Natural ecosystems and climate stabilization

Ideas on how to integrate Nature's Complexity into the climate change narrative

Substack is great in connecting like-minded people, but I’ve been finding that this close connectivity, while emotionally fulfilling, tends to create isolated bubbles of thought that then begin to evolve separately. Such bubbles risk clashing and canceling each other out when they ultimately collide through a shared reality. I am thinking in particular about the many people concerned about climate change. Even within this community of concerned Earth’s citizens the views on what should be done to help us out of the crisis differ vastly and often radically.

Today I will share a few ideas on how to shape a discourse that recognizes a major role of biospheric and water cycle disturbances in recent climate disruptions but at the same time respects a major role of added carbon dioxide in the observed global warming. In the proposed framework, more people may hopefully get a chance to listen to and hear each other.

Let us first take a look at the familiar narrative.

The familiar, straightforward message is that all our climate problems can be traced to carbon emissions, so to solve them, we must stop emitting. Biodiversity conservation is the poor cousin in the family of dominant narratives about global change. Attempts have been made to link ecosystem preservation to carbon storage, but these have not worked well—either on practical or even logical grounds. If we view ecosystems not as a complex climate-regulating process but merely as a stock or source/sink of carbon, then natural ecosystems are rendered unnecessary and can be replaced with ever-growing carbon sticks to be harvested and buried.

While the biodiversity crisis is often formally attached to climate concerns—for example, as Rob Lewis noted, the tragic story of the mother whale carrying her dead calf, which had starved due to fish shortages caused by dam construction, was reported in the paper’s climate section—our concern for other living beings is readily sidelined when other climate-related interests take precedence. The problem is not just about cutting trees to make place for wind turbines or solar panels but about large-scale resource extraction, including for renewable energy infrastructure and electric-powered devices. These projects require road construction and often lead to widespread decimation of wild nature.

An alternative narrative, which can be characterized as embracing nature’s complexity, can be formulated as follows.

In this more sophisticated framework, it is acknowledged that rising atmospheric CO₂ contributes to planetary warming. It is also recognized that natural ecosystems act as buffers against unfavorable climate fluctuations. While the biosphere cannot prevent an asteroid from striking Earth, it can maintain planetary homeostasis—provided the biosphere itself remains free from structural disruptions, whether internal or external.

This homeostasis can be quantified in various ways, for example by analyzing how temperature fluctuations evolve over time. Without a climate stabilizer, these fluctuations would follow a random walk model, increasing in proportion to the square root of time.

Figure 3A from Arnscheidt and Rothman 2022 “Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales”. Root mean square temperature fluctuations at different time scales: in the interval from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand years, temperature fluctuations do not increase with time indicating some stabilizing mechanism(s) in action.

Another way to formulate the idea of natural ecosystems buffering climate disruptions is through the concept of climate sensitivity. Climate sensitivity describes how much our planet warms in response to a given increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, e.g., its doubling.

For the same amount of added CO₂ we may observer a smaller or larger temperature change, i.e., a lower or higher sensitivity, respectively. The climate sensitivity of the past climates is not very well-known because temperature changes are irregular, and observations are not perfect. For modern climate change, global climate models provide a wide range of climate sensitivities that range by several times, from about two to nearly six kelvins per CO₂ doubling.

If you were a storyteller, how would you visualize and communicate the climate sensitivity concept ? I tried hard and here’s what I came up with.

Imagine the guy in the picture is CO₂, pushing the Earth to the right—toward warming. However, this path is also an uphill climb, which makes it more difficult. The familiar narrative is simple: more CO₂ means more warming.

How do natural ecosystems alter this scheme? The low sensitivity situation means that it is very difficult for the guy to push the planet toward warming, because the slope is very steep. This steep slope is the buffer that natural ecosystems provide.

When we destroy the buffer, climate sensitivity increases. Now, even a small amount of CO₂ is able to push the planet significantly toward dangerous warming. With less natural biota, the same amount of CO₂ leads to more warming. This doesn’t mean that accumulating atmospheric CO₂ is unimportant—I share the concerns of Professor Ugo Bardi, who argues that higher CO₂ levels may even impair our already limited thinking capacity. But by shifting from the left to the right picture, we are quite literally undermining our own existence.

Now, to put some empirical flesh on the bones of our new concepts, we need to address three key questions. First, are there physical mechanisms through which natural ecosystems influence climate sensitivity to CO₂ accumulation? Second, are natural ecosystems in decline? (They are.) And third, is climate sensitivity increasing? (It is.)

We do know that natural ecosystems are powerful regulators of clouds. Clouds are the most complicated element of the climate system because clouds can both warm and cool the planet. They cool by reflecting sunlight, so less solar energy is ultimately converted to heat. They warm because clouds, like CO₂, interact with thermal radiation from the surface and partially redirect it back to the surface, so they are part of the greenhouse effect. As a simple rule of thumb, thick low clouds cool, while thin high clouds warm.

Source: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Clouds/clouds3.php https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Clouds/clouds4.php

By using these climate levers, it is possible for the biota to regulate surface temperature. Extensive research shows that forests, and not just trees but the whole community of species including fungi and bacteria, emit certain particles that can facilitate cloud formation.

Data from Dror et al. 2020 and Heiblum et al. 2014.

The left graph shows the frequency of shallow convective clouds (those that cool the surface) over different land cover types. These clouds form more often over forests, a pattern observed across all regions of the world. Whether in the Amazon, Eurasia, or North America, forests respond to warmth by producing white cloud shields that help maintain a habitable environment.

The second graph shows that not everything green works right. The blue symbols indicate that cloud cover increases with forest productivity. However, highly productive non-forest ecosystems, such as agricultural lands, generate significantly less low cloud cover, as shown by the purple symbols. The more we extract from an ecosystem—whether through timber harvesting or food production—the fewer resources it has to stabilize itself, the surrounding environment, and climate.

It’s almost hilarious that, in the global change discourse, we still tend to view life merely as a physical-chemical system, even though we know that information governs everything. We’ve embraced artificial intelligence and supercomputers, yet when faced with the ultra-super-hyper computer of life itself, we reduce it to simple chemical reactions—CO₂, carbohydrate production—little more. This perspective is not only flawed but also dangerous.

This outdated view—treating life as a simple physical-chemical process—is also embedded in climate models through oversimplified parameterizations. It comes as an intellectual atavism, a relic of our failure to fully appreciate the complexity of the world.

Returning to the link between natural ecosystem decline and increasing climate sensitivity: The rather dull-looking graph below may not seem engaging, but it encapsulates the drama unfolding on our planet. Over the past century, we have been rapidly losing primary ecosystems—both forests and non-forest landscapes—while simultaneously polluting the atmosphere with CO₂.

Fig. 1 from Makarieva et al. 2023. Data on the loss of primary ecosystems are not updated as frequently as CO₂ emissions, but the overall trend is clear.

The two green curves illustrate a critical reality: we have been dismantling the very system that could have helped mitigate much of the undesired effects of global change. In parallel, the warming has been accelerating. The warming rate has almost doubled in 2010-2023, from 0.18 °C/decade in 1970-2010.

Hansen et al. 2025: Global surface temperature relative to 1880-1920 is the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) analysis through October 2024. I am absolutely fascinated by the vast wealth of information that, for the first time in human history, we have about our planet. It’s up to us to ensure this knowledge doesn’t go waste but instead catalizes a phase shift in how we appreciate our living planet.

This increasing climate sensitivity remains unexplained. Moreover, those global climate models that began predicting more warming were downgraded in reliability, as they could not accurately explain the past climate change. We noted as follows:

Global climate models with an improved representation of clouds display a higher sensitivity of the Earth's climate to CO₂ doubling than models with a poorer representation of clouds. This implies more dire projections for future climate change, but also poses the problem of how to account for the past temperature changes that are not affected by the model improvements and have been satisfactorily explained assuming a lower climate sensitivity. The concept of the environmental homeostasis and the biotic regulation of the environment provide a possible solution: the climate sensitivity may have been increasing with time—reflecting the decline of natural ecosystems and their global stabilizing impact.

There is another important issue:

Any control system increases its feedback as the perturbation grows. Therefore, as the climate destabilization deepens, the remaining natural ecosystems should be exerting an ever increasing compensatory impact per unit area. In other words, the global climate price of losing a hectare of natural forest grows as the climate situation worsens. We call for an urgent global moratorium on the exploitation of the remaining natural ecosystems and a broad application of the proforestation strategy to allow them to restore to their full ecological and climate-regulating potential.

To stop the destruction of natural ecosystems, we need to cooperate globally. This global cooperation does not have to take the form of a rigid, hierarchical correlation—like the relationship between organs in an animal body. Rather, it can be a loose, interconnected network, like the leaves of a great tree. Each leaf functions independently, consuming light on its own, yet all are sustained by nutrients and water flowing through the shared stem. A shared global understanding of the importance of natural ecosystems could guide us toward realistic local solutions for their preservation. If we just halt their destruction right now, we can prevent further deterioration, which, in itself, would be a significant achievement. And this would buy us time.

Linked literature

Arnscheidt, C. W., & Rothman, D. H. (2022). Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales. Science Advances, 8(46), eadc9241. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adc9241

Dror, T., Koren, I., Altaratz, O., & Heiblum, R. H. (2020). On the abundance and common properties of continental, organized shallow (green) clouds. IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 59(6), 4570-4578. https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2020.3023085

Hansen, J. E., Kharecha, P., Sato, M., Tselioudis, G., Kelly, J., Bauer, S. E., ... & Pokela, A. (2025). Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 67(1), 6-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494

Heiblum, R. H., Koren, I., & Feingold, G. (2014). On the link between Amazonian forest properties and shallow cumulus cloud fields. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 14(12), 6063-6074. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-14-6063-2014

Makarieva, A. M., Nefiodov, A. V., Rammig, A., & Nobre, A. D. (2023). Re-appraisal of the global climatic role of natural forests for improved climate projections and policies. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 6, 1150191. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2023.1150191

Moomaw, W. R., Masino, S. A., & Faison, E. K. (2019). Intact forests in the United States: Proforestation mitigates climate change and serves the greatest good. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 2, 449206. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2019.00027