It is speculated that the cold and relatively humid climate in alpine ecosystems can facilitate the storage of soil carbon. Besides, these ecosystems play an important role in the carbon cycle on a global scale. Due to the special environment of high altitude and low temperature in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), the ecosystem respiration (RE) in alpine wetland is sensitive to global climate change. However, previous studies on RE of wetland ecosystem were limited to short time series data, which was difficult to fully explain the dynamic of RE and its influence mechanism. Therefore, to study the carbon budgets from alpine wetland ecosystem has become increasingly important in accurately projecting global carbon cycling in future climatic change. Here, we analyzed the continuous RE measured with the eddy covariance technique over an alpine wetland. The results indicated that monthly RE exhibited a single-peak trend which increased and then decreased from 2004 to 2016, and reached the peak in August. The annual RE was (608.9±65.6) g C m^-2 a^-1, which showed a gradually increasing trend (P<0.05). The non-growing season RE accounted for a small proportion of annual RE, but it was significantly positively correlated with annual RE (P<0.05). This finding suggested that CO₂ emission in alpine wetland during the non-growing season were crucial for annual carbon balance of alpine wetland. At monthly scale, the results of classification and regression tree (CART) and linear regression analysis indicated that soil temperature (Ts) was the predominantly determinant factor that affected the change of monthly RE, suggesting that soil respiration in alpine wetland was critical to the carbon emission. The correlation analysis showed that the growing seasonal RE had significantly positive and negative correlation with growing season degree days (GDD) (P<0.05) and precipitation (PPT) (P<0.05), respectively. Furthermore, linear regression analysis indicated that the non-growing seasonal RE had significantly positive correlation with the non-growing season air temperature (Ta) (P<0.05) and the PPT (P<0.05), respectively. Due to the promoting effect of growing seasonal GDD and non-growing seasonal Ta on RE, we speculate that under the context of global warming, especially in the non-growing seasons, which will exacerbate carbon emission in the alpine wetland of the QTP. However, considering that PPT had different effects on carbon emission of alpine wetland ecosystem in growing season and non-growing season, it is suggested that more caution should be applied in analyzing the response mechanism of carbon emissions of alpine ecosystem to hydrothermal conditions in future.