Managing Uncertainty: How Soil Carbon Feedbacks Could Affect Climate Change

A new article makes the case that developing meaningful climate projections depends upon a better understanding of the role of 'soil carbon turnover.'

There is more than twice as much carbon in the planet's soils than there is in its atmosphere, so the loss of even a small proportion of that could have a profound feedback effect on the global climate.

Yet in its most recent report, in 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used models that paid less attention to soil carbon potentially entering the atmosphere than had earlier reports, concluding that there simply wasn't enough evidence about how warmer global temperatures might impact soil carbon stocks.

A new Yale-led paper makes the case that developing meaningful climate projections will rely on understanding the role of "soil carbon turnover" and how it might potentially trigger climate feedbacks in a warming world.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, a team of scientists calls for more collaboration between modelers and soil scientists to improve the scientific understanding of the mechanisms that control the creation, stabilization, and decomposition of carbon in the soil.

Read more at Managing Uncertainty:  How Soil Carbon Feedbacks Could Affect Climate Change