Carbon emission from soil on the Tibetan Plateau is an important part of national carbon emission, evaluating which would be useful to rightly evaluate national carbon emission and predict the potential effects due to climate change. In this paper, the key influence factors of carbon emission are discussed and the spatial and temporal pattern of carbon emission in the plateau is analyzed. At present, studies of carbon emission are mainly in allusion to alpine meadow and alpine steppe ecological systems, less involve alpine desert, with studied region inhomogeneous. Carbon emissions from soil are affected by multiple factors, such as climate, biological and human activities, among them, temperature, soil moisture, soil fauna and permafrost degradation are the main; carbon emission from soil displays obvious spatiotemporal variability, with spatial variabilities in biologic association, landscape, regional and biotic formation and temporal variabilities in daily, seasonal and annual. In conclusion, relevant studies are still very inadequate, especially, of large-scale and long-term sequence; mechanisms of carbon emissions are also short. Further and more systematic studies are necessary.