That amount of carbon equals about 7.5 years of emissions by every person on Earth at current rates - including all of the exhaust from all of the world's cars, semi-trucks, jets, ships, power plants and factories over the course of 2,737 days.
The study - which crunched reams of soil warming and climate change numbers through a French supercomputer - overturns the notion that a warmer, greener Arctic will absorb more carbon than it will spew from its new expanses of soggy peat.
Any budding plant growth may just be a little too late, the study concludes.
“Including permafrost processes turns out to be very important," said lead author Charles Koven, with Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division, in this story about the study. “Previous models tended to dramatically underestimate the amount of soil carbon at high latitudes because they lacked the processes of how carbon builds up in soil. Our model starts off with more carbon in the soil, so there is much more to lose with global warming."
The study - Permafrost carbon-climate feedbacks accelerate global warming - was published in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Koven, a now new staffer with the federal Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, worked on the project while he was a postdoctoral researcher at France's Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement. With the help of seven scientists from France, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Koven conjured the new estimates by running climate models through the supercomputer at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.
The findings are among a growing body of work predicting that climate change will accelerate throughout the Arctic as natural processes feed on themselves to produce even more warming. Read the full report here.
Source: Doug O'Harra, Alaska Dispatch.
