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Carbon-Emitting Soil Could Speed Global Warming, Warns 26-Year Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quote the Guardian:
Warming soil releases more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought, suggesting a potentially disastrous feedback mechanism whereby increases in global temperatures will trigger massive new carbon releases in a cycle that may be impossible to break... The 26-year study is one of the biggest of its kind, and is a groundbreaking addition to our scant knowledge of exactly how warming will affect natural systems. Potential feedback loops, or tipping points, have long been suspected to exist by scientists, and there is some evidence for them in the geological record. What appears to happen is that once warming reaches a certain point, these natural biological factors kick in and can lead to a runaway, and potentially unstoppable, increase in warming...
In the Science study, researchers examined plots of soil in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, a mixed hardwood forest in the U.S. They experimented by heating some of the plots with underground cables to 5C above normal levels, leaving others as a control. The long-term study revealed that in the first 10 years there was a strong increase in the carbon released from the heated plots, then a period of about seven years when the carbon release abated. But after this second calmer period, which the scientists attribute to the adjustment of the soil microbes to the warmer conditions, the release of carbon resumed its upward path. From 1991, when the experiment began, the plots subjected to 5C warming lost about 17% of the carbon that had been stored in the top 60cm of the soil, where the greatest concentration of organic matter is to be found...
Lead scientist Jerry Melillo, points out that currently 10 billion metric tons of carbon gets released into the atmosphere every year, but "The world's soils contain about 3,500 billion tons of carbon. If a significant amount of that is added to the atmosphere, due to microbial activity, that will accelerate the global warming process. Once this self-reinforcing feedback begins, there is no easy way to turn it off. There is no switch to flip."
In the Science study, researchers examined plots of soil in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, a mixed hardwood forest in the U.S. They experimented by heating some of the plots with underground cables to 5C above normal levels, leaving others as a control. The long-term study revealed that in the first 10 years there was a strong increase in the carbon released from the heated plots, then a period of about seven years when the carbon release abated. But after this second calmer period, which the scientists attribute to the adjustment of the soil microbes to the warmer conditions, the release of carbon resumed its upward path. From 1991, when the experiment began, the plots subjected to 5C warming lost about 17% of the carbon that had been stored in the top 60cm of the soil, where the greatest concentration of organic matter is to be found...
Lead scientist Jerry Melillo, points out that currently 10 billion metric tons of carbon gets released into the atmosphere every year, but "The world's soils contain about 3,500 billion tons of carbon. If a significant amount of that is added to the atmosphere, due to microbial activity, that will accelerate the global warming process. Once this self-reinforcing feedback begins, there is no easy way to turn it off. There is no switch to flip."
Ok banning it might not work. I say we tax possession of soil, maybe with a carbon credit system. Fallback plan: take all of this 'soil' and bury it deep, preferably under tons of dirt. As any politician knows, burying things takes care of them once and for all. /s
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
you are a fucking retard
I'm impressed by the fact that 26 years ago, some scientists put underground cables to warm the soil 5C and kept it that way for 26 years.
I'm glad somebody even thought of this that long ago, it was (for most people) not on their radar. Who knows what other studies were proposed and were denied because of the political climate from the (Bush) administration. Then again, maybe it was funded by the university. Go Hahvahd!
To the deniers: If we agree on nothing else can we at least agree on continuing to fund well planned scientific studies on the climate? If you really think there is no truth to this then you should be all for it, all the data is public and in fact you can run the studies yourselves! I've always thought that the TRUTH may come from people you completely disagree with.
It would be a crime if due to the political winds/lobbyists these studies were denied, it's like an ostrich sticking its head into the ground (do they really do that?). It's would be like how federal studies into the links between gun ownership and gun violence is PROHIBITED or how the federal government isn't allowed to even negotiate for lower drug prices (despite being a huge buyer, through medicare/medicaid).
Two things are crippling America: poor basic education in some parts of America due to widely uneven funding based on local communities resources (kinda defeats the idea of giving the next generation a fair chance). The other is legalized corruption by allowing unlimited corporate donations to politicians; for example this has resulted in American health care costs being more than twice that of the next country in the entire world! (With worse outcomes)
As I've been saying for over a decade: The fundamental issue with CC is that it invalidates the underlying assumptions of almost everything we build (or have built) or do. E.g. Is this a good place to build this power plant? Sure -- we can ALWAYS use water from the nearby river to cool it. And that's true, right up to the point when that river dries up or the water in it is too hot to be used for cooling. In the last 10 to 15 years there have been many examples in the US and the EU of thermoelectric power plants being throttled back or shut down completely for months over cooling water issues.
Similarly, there are places in the SE US that use large municipal wells for drinking water. The problem is, rising sea levels are making salt water intrude into those wells, making them impossible to use without adding desalination plants.
And yes, the potential impacts to agriculture and the basic biosphere are nightmarish.
But what the hell -- let's all go out and buy ever bigger gas guzzlers and McMansions, because we're so confident that the impacts of CC won't hit during our lifetimes.
Tell it to Venus and Mars (runaway cooling in second case).
As for the last 11 inter-glacial periods.. in how many of them so much of fossil fuel was burned? Technology and population density changed a bit since last interglacial...
Mars has no magnetic field, that is the reason it has no atmosphere, hence cold.
The fact that you brought it up as a point to make an AGW point and are too stupid to have known means anything else you post is probably wrong. You liberals as so dumb and think just because a bunch of other idiots vote you up, you "must" be smart. No, it means you all wallow in such ignorance and are actually proud of how stupid you are.
Sad.