Posted on 02/08/2007 5:59:23 AM PST by yoe
With that in mind, one might conclude that CO2 affects temperature or temperature affects CO2.
Thus there is probably at least a 50% chance that all of the CO2 we've been pumping into the atmosphere will raise the temperature.
For me, I personally am not inclined place a black or red bet on the planet. And you?
Ah yes, mind-blowingly bad logic followed by that old canard, the precautionary principle. Note that the graph shows CO2 as a *trailing* indicator relative to temperature.
Anyway how exactly are we betting "on the planet"? How do you even know that increased temperatures are a bad thing? What makes you think that our current climate is some kind of unimprovable, perfect utopia? In my view warmer temperatures are likely to be a net positive for civilization, and I welcome global warming if it's happening; I just don't believe we're having any affect on it.
I would believe plants withdraw more carbon from the atomsphere than they contribute. And they do not create the water released as water vapor but take it from the soil whence it would eventually evaporate anyway so there is not net contribution there.
My impression is that Earth's climate changes at times in a very rapid manner without any influence of man. The Sun and Seas regulate our temperature.
That was well put. Given this probiotic effect of plants it does seem strange to call it temperature pollution though.
How do we harvest the trees before they die? Or is it that serious forestry will reduce the number of trees allowed to rot to insignificance?
And also how do we keep the soil chemistry right if we remove every dying tree? If you hay a field over and over again without inputs, you reduce the yield.
If I have a thesis (more like a conjecture), it's that we're doomed! My 80 year old house is about to need serious gutting. a lot of the wood here is in the process of rotting. I know that great violins are made from really old framing and sheathing lumber, but how many violins can the world use?
That is an excellent graph Paloma, and makes the temperature lead hard to miss. Please consider it stolen.
The prevailing view on this thread seems to be that the CO2 rise that trails a temperature rise comes from plants. There is another huge source - the ocean. Does dissolved CO2 in sea-water increase or decrease with temperature? Could some FReeper jump in here?
Thank you Cletus - I missed this post on the first read-through. The oceans seems over-determined to be the CO2 reservoir that is feeding "trailing CO2".
That's the algore effect
"Always love the never before discovered SOME scientists come up with. Assume what they say is true then the relevant question is "Does the methane contribution to GW overcome the reduction due to CO2 absorbtion?" Without going into intricate chemical formulae I would say that would appear to be impossible." ~ Justshutupandtakeit
Published in Nature Magazine January 2006:
Dry and wet plants both - were found to produce methane
http://www.afbini.gov.uk/index/news/news-releases/news-releases-archive.htm?newsid=6112
After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas. In the past two centuries the concentration of atmospheric methane has more than doubled. Rising concentrations are causing changes in climate and contributing to global warming.
Total annual emissions of methane are about 600 million tonnes, split almost equally between anthropogenic and natural sources. Anthropogenic methane contributors include mining and burning of fossil fuels, digestive processes in ruminant animals such as cattle, rice paddies and the burying of waste in landfills. To date known natural sources of methane include wetlands, termites and oceans.
Biological production of methane up to now was considered only to occur under strictly anaerobic conditions.
However, AFBI scientists, in conjunction with researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany and The Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht in The Netherlands, have discovered that plants produce methane under oxic conditions. These findings were reported in the prestigious journal Nature in January 2006.
This paper was the third most downloaded paper from the Nature website during January 2006. View methane emissions article in the Nature journal
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7073/abs/nature04420.html
Based on laboratory and some field experiments it is estimated that living plants release between 60 and 240 million tonnes of methane per year. Thus plants could account for 10-30% of methane found in the atmosphere. Methane release by plants was found to increase with rising temperatures and solar radiation. It was estimated that the largest emissions come from tropical regions because that is where the most biomass is located.
Laboratory and field investigations with dried leaf tissue, fresh detached leaves and intact plants were conducted. Laboratory experiments involved the incubation of plant material in an atmosphere of methane-free air, in order to eliminate the high background of methane normal to atmospheric air. Stable carbon isotope analysis of methane was employed to show beyond doubt that this was an undiscovered process of methane production. Field experiments involved incubation of intact plants in Plexiglass incubation chambers. Tissue from thirty species of plants, from deciduous trees to grasses, were evaluated for methane release and the effects of temperature and solar radiation on release rates were investigated.
Methane release was observed from all plant material regardless of whether the leaf tissue was dry or fresh or if the plant was intact or not.
Emission rates were directly related to both temperature of incubation and solar radiation. Living plants were found to produce the largest quantities of methane, with a considerable range of emissions between the different species.
Methane emissions measured in the laboratory and field experiments were scaled on a global basis relative to annual nett primary production, distinguishing between various types of biomes, length of vegetation period and average daily sunshine hours. On an annual basis living vegetation was calculated to release 62-236 million tonnes with the main contribution, 46-169 million tonnes, assigned to tropical forest and grasslands. Plant litter was considerably lower in the range 0.5-6.6 million tonnes.
The implications of this research are significant and may shed some light on a number of unexplained phenomena. These include the large plumes of methane observed above tropical forests, the fact that rice fields emit less methane when there is less sunlight, and the high levels of methane found in ice formed 2,000 years ago, when plants covered more of the Earth's surface.
Plants as a natural source of methane provides closure for the carbon isotope mass balance of methane in the pre-industrial atmosphere, a finding of considerable importance to atmospheric chemists when modelling past and future climates of the Earth.
The research has created considerable controversy worldwide in both scientific and political arenas.
It is generally accepted that, as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide rise, plant growth will increase - a phenomenon known as 'carbon dioxide fertilisation' - and thus methane emissions will also increase.
This has led to the debate that new forests might increase greenhouse warming through methane emissions rather than decrease it by storing carbon dioxide.
However, calculations of the climatic benefits gained through carbon sequestration by reforestation far exceed the relatively small negative effect of methane emissions, which may reduce carbon uptake by 4 percent. View natural gas plants article in the Nature journal
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7073/edsumm/e060112-09.html
The discovery of methane emissions by plants will require rewriting of certain sections in textbooks that describe natural sources and mechanisms of formation of methane. However, more basic information is necessary before the full impact of this discovery is finally known.
*
Week of Jan. 14, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 2 , p. 19
Greenhouse Plants? Vegetation may produce methane
Sid Perkins http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060114/fob1.asp
Lab tests suggest that a wide variety of plants may routinely do something that scientists had previously thought impossibleproduce methane in significant quantities. a6894_121.jpg
BREATHING OUT. Trees and other plants may emit substantial quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane, according to a recent battery of lab tests.
Methane, like carbon dioxide, traps heat in Earth's atmosphere. Scientists have been studying natural sources of methane for decades but hadn't pegged plants as a producer, notes Frank Keppler, a geochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Previously recognized sources of methane include bacterial action in the digestive systems of ruminants such as cows and in the saturated soils of swamps and rice paddies.
Now, Keppler and his colleagues find that plants, from grasses to trees, may also be sources of the greenhouse gas. "This is really surprising," Keppler says, because most scientists assumed that methane production requires an oxygenfree environment.
In its experiments, Keppler's team scrutinized the gaseous emissions of a variety of plants and their debris at normal atmospheric oxygen concentrations. A gram of dried plant material, such as fallen leaves, released up to 3 nanograms of methane per hour when the temperature was about 30°C. Each 10°C rise above that temperature, up to 70°C, caused the emission rate to approximately double.
Living plants growing at their normal temperatures generated even larger quantities of methane, as much as 370 ng per gram of plant tissue per hour. Methane emission more than tripled when the plants, either living or dead, were exposed to sunlight.
The team's experiments took place in sealed chambers with a well-oxygenated atmosphere, so it's unlikely that bacteria that thrive without oxygen generated the methane, says Keppler. Experiments on plants that were grown in water rather than in soil also resulted in methane emissions, another strong sign that the gas came from the plants and not soil microbes.
From their data, the researchers estimate that the world's plants generate more than 150 million metric tons of methane each year, or about 20 percent of what typically enters the atmosphere. They report their findings in the Jan. 12 Nature.
"This is some pretty strange chemistry," says David C. Lowe, an atmospheric chemist with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Wellington, New Zealand. One reason that scientists hadn't considered plants as a source of the gas is that the laws of thermodynamics don't favor methane production in an oxygen-rich environment. However, Lowe notes, many plants produce volatile hydrocarbons that contribute to haze and smog (SN: 12/7/02, p. 360: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021207/bob8.asp).
The new finding is an "interesting observation," says Jennifer Y. King, a biogeochemist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. Because some types of soil microbes consume methane, they may prevent plant-produced methane from reaching the atmosphere. Field tests will be needed to assess the plants' influence, she notes.
The Keppler team's results may partially explain the large methane plumes recently observed over some tropical forests by Earth-orbiting satellites, says John B. Miller, an atmospheric scientist at the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. Although such plumes are unsurprising during the rainy season, when methane-producing soil microbes are most active, they also appeared during the dry season.
The new findings will probably spur researchers to revise their models of where and how methane is generated as well as their interpretations of the gas' concentrations measured in ancient ice cores. "This is a big deal if it's real," says Stanley C. Tyler, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Irvine.
*
Global warming: blame the forests
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1684379,00.html
*
Etc., etc. bttt
Water releases dissolved CO2 as it warms.
Consider what happens when you open a warm coke.
OK, ERF, I'll bite.
The IFCC says that there is now 90% certainty that human activity "contributes to" or "aggravates" climate change. They no longer say "causes", because they admit other factors like natural climate patterns, solar activity, and other extraterrrestrial activity also have an impact. And they also admit that their models are stilll not developed enough to fully inventory or measure these other effects, so even that 90% certainty is just 90% of an uncertain amount.
But even if we accept that 90-95% is the actual certainty that continuing current trends of human activity will add 2-8 degrees to global climate averages over the next 100-200 years:
* What certainty do we have that an imposed solution will have the designed impact? I suggest looking at previous social and cultural experiments during the past century as a benchmark.
* What certainty do we have that an imposed solution will be accepted globally, and not cause political, cultural and social conflicts so disastrous as to completly undermine the effort? Again, benchmarks don't look favorable.
* What certainty do we have that in the next 1 or 2 centuries, a natural event or process won't cause short-term or long-term events much more destructive than the currently observed climate change? Off the top of my head, I can think of 3 major eruptions in the past 500 years (Krakatoa in the 500s, Kueae in the 1400s, Tambora in the 1800s) that had incedible impacts on the course of human history... impacts that greatly eclipse anything we're doing now.
* What certainty do we have that the dramatic changes required to reduce GHGs won't make humans in general more vulnerable to climate... instead of more resilient?
Instead of trying to re-engineer global human cultures to impact the global climate - an effort both futile and suicidal - we should be figuring out how to survive the violently dynamic world we live in.
Interesting logic. Since the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun during its winter, would you conclude there'e 50% chance that the colder weather causes the pole to tilt away from the sun?
Anyway, the scientific process is fine for discovery - observe, hypothesize, experiment, then discard or refine your hypothesis. Unfortunately, making policy is a bit different than that.
http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/aggi/
The implicit suggestion that failure to regulate amounts to "placing a red or black bet on the planet" indicates someone who has swallowed the Environmentalist Fundamentalism hook, line and sinker.
In order for me to answer your question I need to understand why you think that lower carbon emissions requires "dramatic changes".
It seems to me that the changes are quite minor and, in fact, necessary anyway in a world where current energy resources are becoming more scarce and/or concentrated.
Basically we are just talking about accelerating a process of moving to renewables and greater efficiency that is happening anyway.
It would probably put America in the lead (after it catches up to Europe) and be a huge competitive advantage in the 21st century.
bttt
I produce the top "greenhouse gases" simply by breathing: water vapor, CO2, methane. Will I be taxed for living?
You've proposed a "solution." Now, what's the problem, specifically? You understand that CO2 is a relatively minor part of greenhouse gases, right, and that plants can't survive without it?
That said, your suggestions make sense for a variety of reasons: they'll cut pollution and cut dependance on foreign oil, for example. Just not sure they'll do much against "global warming."
You didn't even read the mail that led up to it or the follow up did you? Maybe you should look at the whole conversation before commenting and making a political accusation about a scientific debate.
Apparently your mind is made up because you have decided to look through a political prism. I am looking at this scientifically and rationally, so am willing to consider the facts from both side.
Have a nice day with yourself.
Anthropogenic warming is politically correct for reasons of the necessary transfer of the world's wealth to the intellectual elite who are incapable of producing wealth and therefore who do not receive their fair share of it. It is born of envy and of the desire to cause a dieoff of the world's population in order to return the world to the pristine beauty of parkland to be enjoyed by those with the intellectuality and the training to enjoy it.
I bet you made that up all by yourself from the talking points of the paranoid right.
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