Climate projections don't accurately reflect soil carbon release

Science Daily: A new study concludes that models may be predicting releases of atmospheric carbon dioxide that are either too high or too low, depending on the region, because they don't adequately reflect variable temperatures that can affect the amount of carbon released from soil. The study points out that many global models make estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from soils based on "average" projected temperatures. But temperatures vary widely from those averages. That variability, along with complex biological processes, makes the issue far more complicated.

Researchers said that climate projections, in general, don't effectively incorporate into their calculations a major component of global warming -- the enormous amounts of carbon found in dead, decaying organic matter, which represent up to three times the amount of carbon in Earth's live vegetation.

…"We've done a pretty good job of determining how much carbon is getting absorbed by growing trees and vegetation, how much is coming in," said Mark Harmon, professor and holder of the Richardson Chair in Forest Science at OSU, and one of the world's leading experts on the effect of decomposition on Earth's carbon cycle. "However, we know much less about how carbon is released to the atmosphere through the process of decomposition, how much is going out," he said. "This is half of the equation, and there's just a huge amount we don't know about it."

These findings don't change the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels are increasing and global warming is a reality, Harmon said. But they do suggest that some of the projections, particularly those made by older models that incorporate even less variability into their analysis, may be flawed….

Iosif Krachkovsky's painting, "The Watermelon Plantation," from the 1890s or 1900s