Global warming causes soil to release carbon -study

By Peter Graff

LONDON (Reuters) – Global warming is causing soil to
release huge amounts of carbon, making efforts to fight global
warming tougher than previously thought, scientists said on
Wednesday.

A study in the journal Nature looked at the carbon content
of soil in England and Wales from 1978-2003 and found that it
fell steadily, with some 13 million tonnes of carbon released
from British soil each year.

The team from Britain’s National Soil Resources Institute
at Cranfield University said its results implied a similar
process would be under way in other temperate areas across the
globe.

“Our findings suggest the soil part of the equation is
scarier than we had thought,” Professor Guy Kirk, of Cranfield
University, told journalists at a science conference in Dublin.
“The consequence is that there is more urgency about doing
something.”

Since the carbon appeared to be released from soil
regardless of how the soil was used, they concluded that the
main cause must be climate change itself.

Though they could not say where all the missing carbon had
gone, much of it may be entering the atmosphere as the
greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which scientists
say has caused global warming.

KYOTO PROTOCOL

International efforts like the Kyoto protocol, which came
into effect in February this year, have been aimed at stopping
climate change by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases
released into the atmosphere by industry.

But those efforts don’t take into account carbon trapped in
soil, about 300 times the amount released each year by burning
fossil fuels.

In a separate article published alongside the paper in
Nature, scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for
Biogeochemistry said the carbon released from British soil
wiped out the gains made by cutting its industrial emissions.

“These losses thus completely offset the past technological
achievements in reducing CO2 emissions, putting the United
Kingdom’s success in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in a
different light,” Detlef Schulze and Annette Freibauer wrote.

“An effective climate policy will require a more
comprehensive approach,” they wrote. “The scientific and
political implications of the new findings are considerable.”

(Additional reporting by Patricia Reaney in Dublin)