I remember the intro to earth geology class I took 15 years ago at my university, taught by a climate scientist; the professor would take off a week every time

I remember the intro to earth geology class I took 15 years ago at my university, taught by a climate scientist; the professor would take off a week every time there was a shuttle launch because he'd fly down to Florida and be part of the panel of scientists who would give the astronauts lists of things they were interested having photographed from space. I remember him talking about runaway feedback loops. He would explain them and would explain some historical examples of them we can see in geological data. He seemed really concerned about them, not so much because he thought it probable that the ones we know about are going to run away and make the climate uninhabitable for humans, but rather because he thought that there were lots of feedback loops out there hiding in plain sight that we wouldn't learn about until we started observing them actively happening. He basically seemed to think there was no real way to know with any certainty the upper bounds of how bad we can screw up the climate but that we were effectively running a giant experiment with the entire atmosphere and would within a few generations find out, and he thought that was a pretty big deal.