Losses of soil carbon under global warming might equal US emissions / November, 2016

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.

*

 

Humans have turned soil into a ‘global warming machine’ https://t.co/7IKdUqSfNT

pic.twitter.com/BV6rzxTWQL

— Climate Home (@ClimateHome) March 30, 2016

'Twenty-three scientists from 16 laboratories and institutions report in Nature journal that they re-examined the sums on which climate forecasts depend.

They concluded: “We find that the cumulative warming capacity of concurrent biogenic methane and nitrous oxide emissions is a factor of about two larger than the cooling effect resulting from the global land carbon dioxide uptake from 2001 to 2010.”'