A new study on extreme climate events in the ancient history of Earth by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently suggested that today's planet may become more unstable because of continued heat due to global warming.
A SciTechDaily report specified that it's progressively clear that the extended conditions of drought, record-breaking heat, continuous wildfires, and recurrent, more extreme storms experienced in the past several years are direct outcomes of increasing global temperatures from the addition of carbon dioxide by humans to the atmosphere.
The new study investigates the paleoclimate record during the Cenozoic Period, or the last 66 million years, which started shortly after the dinosaurs' extinction.
As a result, the MIT researchers discovered that during this era, fluctuations in the climate of Earth experienced what they described as a surprising "warming bias."
'Warming Bias'
The study authors meant by warming bias that there were far more warming occurrences, periods of extended global warming that lasted for tens of thousands of years, compared to cooling events.
What's even more, as indicated in the study, Asymmetry of extreme Cenozoic climate-carbon cycle events published in Science Advances, warming events were inclined to turn more extreme, with greater temperature changes than cooling events.
The study investigators said a probable explanation for this warming bias may lie in what's called the multiplier effect," whereas a different degree of warming, for example, from volcanoes discharging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is naturally accelerating certain chemical and biological processes that improve such fluctuations, resulting averagely, in still more warming.
Interestingly, the researchers observed that such warming bias was banished roughly five million years ago, around that time when ice sheets began forming in the North Hemisphere.
Temperature Fluctuations Over the Last 66 Million Years
The research team performed a statistical analysis of the data. As a result, they observed that over the past 66 million years, global temperature fluctuations were not similar to a standard bell curve, with symmetrical tails that represented an equal possibility of extremely warm and extreme cold fluctuations.
Rather, the curve was evidently uneven, skewed toward more warm, compared to cool events. The curve showed a strikingly longer tail, representing warm events that were more extreme or of higher temperature than the most extreme cold events.
This then specifies that there's some sort of augmentation in relation to what one would have otherwise expected, said Constantin Arnscheidt, the study's lead author.
He added that everything is pointing to something essential that leads to this push or bias toward warming occurrences.
Multiplies Warming
The research team wondered if the said warming bias might have resulted from the so-called "multiplicative noise," in the climate-carbon cycle.
Researchers have long understood that higher temperatures, up to a certain point, are included to fast-track or accelerate biological and chemical processes.
Since the carbon cycle, which is the main driver of long-term fluctuations of climate, comprises such processes, rising in temperature may result in greater fluctuations, biasing the systems headed for extreme weather occurrences.
Statistically, there is the presence of equations describing such general amplifying or augmenting or multiplicative impacts.
The study authors applied this multiplicative theory to their assessment to determine if the equations could predict the asymmetrical distribution, which includes the degree of its skew and its tails and length.
In conclusion, they discovered that the data and the observed bias toward warming could be explained through the multiplicative theory.
Meaning, it is very likely that for the past 66 million years, periods of modest warming were averagely further improved by multiplier impacts, like the biological and chemical processes' response that warmed the planet further.
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