Scientists have long feared this feedback to the climate system. Now they say its happening

[jpak]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/11/30/the-ground-beneath-our-feet-is-poised-to-make-global-warming-much-worse-scientists-find/

At a time when a huge pulse of uncertainty has been injected into the global project to stop the planet’s warming, scientists have just raised the stakes even further.

In a massive new study published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature, no less than 50 authors from around the world document a so-called climate system “feedback” that, they say, could make global warming considerably worse over the coming decades.

That feedback involves the planet’s soils, which are a massive repository of carbon due to the plants and roots that have grown and died in them, in many cases over vast time periods (plants pull in carbon from the air through photosynthesis and use it to fuel their growth). It has long been feared that as warming increases, the microorganisms living in these soils would respond by very naturally upping their rate of respiration, a process that in turn releases carbon dioxide or methane, leading greenhouse gases.

It’s this concern that the new study validates. “Our analysis provides empirical support for the long-held concern that rising temperatures stimulate the loss of soil C to the atmosphere, driving a positive land C–climate feedback that could accelerate planetary warming over the twenty-first century,” the paper reports.

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Thank the Goddess it's a hoax made in China...

[mopinko]

1. i often tell visitors to my little farm- i smell the planet burning, do you?

last year was supposed to be the international year of soils. i didnt hear much about it, did you?

the loss of soil worldwide is coupled w creeping throw away culture. i have built a thick, and i mean thick, like feet thick, layer of soil for my farm. made entirely of landscape waste. dead trees. fallen leaves. grass clippings.
the city of chicago has been in a consent decree for over a decade to remove landscape waste for the garbage stream. nada. zip. pretty much nothing. they do add woodchips to the solids from the sewage plants, and i think there is one food waste recycler in the city.

i once heard al gore describe the soils as- if we picture the earth as a globe, the soils are the coat of varnish on that globe. it's loss would be catastrophic. and yet it is soooo very easy to replenish, instead of filling up landfills w stuff that should be returned to the earth.

one of these days i will figure out my carbon footprint, but what i know- over 20 mature trees buried, carbon sequestered. should take 30 years for some of it to rot.
at least a dozen more truckloads of just woodchips.
at least 50 half ton and larger trucks that make a trip of a couple blocks, instead of a 30-70 mile round trip to somewhere that those trees are ground down and composted, releasing methane. for a hefty fee.

all on less than 1/10th of an acre.
if real farmers did what i do- build hugelpiles ringing fields, w material they can get paid to dump (which i cant do. urban farmers forbidden), runoff from fields would be changed into captured fertilizer, and long term soil gain.

what we have done in our short 5 years sorta blows me away sometimes. i cant help imagining it on a huge scale.

[Hekate]

6. KnR

[hatrack]

2. So potentially, even if we move aggressively to cut industrial/auto emissions (hah!) . . .

. . . Nature will be more than capable of making up the difference from melting permafrost and forests switching from sinks to sources.

Kind of like what's happening right now - we're already at about 404 ppm atmospheric C and at 485 for C equivalent (the total of all GHGs) - and atmospheric carbon increases are now at record YOY levels, despite some efforts at efficiency and renewables.

Oops.

[SpankMe]

3. Yep.

And the slow melting of the permafrost in the north polar regions is releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gasses from the living organisms in there that are now thawing and decaying. This creates more temperature rise, which melts more permafrost, which generates more greenhouse gasses, etc.

We are leaving our children a dying planet.

We're supposed to go the other way.

[jalan48]

4. Perhaps if this was an "identity "politics" issue it would get more interest.

Meanwhile the earth burns up.

[hatrack]

5. Maybe we should reach out to disaffected white conservative voters?

Yeah, that'll work!

[mopinko]

7. yeah, the coal miners will be on our side, fersher.

all the extractive industries will be cheering for all the jobs created by high tech mining, where automation has totally taken over for human labor.

yeah, that's the ticket right there. i agree.

eta- just like the fisherman, who are fighting for the rights of dragnet trawlers to scour our sea bottoms of every scrap of life.
yeah, natural allies.

[jalan48]

8. Education and dialogue with everyone is the key.

We can't stop trying.