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.
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.
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/1
Thanks! 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.