from Part III - Scientific Investigations of the Climate System
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2025
A feedback is something that happens in response to a prior cause, and which then itself makes a change in what caused it. It is the modification or control of a process or system by its results or effects. The challenge in making climate models realistic is largely that of understanding these feedback processes and incorporating them in models. As the air warms, does water vapor increase? To what extent? How much does that affect the warming? Do ice and snow melt? How rapidly? Does that change the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface and affect the warming? Does the ocean circulation change? In what ways? How does that affect climate? Do the clouds change? Are they more plentiful? Less plentiful? Higher? Lower? Darker? Lighter? How do they feed back to the climate? We need quantitative answers to all these questions. For example, we are not asking the qualitative question of whether clouds warm us or cool us. We know that they do both. Rather, we are asking the hard, quantitative question: Which of those two events is dominant, the cloud’s contribution to the greenhouse effect (warming) or the cloud’s contribution to reflecting away sunlight (cooling)?
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.