For decades, climate scientists have been warning about the effects of burning fossil fuels on global temperatures. They have been developing increasingly sophisticated climate models that simulate how the atmosphere, oceans, and land will respond under different emissions scenarios. But as the world has warmed and the effects of the warming increase, the models have not been taking into account additional sources of emissions that result from that warming.
Ecosystems are emitting more greenhouse gases as the planet warms. For example, more carbon dioxide is emitted as wildfires increase. More methane bubbles up as wetlands ferment and permafrost melts.
Since 2001, global carbon emissions from wildfires have increased by 60%. In 2020, researchers reported an alarming spike in the concentration of methane in the atmosphere, attributed partly to wetter conditions that are expanding wetlands in Africa and Asia, and partly to warming temperatures which accelerate the rate at which plants decompose in water. The 2024 Arctic report card found that wildfires and permafrost melt have caused the northern tundra to become a source of emissions, whereas they acted as a sink for millennia.
These so-called warming-induced emissions are poorly represented or even absent from the most influential climate models such as those that inform the assessments of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One thing that is for certain, this information gap in climate models can only make it more difficult for nations to limit the rise in global average temperatures before the consequences are too dire.
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References:
A Missing Piece in Climate Models: Nature’s Own Emissions
