Heating alone won’t drive soil microbes to release more carbon dioxide — they need added carbon and nutrients to thrive. This finding challenges assumptions about how climate warming influences soil emissions.
A study examining the effects of higher temperatures on soil shows that warming alone does not increase levels of carbon dioxide emitted from the soil. Instead, higher temperatures combined with more added carbon - and more nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus - led to higher carbon dioxide levels released from the soil.
I’m no expert, but the nutrients needed sound a whole lot like fertilizers that are needed by large farms to produce enough lol
If you have a look at the figures in the study, only adding N and P did not significantly increase CO2 emissions.
Only when also adding carbon to the soil (which has been a starved kind of soil to begin with) emissions were increased.
Which is kinda… obvious??
Here is the link to the relevant figures:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10533-025-01265-0/figures/1Thanks! Just that byline made it weird, but also agreed that adding carbon to “starved” soil makes sense that it would begin to emit more 🙃
The lead is misleading. Warming alone will absolutely increase CO2 emission if the soil has a lot of stored carbon. In this experiment, they used carbon-poor soil.
This is important because the concern is that warming will increase emissions in the taiga and tundra, not in the subtropics. It’s like saying the Titanic’s deck wasn’t damaged by the iceberg - technically true, but meaningless.
I wouldn’t say meaningless (though I see you refine your commentary in another comment).
It’s one of those ‘how do you prove a negative?’ or ‘how can we be sure that it’s really the mechanism we think it is?’
While unglamorous, these types of experiments are the load-bearing Tupperware of larger bodies of science.
This is a good experiment. I like that they look at depleted soils, as it’s showing what happens to marginal soils when heated and helps fill in the picture of what we can expect to see during climate change. This also improves modeling accuracy.
Kentucky soils (or was it Georgian?) are depleted from cropping but are also naturally low in nutrients as they are in warmer climates and the nutrient pool has already been naturally depleted from pre-ag biomass and then by Ag itself.
They aren’t saying warming won’t increase emissions. They are saying you need warming and a system like the boreal, prairies or organic soils to see the impact.
Warming in these systems increases soil microbial activity and mineralisation of the organic matter which yields CO2
So, is this a good or a bad message for climate change?
On the one hand, it could point to man-made CO2 currently emitted being even higher than we think (as less is contributed by the warmed up soil), which would be bad.
On the other hand, this might reduce the risk of yet another runaway scenario where higher temperatures lead to higher emissions, again leading to higher temperatures (like there is for soils in cold climates and methane emissions).
So, although I am just now not sure how to interpret the results, still a very interesting study!This result says nothing*. Carbon-poor soils will not release more CO2 under warming, since they are carbon-poor. But there are ~1670 petagrams of carbon under the Arctic permafrost (and a little more in Tibet), which could absolutely cause a runaway scenario. For comparison, the atmosphere has about 900 Pg of carbon.
* Okay, that’s too harsh. I’m sure this study will help refine the current equations, and could be useful in making local policies.
Sums up and confirms my impression of this.
