>Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting
Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.
"Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries. That’s because it takes a while for the planet (for example, the oceans) to respond, and because carbon dioxide – the predominant heat-trapping gas – lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years."[0]
Interesting, thanks. The mechanisms that cause such a delayed temperature response are still opaque though, figure I gotta read more in-depth technical stuff to really understand.
The delayed response is because the temperature rise isn't merely caused by the carbon we've emitted this year, but by all the carbon that has been accumulating in the atmosphere over the past 100 years. Carbon isn't instantly removed from the atmosphere when we stop burning it, so it's going to stay around for a long time. Plants absorb it, but we've been burning more carbon than plants can absorb for a long time.
And for all the time that there's more CO2 in the atmosphere, the atmosphere will continue to trap more heat from the sun, and temperatures will continue to rise.
Well, the CO2 in our atmosphere is too high, and it's been built up over the course of more than a century. It won't immediately drop back to normal levels even if we did somehow manage to stop producing any CO2 at all.
At night the temperature drops not due to a lack of CO2, but due to a lack of sunlight. If we were to be able to partially block the sun, or reflect significantly more sunlight back into space, we would indeed be able to lose heat more more quickly, but that would require engineering on a scale we've never done before.
So sure, paint the entire Earth white, but how? Or build a giant solar screen in space, but again: how? Besides, blocking sunlight will also have many negative repercussions.
You didn't make an effort to charitably interpret my question. My question is essentially about whether transient response to changes in albedo occur primarily over the course of days or primarily over the course of years.
The impact of albedo on this process can go either way. On the one hand, melting ice caps and higher temperatures can mean less ground covered in ice and snow, therefore lower albedo and temperature will rise even faster.
But warmer seas can also mean more evaporation, more precipitation and therefore more snow, higher albedo and a brake on rising temperatures, possibly even a new ice age. (It gets mentioned sometimes; an ice age is ironically a potential result of global warming.)
But it seems to me that effect will mostly be limited to higher latitudes. There's not a lot of snow around the equator, which receives the most sunlight.
But if we could somehow increase the Earth's albedo on a large scale, then that would absolutely have an impact.
Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.