If you are still skeptic about global warming, this year might just change your perspective. 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. Considering that the Paris agreement could be fully implemented, UNEP's 2016 Emissions Gap Report has revealed it's cautionary suggestions claiming that the projected emissions for 2030 is still likely seen to increase in terms of the global temperature around 3 degrees Celsius this century.
Global Warming And The Carbon Emission
According to Phys Org, in a recent Yale- led study, it was found 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.
In line with this, experts claim that the rising temperatures will most likely result to the alteration of the soil's ability to store carbon, which can then lead to the release of massive amounts of the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. As per Daily Mail, study lead author Thomas Crowther, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale school of Forestry & Environmental Studies said that carbon stores are greatest in places like the Arctic and the sub-Arctic, where the soil us cold and often frozen.
On the other hand, Crowther adds that the scary thing in this situation is that these cold regions are the places that are expected to warm the most under climate change. It was found that for just one degree of warming, experts believe that 30 petagrams of soil carbon will be released, considering that a petagram equal to 1,000,000,000,000 kilograms. Ultimately, Crowther, who is now completing a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology has added that having these kinds of results are essential if we're going to make meaningful projections about future climate conditions.
