Researchers are getting to grips with the effects of heat, drought and storms on carbon release
By Quirin Schiermeier and Nature magazine
Climate change has a disconcerting tendency to amplify itself through feedback effects. Melting sea ice exposes dark water, allowing the ocean to soak up more heat. Arctic warming speeds the release of carbon dioxide from permafrost. And, as researchers discussed at a meeting last week in Seefeld, Austria, climate extremes — heatwaves, droughts and storms — can hamper plant growth, weakening a major buffer against the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere.
“Heatwaves and droughts will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate, and ecosystems will somehow respond,” says Philippe Ciais, a carbon-cycle researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. “More storms will add an extra dimension to the problem.”
The meeting was organized by the CARBO-Extreme project, a €3.3-million (US$4.5-million) collaboration of 27 groups from 12 countries, funded by the European Union. Attendees showed off an array of tools for uncovering how extreme events affect terrestrial carbon cycles, including numerical models, CO2 flux measurements and field experiments. The challenge now, says Ciais, is to predict how the frequency of climate extremes will change, and to model the intricate physiological responses — some of which are poorly understood — of plants and ecosystems.
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