How the Earth will pay back our carbon emissions with … more carbon emissions

A fireman works to extinguish a wildfire
 on a peatland field in
 Ogan Ilir, South Sumatra, Indonesia.

The really scary thing about climate change is not that humans will fail to get their emissions under control. The really scary thing is that at some point, the Earth will take over and start adding even more emissions on its own.

A new study underscores this risk by looking closely at Indonesia, which has a unique quality — some 70 billion of tons of carbon that have built up in peatlands over millennia. In this, Indonesia is much like the Arctic, where even larger quantities of ancient carbon are stored in , and are also vulnerable.

In each case, if that carbon gets out of the land and into the atmosphere, then global warming will get worse. But global warming could itself up the odds of such massive carbon release. That’s a dangerous position to be in as the world continues to warm.

Read The Washington Post story - “How the Earth will pay back our carbon emissions with … more carbon emissions.”