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Davidson: Post-WWII synthetic fertilizer adoption disrupted atmospheric N2O equilibrium

Eric Davidson · The greenhouse gas you don’t know about · Mar 16, 2023 · at 20:55

Environmental scientist Eric Davidson discusses how post-World War II agricultural synthetic fertilizer use catalyzed a continuous rise in global N2O emissions.

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“Farmers began using synthetic fertilizers after World War II, and the rate of increase just sort of skyrocketed after that, and that was sort of the beginning of the end of An equilibrium of the N-to-O budget, because once we started using much more synthetic fertilizers, the N-to-O emissions from agriculture started increasing significantly, and they're still going up.”

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