Draft script:
From Popular Mechanics comes this headline on 22 April 2024: Trillions of Tons of Carbon Are Missing from Climate Models. The story begins with three bullet points: (1) While the world’s soils are home to lots of organic carbon—such as leaf litter and animal waste—inorganic carbon, which is often in the form of solid carbonates, can also leak into the atmosphere. And it isn’t accounted for by current climate models; (2) A new study focuses on the role of soils as both a storage for and emitter of carbon, and found that 23 billion [metric] tonnes of inorganic carbon could escape soil over the next 30 years; and (3) Good land management—as well as other practices, such as afforestation and improved rock weathering—can help slow down this significant source of CO2.
Here’s the lede: “The sole purpose of people and programs combating climate change is finding ways to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.” The first paragraph continues: “Planting trees is a big help, as their woody roots lock away carbon for decades, and companies are hard at work trying to find artificial means of sucking greenhouse gasses from the air and sequestering it underground. But in this obsession with tracking CO2 levels, one significant source of both emission and storage has been overlooked—the soil.” A minor detail is worthy of mention: Planting trees is not necessarily a big help, as I pointed out previously in this space.
The article goes on: “the top two meters of soil beneath our feet currently hold roughly 2.3 trillion [metric] tonnes of inorganic carbon—five times more than all of the terrestrial plants on Earth combined.”…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
