Negative feedback

Definition

The meaning of NEGATIVE FEEDBACK is feedback that tends to dampen a process

by applying the output against the initial conditions.

Definition in climate context

Negative climate feedback is any process where
climate feedback decreases the severity of some initial change.
With positive feedback, some minor change in the state of the
climate can result in a large change overall. Negative
feedback however generally stabilizes some initial climate
change by acting in the opposite direction, bringing it back to
its initial state.
Negative feedbacks are important because small changes or
"pushes" to the climate are accounted for and corrected
without pushing the climate into an unstable state. Without
negative feedbacks, the climate would be much more
unstable in its behaviour.
Examples Of Negative Feedback
● Ex 1 : As the surface temperature of the Earth increases due to a decrease in
albedo, there are increased levels of evaporation from the oceans. This
increased evaporation results in more clouds forming in the lower atmosphere
. These clouds in turn reflect some incident solar radiation back into space,
slightly decreasing the surface temperature.
 ● Example 2 : Increased evaporation due to low albedo also leads to an
increased precipitation which causes snowfall in the Earth’s polar regions.

This action increases the Earth’s albedo and therefore reduces the average global
temperature.
Example 3: Burning

Burning leads to more aerosols in the air, these become condensation nuclei for water.
The droplets formed tend to be smaller than natural droplets, which means that polluted
clouds contain many more smaller water droplets than naturally occurring clouds. Many
small water droplets reflect more sunlight than fewer larger droplets, so polluted clouds
reflect far more light back into space, thus increasing the Earth’s albedo and lowering the
average global temperature.
Case Study

Negative feedback in Greenland

Increased melting of the ice sheet in Greenland could mean the return of very cold
winters to Britain, as well as the shitting off of the currents of the Gulf Stream,
allowing depressions to bring snow instead of rain, making its climate colder and
more continental, such as that of Eastern Canada. This is a good example of why
saying “global warming”instead of “climate change” is somewhat euphemistic and
misleading.
References

1. ↑ Wikimedia Commons. (October 10, 2015). Clouds in Vellore [Online]. Available:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Clouds_in_vellore.JPG
2. ↑ NASA Global Climate Change. (October 10, 2015). The Study of Earth as an Integrated System [Online]. Available:
http://climate.nasa.gov/nasa_role/science/
3. ↑ NOAA. (October 10, 2015). Positive Feedback [Online]. Available: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/story2.html
4. ↑ Southwest Climate Change Network. (October 10, 2015). Negative Feedback Cycle [Online]. Available:
http://www.southwestclimatechange.org/figures/feedback_cycles
5. ↑ Zong-Liang Yang. (October 10, 2015). Chapter 2: The Global Energy Balance [Online]. Available:
http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387H/Lectures/chap2.pdf
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