Troubling recent reports on climate change actually are underestimating the pace and depth of change because of an unexpected surge of greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007, according to an influential Stanford researcher.

Christopher Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); he's working on the next IPCC assessment, which is due in 2014. He told reporters at the AAAS Annual Meeting Saturday that future warming "will be beyond anything" predicted in earlier analyses.

Field's briefing was picked up widely in U.S. and European news reports. In a story on page 3 of Sunday's Washington Post, Kari Lyderson explained the feedback loops that appear to be driving accelerated change. Quoting Field: "It's a vicious cycle of feedback where warming causes the release of carbon from permafrost, which causes more warming, which causes more release from permafrost."

The Climate Watch blog, produced by KQED radio and TV in San Francisco, also focused on Field's discussion of harmful feedback loops. "There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," said Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

"We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot," he told reporters.

But, said KQED blogger Craig Miller: "That would appear to be path that we're on."

Again, quoting Field: "Tropical forests are essentially inflammable. You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little bit, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires. It is increasingly clear that as you produce a warmer world, lots of forested areas that had been acting as carbon sinks could be converted to carbon sources. Essentially we could see a forest-carbon feedback that acts like a foot on the accelerator pedal for atmospheric CO2."

Julie Steenhuysen, writing from Chicago for Reuters, noted that developing countries such as China and India appear to be the source for much of the unanticipated greenhouse gas emissions.

She quoted Field saying that "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report, issued in 2007.

And in The Telegraph, Sarah Knapton offered this quote from Field: "We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy."