We’ve all woken up in the morning having gotten more than the recommended 8 hours and yet somehow we feel more tired than the night before. The solution we often choose is more sleep, which sadly only perpetuates the cycle of grogginess. The environment suffers a similar issue, only instead of lethargy it’s plagued by CO2 and heat.

Peat bogs, often called the livers of the world, known for significantly reducing the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere are being destroyed. Ironically, by the very thing they’re supposed to be ridding the world of.

Nature Geoscience recently published a study done by Takeshi Ise of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. He and his colleagues have been playing the role of environmental meteorologists and the forecast is bleak. According to their study, global warming, or the increase in the earth’s environmental temperature as a result of rising CO2 levels, will cause the positive feedback loop currently established by peat bogs to reverse. This would mean that instead of peat being created from peat, furthering the elimination of CO2 , drying peat will trigger more peat death, and CO2 eradication will plummet further culminating in severe depletion of CO2 level remedies during the time they’ll be most needed.

The good news? The study conducted the forecast for the next few hundreds of years, so there is yet time to save the peat bogs. However, an increasing importance must be placed on the environmental preservation of such critical natural solutions to this man-exacerbated problem of global warming in order for the forecast to have any significant turn around.

News Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/science/14obpeat.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Scientific Article: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo331.html

Discussion question: What implications does this have in terms of individual responsibility towards controlling carbon dioxide emissions?