The Conversation | Article Link | by Pep Canadell and Hanqin Tian

Image courtesy of Unsplash

Each year our terrestrial biosphere absorbs about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide emissions that humans produce. This a very good thing; it helps to moderate the warming produced by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.

But in a paper published in Nature today, we show that emissions from other human activities, particularly food production, are overwhelming this cooling effect. This is a worrying trend, at a time when CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels are slowing down, and is clearly not consistent with efforts to stabilise global warming well below 2℃ as agreed at the Paris climate conference.

To explain why, we need to look at two other greenhouse gases: methane and nitrous oxide.

The other greenhouse gases

Each year, people produce about 40 billion tones of CO₂ emissions, largely from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. This has produced about 82% of the growth in warming due to greenhouses gases over the past decade.

The planet, through plant growth, removes about a quarter of this each year (another quarter goes into the oceans and the rest stays in the atmosphere and heats the planet). If it didn’t, the world would warm much faster. If we had to remove this CO₂ ourselves, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars each year, so we should be very grateful that the Earth does it for free.

Apart from CO₂, there are two other main greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O). In fact, they are both more potent greenhouse gases than CO₂. The global warming potential of methane and nitrous oxide is 28 and 265 times greater than that of CO₂, respectively.

The human emissions of these gases are largely associated with food production. Methane is produced by ruminants (livestock), rice cultivation, landfills and manure, among others.

Other human-induced emissions of methane come from changes to land use and the effects of climate change on wetlands, which are major producers of global methane.

Nitrous oxide emissions are associated with excessive use of fertilisers and burning plant and animal waste. To understand how much excess nitrogen we are adding to our crops, consider that only 17 of 100 units of nitrogen applied to the crop system ends up in the food we eat.

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