Losses of soil carbon under global warming might equal U.S. emissions [View all]

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http://news.yale.edu/2016/11/30/losses-soil-carbon-under-global-warming-might-equal-us-emissions

[font face=Serif][font size=5] Losses of soil carbon under global warming might equal U.S. emissions[/font]

By Kevin Dennehy | November 30, 2016

[font size=3]For decades scientists have speculated that rising global temperatures might alter the ability of soils to store carbon, potentially releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and triggering runaway climate change. Yet thousands of studies worldwide have produced mixed signals on whether this storage capacity will actually decrease — or even increase — as the planet warms.

It turns out scientists might have been looking in the wrong places.

A new Yale-led study in the journal Nature finds that warming will drive the loss of at least 55 trillion kilograms of carbon from the soil by mid-century, or about 17% more than the projected emissions due to human-related activities during that period. That would be roughly the equivalent of adding to the planet another industrialized country the size of the United States.

Critically, the researchers found that carbon losses will be greatest in the world’s colder places, at high latitudes, locations that had largely been missing from previous research. In those regions, massive stocks of carbon have built up over thousands of years and slow microbial activity has kept them relatively secure.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature20150

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