Nitrous Oxide 300X As Powerful As CO2 In Warming, Depletes Ozone, But Still Under The Radar

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Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it also depletes the ozone layer. Since it also has a shorter life span, reducing it could have a faster, significant impact on global warming. But the largest source of nitrous oxide is agriculture, particularly fertilized soil and animal waste, and that makes it harder to rein in. "One could imagine limiting carbon dioxide, less methane, less of lots of things. But nitrous oxide is so much a food production issue," Ravishankara said.

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Since the 1960s, fertilizer use has shot up globally, helping usher in the "Green Revolution," which fed millions around the world. In the U.S. alone, the use of fertilizer has risen more than 200 percent over the past 60 years, even though the amount of cropland has stayed relatively constant. At the same time, the number of large industrialized livestock operations has also gone up, creating more manure "lagoons" and excess manure, which is often over-applied on cropland.

A 2013 report by the United Nations found that since the pre-industrial era, nitrous oxide emissions from human activities have increased 20 percent. At the time, the authors wrote that if nothing was done, those emissions were expected to double by 2050.

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Especially in larger farming operations, livestock manure presents a two-fold emissions problem: it emits an enormous amount of methane, but it can create nitrous oxide too. "When the manure doesn't get access to oxygen, toward the bottom of the pit, it starts to convert into nitrous oxide," said Ben Lilliston, Director of Rural Strategies and Climate Change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. "This also happens when manure gets overapplied to crop land."

When farmers add nitrogen fertilizer to their soil to help stimulate plant growth, only about half gets taken up by the plant, according to Neville Millar, a senior research coordinator at Michigan State University. The rest can be washed away in groundwater, or off-gassed as nitrous oxide or other gases.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11092019/nitrous-oxide-climate-pollutant-explainer-greenhouse-gas-agriculture-livestock