![]() ![]() That all changed in the early 1900s with the debut of the Haber-Bosch process that provided an industrial method to produce massive amounts of ammonia fertiliser. Before the rise of modern agriculture, most plant-available nitrogen on farms came from compost, manure and nitrogen-fixing microbes which take nitrogen gas (N2) and convert it to ammonium, a soluble nutrient that plants can take up through their roots. Humanity has tipped the Earth's nitrogen cycle out of balance. "Anything that can be done to improve fertiliser use efficiency would be big," says Michael Castellano, an agroecologist and soil scientist at Iowa State University. Today, scientists are looking at several ways to treat the soil or adjust farming practices to cut back on N2O production. Agricultural soil – especially because of the globe's heavy use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser – is the principal culprit. A 2020 review of nitrous oxide sources and sinks found that emissions rose 30% in the last four decades and are exceeding all but the highest potential emissions scenarios described by the IPCC. Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have estimated that nitrous oxide comprises roughly 6% of greenhouse gas emissions, and about three-quarters of those N2O emissions come from agriculture.īut despite its important contribution to climate change, N2O emissions have largely been ignored in climate policies. In all, the climate impact of laughing gas is no joke. And like CO2, it is long-lived, spending an average of 114 years in the sky before disintegrating. Yet molecule for molecule, N2O is about 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide at heating the atmosphere. ![]() "It's a forgotten greenhouse gas," he says. They're from another gas altogether: nitrous oxide (N2O).Īlso known as laughing gas, N2O does not get nearly the attention it deserves, says David Kanter, a nutrient pollution researcher at New York University and vice-chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, an organisation focused on nitrogen pollution research and policy making. There's good reason for that: Agriculture accounts for 16 to 27% of human-caused climate-warming emissions. But much of these emissions are not from carbon dioxide, that familiar climate change villain. In the world's effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the source of our food is coming into the spotlight. ![]()
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