Carbon in Soil

"Climate scientists have long been concerned about the possibility that warming temperatures will speed changes on the earth’s surface that will in turn accelerate global warming. The best illustration of such a feedback loop involves the melting of sea ice in the Arctic. The ice reflects solar radiation back into space rather than absorbing it. When it melts, it leaves open water that absorbs the heat rather than reflecting it. The more warm water there is, the more ice melts, and so on. (In the business we call this the Albedo Effect) Now scientists have identified another feedback loop that may be accelerating the loss of carbon dioxide from the topsoil of forests in the United States, contributing to climate change."

Read the full article here!
We talk quite a bit in the Soil field study about the organic material in the Soil. Soil is actually considered a major reservoir of carbon storage. (Well not as big as rocks and the deep ocean, but big enough to make the list.) So there is a lot of concern about how the increased temperature caused by global warming will interact with carbon stored in the soil.


If you are a savvy science reader (not that you should be, it is a skill that takes practice... pro tip when you read this kind of article think of it like a game: How many problems can I find with what they are presenting?) you will be able to note some things about this study that indicate it is not modeling real temperature increase conditions very well.

Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. They put the soil in mason jars. Is soil more or less insulated from increase in temperature when in the ground, I don't know but this seems dubious at best!

2. This paragraph: "The study reported an eightfold increase in carbon dioxide production when temperatures were increased by 20 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit). (That is a huge temperature jump, if I were doing this experiment I would have started out with very small temperature increases and moved up)  This is far in excess of the range of temperature increases predicted to occur by the end of the century under existing climate models. Under the moderate warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Ms. Hopkins’s experiment indicated that the respiration rates of the microbes — and the amount of carbon dioxide they exhale — would roughly double by 2100." Oh look they did start out with small increases and their results were more on the order of doubling the amount of carbon released. 

However I think it is important to note that doubling the amount of carbon released from the soil world wide in the next 90 years could actually represent a huge amount of Carbon Dioxide.