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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know these feedback mechanisms are explicitly not accounted for in the climate models.

That sounds unfortunate, to say it lightly. So an actual model would predict almost immediate doom? Is there any climate model taking these things into account?

If you include all known positive and negative feedback loops we're talking about human extinction within a couple decades. Furthermore, most of what the public thinks is the key leverage points of climate change generally turn out to be something else. Ie deforestation for meat production is the dominant human made climate mover, not CO2 from energy use. All other natural feedback loops then end up being force multipliers.

> Ie deforestation for meat production is the dominant human made climate mover, not CO2 from energy use.

No it isn't, it's around (under, really) 10%. CO2 from US transportation alone is 6.7 billion tonnes, vs 4.8 for all tropical deforestation (which is the place land use for livestock takes place). It is a common misconception that land use or agriculture are significant drivers of climate change. They are of course tremendously damaging in their own particular ways (eg water/runoff/biodiversity), but globally energy, and fairly close behind it transportation, are by far the largest causes of increased greenhouse gas emissions.

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/deforestation/

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