Yesterday, I posted a press release on a paper that suggested soil was going to accelerate global warming. Now today, we have the opposite; “Soil holds potential to slow global warming”.
Collectively, I don’t think climate science has a clue either way.
Climate solution in soil?
Soil holds potential to slow global warming, Stanford researchers find
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
If you want to do something about global warming, look under your feet. Managed well, soil’s ability to trap carbon dioxide is potentially much greater than previously estimated, according to Stanford researchers who claim the resource could “significantly” offset increasing global emissions. They call for a reversal of federal cutbacks to related research programs to learn more about this valuable resource.
CREDIT Jennifer Harden
The work, published in two overlapping studies Oct. 5 in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics and Global Change Biology, emphasizes the need for more research into how soil – if managed well – could mitigate a rapidly changing climate.
“Dirt is not exciting to most people,” said earth system science professor Rob Jackson, lead author of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics article and coauthor of the Global Change Biology paper. “But it is a no-risk climate solution with big cobenefits. Fostering soil health protects food security and builds resilience to droughts, floods and urbanization.”
Humble, yet mighty
Organic matter in soil, such as decomposing plant and animal residues, stores more carbon than do plants and the atmosphere combined. Unfortunately, the carbon in soil has been widely lost or degraded through land use changes and unsustainable forest and agricultural practices, fires, nitrogen deposition and other human activities. The greatest near-term threat comes from thawing permafrost in Earth’s northern reaches, which could release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Despite these risks, there is also great promise, according to Jackson and Jennifer Harden, a visiting scholar in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and lead author of the Global Change Biology paper.
Improving how the land is managed could increase soil’s carbon storage enough to offset future carbon emissions from thawing permafrost, the researchers find. Among the possible approaches: reduced tillage, year-round livestock forage and compost application. Planting more perennial crops, instead of annuals, could store more carbon and to reduce erosion by allowing roots to reach deeper into the ground.
Jackson, Harden and their colleagues also found that about 70 percent of all sequestered carbon in the top meter of soil is in lands directly affected by agriculture, grazing or forest management – an amount that surprised the authors.
“I think if beer bets were involved, we all would have lost,” Harden said of her coauthors.
Jackson and his coauthors found a number of other surprises in their analysis. For example, plant roots are ?ve times more likely than leaves to turn into soil organic matter for the same mass of material. The study also provides the most complete estimate yet of carbon in peatland and permafrost – almost half of the world’s estimated soil carbon.
“Retaining and restoring soil organic matter helps farmers grow better crops, purifies our water and keeps the atmosphere cleaner,” said Jackson, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.
Overcoming obstacles
The Jackson-led study describes an unexpectedly large stock of potentially vulnerable carbon in the northern taiga, an ecosystem that is warming more rapidly than any other. These carbon stocks are comparatively poorly mapped and understood.
The study warns of another danger: overestimating how the organic matter in soil is distributed. Jackson and his coauthors calculate there may be 25-30 percent less than currently estimated due to constraints from bedrock, a factor previously not analyzed in published scientific research.
While scientists are now able to remotely map and monitor environmental changes on Earth’s surface, they still don’t have a strong understanding of the interactions among biological, chemical and physical processes regulating carbon in soils. This knowledge is critical to understanding and predicting how the carbon cycle will respond to changes in the ecosystem, increasing food production and safeguarding natural services we depend on, such as crop pollination and underground water storage.
A rapidly changing climate – and its effects on soil – make these scientific advances all the more urgent.
“Soil has changed under our feet,” Harden said. “We can’t use the soil maps made 80 years ago and expect to find the same answers.”
However, funding pressures such as federal cuts to climate science, combined with turnover in science staff and a lack of systematic data threaten progress on soil carbon research. Jackson, Harden and their colleagues call for a renewed push to gather significantly more data on carbon in the soil and learn more about the role it plays in sequestering carbon. They envision an open, shared network for use by farmers, ranchers and other land managers as well as policymakers and organizations that need good data to inform land investments and conservation.
“If we lose momentum on carbon research, it will stifle our momentum for solving both climate and land sustainability problems,” Harden said.
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Now we are have to make the climate sustainable? Seriously? The rhetoric advances, if not the science.
Sustainable? How about if we ask them to stop breathing our air? You know – wear rebreather equipment or something. Sustainable… oh, the agony of rib-splitting laughter!
Soil science a strong in New Zealand as New Zealand depends on agricultural exports to pay for all the things that other countries can make far cheaper than us .A New Zealand farmer in the South Island holds the world record for wheat tonnage per hectare despite very low natural fertility . Nearly all New Zealand’s soils are phosphate deficient and have had to be top-dressed with super-phosphate for the last 100 years. .Rain or irrigation at the right time with a good depth of friable soil is what is required . Soil mineral deficiencies can be overcome with the right applications .With continuous cropping the organic matter in the soil can drop but under long term pasture organic organic levels rise . This paper sounds very amateurish to me .they are right out of their depth but the one yesterday was plain stoooopid.
Either way soil has got be bad for the Earth’s climate. To avoid all possible effects on climate all soil must be covered with reinforced concrete. In addition use of all goods and services that involve the use of fossil fuels should stop including thouse involved in the making of concrete.
Sequestering CO2 in soils leads to acidification of the soil. Good for growing roses, not good for wheat.
Doesn’t this study also support the premise that warming produces CO2 and not the other way around. Think of all of the peat bogs.
“They buried electrical cables in a set of plots and heated the soil 5° C above the ambient temperature of control plots.” That quote is from yesterday’s article, and I mention it, because the entire experiment was good science; HOWEVER, it does not paint a realistic picture, for soil temperatures to naturally increase that dramatically would require truly catastrophic environmental changes. Outside of the Sun’s blaze engulfing the Earth a few million years from now, there is no decent science to show that transformation occurring.
Sounds like a mixture of Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat. The soil will slow / accelerate warming at the same time.
However, if we keep the soil covered in vegetation and hydrated then it will be kept cool. Open it up to the sun and drain it and it will bake in the sun, warm up the air in contact with it and hey presto it will be hotter. And not hotter in terms of tenths of degrees but whole degrees hotter.
The mind boggles at this weird thinking. It is well reported that cool sea water absorbs CO2 and warm sea water absorbs less. So with both warming land and warming sea CO2 levels are climbing. If CO2 makes things warmer this is known as positive feedback. We are doomed!
Question is why hasn’t it happened before when recorded CO2 levels were much higher than the present?