Thinking of procrastinating?
Sep. 8th, 2005 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purpletigronFrom New Scientist, quoting a paper in Nature:
Soil may spoil UK’s climate efforts
'Unexpectedly vast quantities of carbon released from British soils since 1978 may be critically reducing their effectiveness as carbon sinks , claims a rigorous new survey. The phenomenon effectively cancels out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the finding could have wider global implications. ...
"The buffering effect of soils mopping up emissions is not as strong as we expected," says study author Guy Kirk of the UK's National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University. "The scary thing is that the amount of time that we have to do something about climate change is now smaller." ...
Kirk and colleagues surveyed soil at 6000 sites, spaced 5 kilometres apart, across England and Wales between 1978 and 2003. ...
The overall carbon loss was consistent across environments as varied as grasslands, bogs, arable fields and woodland, suggesting the change is largely due to warming and not changes in land use. The average temperature across England and Wales has increased by 0.5°C over the survey period.
Feedback loop
Up to one-tenth of the missing carbon may have leached into ground water, but Kirk says the majority is likely to have been lost as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is likely to be due to plant matter and organic material decomposing at a faster rate as temperatures rise.
More worryingly, soil sinks are predicted to release their carbon at an even faster rate as temperatures increase, giving rise to a feedback loop. ...'
Can anyone access the original paper, and see whether agricultural soil management techniques make any difference at all? Journal reference: Nature (DOI:10.1038/nature04038)
Soil may spoil UK’s climate efforts
'Unexpectedly vast quantities of carbon released from British soils since 1978 may be critically reducing their effectiveness as carbon sinks , claims a rigorous new survey. The phenomenon effectively cancels out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the finding could have wider global implications. ...
"The buffering effect of soils mopping up emissions is not as strong as we expected," says study author Guy Kirk of the UK's National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University. "The scary thing is that the amount of time that we have to do something about climate change is now smaller." ...
Kirk and colleagues surveyed soil at 6000 sites, spaced 5 kilometres apart, across England and Wales between 1978 and 2003. ...
The overall carbon loss was consistent across environments as varied as grasslands, bogs, arable fields and woodland, suggesting the change is largely due to warming and not changes in land use. The average temperature across England and Wales has increased by 0.5°C over the survey period.
Feedback loop
Up to one-tenth of the missing carbon may have leached into ground water, but Kirk says the majority is likely to have been lost as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is likely to be due to plant matter and organic material decomposing at a faster rate as temperatures rise.
More worryingly, soil sinks are predicted to release their carbon at an even faster rate as temperatures increase, giving rise to a feedback loop. ...'
Can anyone access the original paper, and see whether agricultural soil management techniques make any difference at all? Journal reference: Nature (DOI:10.1038/nature04038)
