Saturday, April 02, 2016

Global Food Production Threatens to Overwhelm Efforts to Combat Climate Change

If you add up the carbon emissions from the “LUC gross source” (emissions from deforestation) and the emissions from methane and nitrous oxide (in blue and green), then you can see they are roughly equivalent to those from the combustion of fossil fuels. (Credit: nature.com) Click to Enlarge.
Each year our terrestrial biosphere absorbs about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide emissions that humans produce.  This a very good thing; it helps to moderate the warming produced by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.

But in a paper published in Nature we show that emissions from other human activities, particularly food production, are overwhelming this cooling effect.  This is a worrying trend, at a time when CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels are slowing down, and is clearly not consistent with efforts to stabilize global warming well below 2℃ as agreed at the Paris climate conference.

To explain why, we need to look at two other greenhouse gases: methane and nitrous oxide.

Read more at Global Food Production Threatens to Overwhelm Efforts to Combat Climate Change

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