Overview: Humanity is confronted with a warming planet that is experiencing rising peak temperatures, increased desertification, more extreme weather events, wildfires of increasing severity and frequency, increasing loss of the cryosphere – glaciers, polar ice, permafrost, etc. – and the resulting rise in sea levels. Global warming is occurring because of increasing levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, as a result of rising production levels that exceed the natural capacity of the microbial world to capture, metabolise and bury them. But microbes not only capture and bury GHGs but also produce them, for example in the rumen of cows and sheep, and thus play key roles in the fluxes of GHGs. Reducing the release of GHGs to the atmosphere requires that we take action to increase microbial capture and decrease microbial production of GHGs. Let’s learn about the roles of microbes in global warming!
Creation of the TFs is a work in progress: those already available are indicated by titles that are live links. Titles of those still in the pipeline are shown for context.
(For vignettes of some of the star actors in these stories, see the MicroGreenhouseGasConsumer/Producer Portrait Galleries)
Sources and sinks of climate active gases
- Microbial cycling of greenhouse gases
- Plants: methane production and consumption
- The stored carbon crisis
- The biological carbon pump
- Agriculture, greenhouse gases and global warming
- Microbes and long-term organic carbon storage
- Microbes and methane
- Reduction of methane release by natural oxidising biofilters
- Microbiology of fossil hydrocarbon reservoirs
- Landfills as methane bombs
Impacts of global warming on microbial activities and interactions
- Glacial retreat
- Fungi in drylands and the potential effect of climate change on drylands
- Global warming and freshwater microbiomes
- Global warming and freshwater plant microbiology
Microbial responses to extreme weather events
- Tundra fires
- Microbes help plants tolerate drought