Carbon stored in Arctic tundra could be released into the atmosphere by new trees growing in the warmer region, exacerbating climate change, scientists have revealed.
The Arctic is getting greener as plant growth increases in response to a warmer climate. This greater plant growth means more carbon is stored in the increasing biomass, so it was previously thought the greening would result in more carbon dioxide being taken up from the atmosphere, thus helping to reduce the rate of global warming.
However, research published in Nature Climate Change, shows that, by stimulating decomposition rates in soils, the expansion of forest into tundra in arctic Sweden could result in the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Dr Iain Hartley now based in Geography at the University of Exeter, and lead author of the paper, said: “Determining directly how carbon storage is changing in high-latitude ecosystems is very difficult because the majority of the carbon present is stored below ground in the soils. Our work indicates that greater plant biomass may not always translate into greater carbon storage at the ecosystem level.
“We need to better understand how the anticipated changes in the distribution of different plant communities in the Arctic affects the decomposition of the large carbon stocks in tundra soils if we are to be able to predict how arctic greening will affect carbon dioxide uptake or release in the future.”
By measuring carbon stocks in vegetation and soils between tundra and neighbouring birch forest, it was shown that compared to tundra, the two-fold greater carbon storage in plant biomass in the forest was more than outweighed by the smaller carbon stocks in forest soils.
So what? It is just nature it has all happened before. The earth can and will act and change as it has always done, what makes the people think they are so important that they can change anything? Many things have changed on this planet, well before humans even existed. The earth does not need our help in anyway whatsoever, nature takes care of that, and will take care of us one way or another, for better or for worse, there is nothing we can do about it. We on the other hand, use the earth for our own benefit while we can, the old sandwich board men used to walk around with the words, The End Is Nigh. Of course it is, we are all going to die, it is nature, nothing we can do about it, we do not need men in white coats to take the place of sandwich board men, the only difference between them, is the unlimited amounts of money the men in white coats get compared to the poor sandwich board men.
Is this one of the flurry of doom papers published as a run up to the next global environmental summit?