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.
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.