(TibetanReview.net, May29’25) – As two of the world’s top weather agencies forecast several years of even more record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable extremes, Chinese scientists have found that the Tibetan Plateau plays a significant role in countering global warming, reported the AP May 29 and China’s official chinadaily.com.cn May 27.
The Tibetan Plateau serves as a net greenhouse gas sink, a phenomenon that is expected to persist for several decades amid global warming, the chinadaily.com.cn report cited Chinese scientists as saying in a new study.
The report explained that greenhouse gas sinks, such as forests and soils, absorb more carbon than they release and are crucial to fighting climate change.
Data on the land surface of the Tibetan Plateau in the 2000s and 2010s “showed that the region absorbs greenhouse gases at a rate that effectively offsets its emissions, resulting in a state of near climate neutrality”, Wang Tao, the corresponding author of the study, which was published this month in the journal Science Bulletin, has said. Wang is stated to be a researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Wang has said the Tibetan Plateau plays an important role in China’s carbon neutrality efforts, with significant annual absorption of carbon dioxide, or CO2, especially through its forests and grasslands.
However, despite this, he has said uncertainties remain regarding its greenhouse gas budget — the set amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted for a given level of global warming — due to factors such as the intensification of livestock systems and the expansion of surface water bodies.
“Simply put, the greenhouse gas sink on the Tibetan Plateau can be viewed as a process involving the absorption of carbon dioxide and the emission of other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide,” Wang said.
He has emphasized that the warming effect per unit of methane is about 27 times that of carbon dioxide, while nitrous oxide’s warming effect is even more pronounced, at around 273 times that of CO2.
The belching, flatulence and excrement of the more than 40 million livestock on the grassland are stated to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.
Besides, the region harbours more than one-third of the PRC’s inland waters and wetlands, including massive emerging thermokarst lakes that form as the permafrost melts, a process that contributes to the release of greenhouse gases, particularly methane, that had previously been sequestered in the soil, Wang has said.
The study was stated to have found that methane and nitrous oxide emissions offset 40% of the terrestrial carbon dioxide sink. Emissions from the livestock system account for around 21% of that, while those from inland waters and wetlands contribute around 13%.
The study was also stated to have found that the greenhouse gas sink nearly compensated for anthropogenic emissions — those that are a direct result of human activities — including those from fossil fuels and industrial sources, suggesting that the Tibetan Plateau has achieved a near climate-neutral state.
The findings are slated to indicate that the existing greenhouse gas sink will persist until 2060.
Meanwhile, a five-year forecast released May 28 by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office said there’s an 80% chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, and it’s even more probable that the world will again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago, said the AP report.
With every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate change, “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany who was not part of the research, has said.
And for the first time there’s a chance — albeit slight — that before the end of the decade, the world’s annual temperature will shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies have said.