Note: Apologizes if a duplicating post.
There’s a Climate Bomb Under Your Feet.
The purpose (of the study) was to measure how carbon dioxide may escape from the earth as the atmosphere warms. What they found[Long-term pattern and magnitude of soil carbon feedback to the climate system in a warming world], published yesterday in the journal Science, may mean the accelerating catastrophe of global warming has been fueled in part by warm dirt. As the Earth heats up, microbes in the soil accelerate the breakdown of organic materials and move on to others that may have once been ignored, each time releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The good news, however, is that the research community is now fully on the case. Over the past week, at least four high-profile papers largely funded by the U.S. government have contributed new evidence, observations, and insight into the role of soil and forests in the global carbon cycle—the flow of material in and out of land, air, life, and sea that’s currently broken and getting worse.
A little overly optimistic as the best places to make the study are also the best places to make money from and you do have problems with governments doing anything with it or backing up the studies as there is still too much kicking the can down the road philosophy in dealing with the real problems faced now.
Although it does show that if we really wanted to bury carbon there are fairly easy ways of doing it. Problem there will be who is going to spend the money to bury the carbon then on top of that prevent anyone for a very long time (100's of years) to touch it?
Edit: should have added this first time around.
Late last month, scientists from Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University published [Long-term pattern and magnitude of soil carbon feedback to the climate system in a warming world]. in Science an analysis of satellite data showing one of the most dramatic turnabouts in recent memory. Long thought of as sponges that suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, tropical forests may actually be a source of emissions. Deforestation is obviously an enemy of forests; what the authors found was that forest degradation—losing healthy patches here or there to human or natural causes—is more damaging to carbon-soaking capacity than previously believed.
