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A study published in the Nature Portfolio Journal warns that Australia’s soil is becoming a net carbon emitter and threatens to ruin the country’s net zero goals.

“They claim that over the next 80 years, Australian soil … will release up to 100 megatons of CO₂ into the atmosphere,” Sky News host James Macpherson said.

“There you have it … dirt is now a major threat to the future of planet Earth.

“I reckon some greenie councillor is going to make you concrete everything now that they know dirt is a climate criminal.”

Macpherson was referring to an article published by The Guardian yesterday about a study published on 26 March 2024 titled ‘A warming climate will make Australian soil a net emitter of atmospheric CO₂’.

The study’s lead author, Professor Raphael Viscarra Rossel, said the “concerning” findings showed the substantial threat soil carbon losses posed to Australia’s emissions reduction targets.

“If Australia wants to achieve its emissions reductions targets … that’s a significant amount of emissions that we’re not accounting for,” he said.

“The climate change problem is so large and so wicked that soil is not going to solve the problem,” he said. “But it can play a part by mitigating the [soil carbon] losses we are projecting.”

As if the whole affair wasn’t peculiar enough, the study said there was well-documented “uncertainty” in modelling future soil carbon levels and that “our understanding of the sources of this uncertainty is evolving.”

The researchers’ work was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects scheme and the Australia-China Science and Research Fund’s (“ACSRF’s”) Joint Research Centres (“JRCs”). 

In other words, tax collected from hard-working and productive Australians is being used to fund Prof. Viscarra Rossel and his colleagues to guess what effect a so called “warming climate” will have on CO₂ being released from Australian soil.  Do you feel like you’re being had?

Featured image: US scheme used by Australian farmers reveals the dangers of trading soil carbon to tackle climate change, The Conversation, 24 June 2021