How Does Human Use of Nitrogen Affect Our Climate?
In this video, SÖNKE ZAEHLE explores how human-induced nitrogen inputs affect the Earth’s climate system. Using an integrated modeling approach, his team assessed how nitrogen from agriculture and fossil fuel combustion influences greenhouse gases, aerosols, and radiative forcing. Their findings show that nitrogen both cools and warms the planet—through carbon storage and N₂O emissions, respectively - while also altering short-lived climate forcers like methane and ozone. ZAEHLE warns that cleaning up nitrogen pollution could unintentionally reduce this cooling, requiring greater efforts to meet climate targets.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21036/LTPUB101206Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
The research is dedicated to the study of global biogeochemical cycles and their long-term interactions with the biosphere, the atmosphere, the geosphere and the entire climate system. We want to better understand how living organisms - including humans - exchange basic resources such as water, carbon, nitrogen and energy with their environment and how this affects global climate and ecosystems. Biogeochemistry is the science of the Earth's metabolism. Elements essential to life such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus are constantly undergoing biological, chemical and physical transformations as they are exchanged between different parts of the Earth, the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. The "biogeochemical cycles" quantitatively describe the distribution and exchange of elements between these components of the Earth system.