Posted on 07/10/2010 5:06:20 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Climate predictions could become more accurate and more reliable in the future - thanks to new findings on the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon cycle. International teams of researchers headed by the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena now present comprehensive data analyses in two related studies. The analyses also lead to more precise estimates of how the ecosystems could react to climate change. In most ecosystems, the photosynthesis rate at which plants fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere changes relatively little as temperature varies. Over 40 percent of the Earth’s vegetated surface reacts very sensitively to changes in the amount of precipitation, however. The respiration of the ecosystems, when flora and fauna release carbon dioxide, also increases to a lesser extent than has recently often been assumed when the temperature rises. Moreover, this temperature dependence is the same all over the world - even in ecosystems as different as the tropical savannah and the Finnish needleleaf forest, for example. (Science Express, July 5, 2010)
(Excerpt) Read more at mpg.de ...
CO2 field experiment likely to cause “do-over” for climate models
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I have two press releases here, one via EurekAlert, and one from Max Planck. Plus at the end a summary of points via WUWT regular Pierre Gosselin. First, a key point. You can see the CO2 respiration of the biosphere in the Mauna Loa CO2 record below:
CO2 Trend for Mauna Loa - note the dip in 2008 when global temperatures plummeted, and the step again from 2009 into 2010 when an El Nino occurred
Breath of the Earth: Cycling carbon through terrestrial ecosystems
New data on photosynthesis and respiration will improve models, researchers say
This release is available in Italian, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese.
This is the Eddy-Flux-Tower in the Hainich National Park, Germany.
Two recent international studies are poised to change the way scientists view the crucial relationship between Earth’s climate and the carbon cycle. These reports explore the global photosynthesis and respiration rates—the planet’s deep “breaths” of carbon dioxide, in and out—and researchers say that the new findings will be used to update and improve upon traditional models that couple together climate and carbon.
The two reports will be published online by the journal Science at the Science Express Web site at 6 p.m., US ET, Monday, 5 July. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
Christian Beer from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, along with colleagues from 10 other countries around the world, first take a look at Earth’s Gross Primary Production, or GPP, which represents the total amount of carbon dioxide that terrestrial plants breathe in through photosynthesis each year. With a novel combination of observations and modeling, they estimate the total amount of carbon that the world’s plant life inhales annually is 123 billion metric tons.
Then, Miguel Mahecha, also from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, and another international team of researchers settle a long-standing debate over the effects of short-term variations in air temperature on ecosystem respiration, or the Earth’s exhalation of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. They show that the sensitivity of ecosystem respiration to short-term variations in temperature is similar around the world. The researchers also suggest that factors other than temperature, such as the slow, ongoing transformations of carbon in the soil and water availability, appear to play crucial roles in long-term ecosystem carbon balances.
Together, these findings shed more light on the global cycle of carbon into and out of the atmosphere and how those processes are coupled with Earth’s ever-changing climate. The researchers analyzed vast amounts of climate and carbon data from around the world, and they say their results should help to improve the validity of predictive models and help resolve how climate change might affect the carbon cycle—and our world—in the future.
“An understanding of the factors that control the GPP of various terrestrial ecosystems is important because we humans make use of many ecosystem services, such as wood, fiber, and food,” said Beer. “Additionally, such an understanding is important in the context of climate change as a consequence of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels because vegetation greatly modulates the land-atmosphere exchanges of greenhouse gases, water, and carbon dioxide…”
In their report, Beer and his colleagues pooled large amounts of data from FLUXNET, an international initiative established more than 10 years ago to monitor exchanges of carbon dioxide between Earth’s ecosystems and the atmosphere, with remote sensing and climate data from around the world to calculate the spatial distribution of mean annual GPP between 1998 and 2006.
This is a view of the tropical forest in Ghana from the top of a flux tower.
The researchers highlight the fact that uptake of carbon dioxide is most pronounced in the planet’s tropical forests, which are responsible for a full 34 percent of the inhalation of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Savannas then account for 26 percent of the global uptake, although the researchers note that savannas also occupy about twice as much surface area as tropical forests.
Precipitation also plays a significant role in determining the gross global carbon dioxide uptake, the researchers found. They suggest that rainfall has a significant influence on the amount of carbon that plants utilize for photosynthesis on more than 40 percent of vegetated lands, a discovery that stresses the importance of water availability for food security. According to the study, climate models often show great variation, and some of them overestimate the influence of rainfall on global carbon dioxide uptake.
“We reached a milestone with this paper by using plenty of data from FLUXNET in addition to remote sensing and climate reanalysis,” Beer said. “With our estimation of global GPP, we can do two things—compare our results with [Earth system] process models and further analyze the correlation between GPP and climate.”
In the second study, Mahecha and his team of researchers also relied on the global collaboration within the FLUXNET network during their investigation of ecosystems’ sensitivity to air temperature. Compiling and analyzing data from 60 different FLUXNET sites, these researchers found that the respiratory sensitivity to temperature of the world’s ecosystems, commonly referred to as Q10, is actually quite set in stone—and that the Q10 value is independent of the average local temperature and of the specific ecosystem conditions.
For years, experts have debated the effect that air temperature has on global respiration, or the collective metabolic processes of organisms that return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from Earth’s surface. Most empirical studies suggest that such ecosystem respiration around the world is highly sensitive to increasing temperatures, while the majority of predictive models suggest otherwise. Scientists say that global air temperatures may rise due to the presence of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. But, this new result suggests that the temperature sensitivity of the natural exhalation of carbon dioxide from ecosystems has been overestimated and should be reevaluated.
This latest study, in settling the controversy, suggests that previous field studies failed to disentangle processes acting on different time-scales. Mahecha and his team considered the processes of the 60 different ecosystems on the exact same time-scale in order to nail the global mean Q10 down to a value of 1.4. Their new, standard value for various ecosystems’ sensitivity to air temperature suggests a less pronounced short-term climate-carbon feedback compared to previous estimates.
“Our key finding is that the short-term temperature sensitivity of ecosystem respiration to air temperature is converging to a single, global value,” Mahecha said. “Contrary to previous studies, we show that the sensitivity of ecosystem respiration to temperature variations seems to be independent from external factors and constant across ecosystems. In other words, we found a general relationship between variation in temperature and ecosystem respiration… Our findings reconcile the apparent contradictions of modeling and field studies.”
In the future, these two separate studies should allow for more precise predictions of how Earth’s warming climate will affect the exchange of carbon between our ecosystems and the atmosphere—and vice versa. They provide scientists with important tools for better understanding the world’s ecosystems and how the human race continues to influence and alter them.
The report by Beer et al. was funded by CarboEuropeIP, FAO-GTOS-TCO, iLEAPS, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, National Science Foundation, University of Tuscia, Université Laval, Environment Canada, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
The report by Mahecha et al. was funded by CarboEuropeIP, FAO-GTOS-TCO, iLEAPS, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, National Science Foundation, University of Tuscia, the U.S. Department of Energy, and grants from the European Research Council, the European Commission project CARBO-Extreme, and the Max Planck Society.
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Here’s the Press Release from the Max Planck Institute:
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This thread started with the article.....
BWAHAHAHA, notice how sure of their research they are with key words like could and might!
Educated way over their stupidty level.
Now this seems to be a study worth doing.
About :
Web Site for the FLUXNET Synthesis Data set.
Those mountains need more trees.
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We hope that this will be the first step into a new “global flux perspective” where the different eddy covariance networks will try more and more to harmonize and share data with the aim to increase the quality of the research and the collaboration. In future this dataset will be regularly updated with data from new sites.
Sorry, this statement alone shows me their agenda.
Whenever I see the word "ecosystems", my skin crawls.
But, then again, I'm no scientist.
I leave it up to you smart FReepers to keep me informed!
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DirkH says:
This research beautifully destroys one foundation of the catastrophist’s fantasies: That an increase in temperature will reduce the photosynthetic capabilities of vegetation severely, leading to a much higher accumulation of CO2.
Now they have two possibilities: Admit that catastrophic warming isn’t likely, or find a different candidate mechanism for the catastrophic scenario.
(I’m using the term catastrophist to distinguish believers in catastrophic warming from moderate warmers. Which brings us to the interesting question of where western governments – Merkel et.al. stand on this issue. Even though Merkel might go the way of the Brown sometime soon now.)
Oh... and I make no claims about being Smart about this stuff.
Unless we don't need plants....
This hypothesis has been challenged and de-bunked by many here on FR and other leading non-AGW believing scientists.
I'm calling out the Viking kitties..:=)
Let me remind readers that Carbon Dioxide was four or five times more concentrated in our atmosphere (1400 ppm) than today during the Silurian or later when highly developed vertebrates prowled the Earth, and terrestrial photosynthesis was rampant. Damn few SUV's around then (and of course NO "climate" scientists or George Soros').
Johnny Suntrade
I thought the debate was over....
Let us see what conclusions they draw after say twenty years into the study if as projected we go into a solid global cooling phase.
Well, I’m not going to form an opinion until I hear the Sex Poodle bark, er...speak.
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Plenty of copies
"Scientific Guide" To The Skeptics Handbook
I’m elated. Last night outside the Watts Up lecture at UWA here in Perth there were people handing out a so-called “Scientific Guide” to the Skeptics Handbook. Let’s put this in perspective, I wrote the Handbook two years ago, and it’s taken this long for those-who-want-to-scare-us to put together a specific printed response. I’m an unbacked, solo pro bono writer, and they needed no less than 5 professors, 2 associate professors, and 21 months, and THIS is the best they can do?
I’m also chuffed. The infamous Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky spoke the night before in the same room as we spoke in (about the dangers of consensus) but maybe he’s finally read my multiple responses to the stone age reasoning he was using and the light bulb has gone off. Maybe he’s realized that the masses of engineers, geologists, lawyers, medical experts and people with just plain common sense out there are never going to be fooled by his old witchdoctor routine about the Gods of Science at the IPCC. I was informed by people who saw the presentation that for the first time he spoke without resorting to obvious errors of reasoning.
Handing out the Guide
Likewise the Scientific Guide makes a lot of whitewashy mistakes; still won’t show the graphs I show; confoundingly obscures the “fingerprint” that was presented by Santer and the CCSP, and makes baseless assertions, uses graphs with dodgy scales, assumes that positive feedback occurs and throws in a venetian blind strawman. Nonetheless, finally Professors are rising above Argument from authority and ad hominem attacks. The word “Denier” has disappeared.
Lewandowsky, Carmen Lawrence, et al, your apology for calling us names is accepted. We’re delighted that you are finally willing to try to discuss the evidence.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is excellent news. For those of us without the backing of any major institution or company taking on the wall of money, as long as we have free speech it shows we can use satire as a scyth backed up with impeccable reasoning and empirical evidence and force our public officials to lift standards and stop bludgeoning us with blatantly obvious mistakes.
I’m happy at the way the Skeptics Handbook still holds up. Most of the critical response to it is to repeat the evidence that supports a direct effect of carbon, which (as I have said many times) can only give us about 1 small degree of warming, not 3 or 4 disastrous degrees. So the critics have stopped breaking laws of reason, but they haven’t quite got numerate yet.
I will do a full detailed response to it, of course, along with the other (un)SkepticalScience.com postings. But given that there are at least ten of them, and one of me, regrettably, I can’t do it all today.
PS: At the door last night I spoke to the people handing out the written reply to the Skeptics Handbook (a reply which doesn’t appear to have a named author, yet has the UWA logo on it). As usual, the conversation dissolved quickly into endless spiral of non-sequiteurs that don’t add up.
I joked that it was good to see Sherwood get a mention, I think his idea to use windshear instead of thermometers is entertaining and creative… the man in the middle scoffed, “havent you seen the three papers that came out last year?” I ask “which papers”. He says, you know, the three… I repeat: Which papers? Can you name them? He’s says “Yes”. Then reaches for his blackberry to sms for help. Ha, I laugh, so you haven’t even read them? He admonishes me for being rude. “What kind a response is that!?” The woman next to him seems utterly dumbfounded by me: “You just don’t get science do you? You don’t get it?” I’m thinking it’s not even worth asking her what she thinks science is… (give me the evidence). Then the pair are asking how many papers I can name. I laugh that counting papers is not how it works. They complain that it should be me naming papers and backing up my claims, and I point out that they’re the ones who want our money, they need some evidence. The man is incredulous, “but but! HALF* the solutions to the problem won’t cost anything, they’re free”. I say: Great, fantastic, so why don’t you go do them then? Cheap energy. The market will love it. So why the big scare? Who needs carbon trading…?
Ugh! He groans: they’re free if you include the costs of the damage.
Oh right, I’m thinking. That would be the damage due to “carbon”, and the catastrophic positive feedbacks that the IPCC can’t really name any convincing evidence for?
* Apparently it was “Half” the solutions, not all, so I corrected that post note. see Justin in comments… . It’s all based on assumptions in any case.
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Pure B.S. They are scaming up a crooked game where ‘’carbon credits’’ will be bought and sold. Of course any company that buys them will naturally pass the cost thru to guess who. We were better off trying to figure out what Y2K would do.
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pgosselin says:
John W.
I’d say the MPI is in general warmist as a whole, but are ready to change their minds as the science comes in. It is, after all, a worldclass organisation.
Our sceptic views are also not rock solid. I think it’ll take another 10 or 20 years before we get a good idea as to how much of an impact our emissions really do have on the climate (I suspect it won’t be that much, though).
From the WUWT comments....
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cagw_skeptic99 says:
Maybe a clearer way to state my question is this: Why so much focus on the land based CO2 cycle? Can there really be a material difference in the amount of land based CO2 contained in the flora of the earth from say, one decade to the next? More CO2 means more vigorous growth and an increase in the total plant matter, but then won’t the earth again reach equilibrium with respect to land based CO2 sequestered in plant material?
It seems to me that those curious about how atmospheric CO2 concentrations will change should be focused on the oceanic carbon cycle. Maybe this is harder to measure or doesn’t contribute in the politically correct direction?
cagw_skeptic99 says:
July 6, 2010 at 10:26 am
“[...]
It seems to me that those curious about how atmospheric CO2 concentrations will change should be focused on the oceanic carbon cycle. Maybe this is harder to measure or doesn’t contribute in the politically correct direction?”
I think the efforts to measure the effect of temperature increase on photosynthesis were done because of concern that the CO2 uptake would drop, which would indeed have been a catastrophe for the land-based biosphere and for food production. So it was a valid concern and urgent enough to get funded.
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