From Kansas State University, dueling statements, which I’ve highlighted in bold. Its the same sort of nonsense argument we here for Carbon Dioxide, that while essential for all life on the planet, it is also a pollutant. I see a nitrogen tax in our future if this nutty idea takes hold. – Anthony
Global nitrogen availability consistent for past 500 years, linked to carbon levels
MANHATTAN — A Kansas State University research team has found that despite humans increasing nitrogen production through industrialization, nitrogen availability in many ecosystems has remained steady for the past 500 years. Their work appears in the journal Nature.
“People have been really interested in nitrogen in current times because it’s a major pollutant,” said Kendra McLauchlan, assistant professor of geography and director of the university’s Paleoenvironmental Laboratory. “Humans are producing a lot more nitrogen than in the past for use as crop fertilizer, and there is concern because excess levels can cause damage. The mystery, though, is whether the biosphere is able to soak up this extra nitrogen and what that means for the future.”
Nitrogen is a key component of the ecosystem and the largest regulator of plant growth. It determines how much food, fuel and fiber the land can produce. It also determines how much carbon dioxide plants remove from the atmosphere, and it interacts with several components of the climate system. Excessive amounts of nitrogen in ecosystems contribute to global warming and impairment of downstream ecosystems.
McLauchlan worked with Joseph Craine, research assistant professor in biology; Joseph Williams, postdoctoral research associate; and Elizabeth Jeffers, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford. The team published their findings, “Change
s in global nitrogen cycling during the Holocene epoch,” in the current issue of Nature.
In the study the team also looked at how nitrogen availability changed thousands of years ago.
Roughly 15,000 years ago, the Earth began to warm, melting many glaciers and ice sheets that covered the landscape. Researchers found that Earth experienced an 8,000-yearlong decline in nitrogen availability as temperatures rose and carbon and nitrogen became locked up in soils. According to researchers, how the nitrogen cycle responded to these ancient global changes in carbon dioxide could be a glimpse into the future.
“What happened in the past might be a dry run for Earth’s future,” Craine said. “By looking at what happened millennia ago, we can see what controlled and prevented changes in nitrogen availability. This helps us understand and predict how things will change in the future.”
The team collected and analyzed data from the sediment records of 86 lakes scattered across six continents. The lakes were distributed between tropical and temperate zones. With the data, the team was able to compare past and present cycling in various regions.
Researchers found that once most of the glaciers and ice sheets had melted around 11,000 years ago, the Earth continued to experience a global decline in nitrogen that lasted another 4,000 years.
“That was one of the really surprising findings,” Craine said. “As the world was getting warmer and experiencing higher carbon dioxide levels than it had in the past, just like we are currently experiencing, the ecosystems were starting to lock carbon in the soils and in plants, also like we are seeing today. That created a long decline in nitrogen availability, and it scrubbed nitrogen out of the atmosphere.”
McLauchlan said the most surprising finding, however, was that although humans have nearly doubled the amount of nitrogen to the ecosystems, globally nitrogen levels have remained stable at most sites for the past 500 years.
One reason may be that plants are using more nitrogen than they previously have, keeping nitrogen levels consistent with those thousands of years ago even though humans continue to add carbon dioxide and nitrogen to the atmosphere, McLauchlan said.
“Our best idea is that the nitrogen and carbon cycles were linked tightly back then and they are linked tightly today,” McLauchlan said. “Humans are now manipulating both nitrogen and carbon at the same time, which means that there is no net effect on the biosphere.”
The balance may be only temporary, McLauchlan said.
“Based on what we learned from the past, if the response of plants to elevated carbon dioxide slows, nitrogen availability is likely to increase and ecosystems will begin to change profoundly,” McLauchlan said. “Now more than ever, it’s important to begin monitoring our grasslands and forests for early warning signs.”
The Nature study is an extension of McLauchlan’s National Science Foundation CAREER Award that examines the history of nitrogen cycling in forested and grassland environments, her research on nitrogen concentrations and grasslands at the Konza Prairie Biological Station, and Craine’s research on grasslands and climate change.
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The balance may be only temporary, McLauchlan said.
“Based on what we learned from the past, if the response of plants to elevated carbon dioxide slows, nitrogen availability is likely to increase and ecosystems will begin to change profoundly,” McLauchlan said. “Now more than ever, it’s important to begin monitoring our grasslands and forests for early warning signs.”
Translation: “We don’t really understand why we couldn’t demonize anthropogenic nitrogen, but if you send us more money we’ll develop a model that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are all doomed.”
Researchers found that Earth experienced an 8,000-yearlong decline in nitrogen availability as temperatures rose and carbon and nitrogen became locked up in soils
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…and this doesn’t also explain how CO2 became limiting?
This just reminds me of how nitrates became the pollution dejour…..nitrates are easy to test for….phosphates are hard to test for
‘it scrubbed nitrogen out of the atmosphere’. These people wouldn’t be able to tell a story straight even if they knew it.
==========
FFS, a *Nitrogen* shortage? And we all know what barren, sparse ages previous high CO2 epochs were, such as the age of the Dinosaurs.
From Webster’s Dictionary 1828
How an almost inert gas that makes up 78% of the atmosphere and is essential to life is a “pollutant” is a perversion of language and illogical. Such misuse undercuts the very foundations of civil discourse and science.
Seems that CO2 influences the scientists in strange ways. They begin calling the substances they talk about for a sort of short- names, even as they should know the proper names.
CO2 is often called Carbon, and now 80% of the atmosphere is a dangerous substance, that suddenly is a pollutant like they often says CO2 is.
Since the air is ~4/5 nitrogen if I remember environmental 101 correctly, it seems there are ample numbers of molecules to worry about. Don’t forget, nitrogen causes the bends, so its already a recognized health hazard. Should be easy to ban.
The earth’s atmosphere near the surface is composed primarily of Nitrogen and Oxygen. Together, the two comprise about 99% of the gas in the atmosphere. Here’s a listing of the key components of the lower atmosphere
Nitrogen – 78.084%
Oxygen – 20.95%
http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/qt/atmcomposition.htm
…“People have been really interested in nitrogen in current times because it’s a major pollutant,” said Kendra McLauchlan
So something that is 78% of the atmosphere is a major pollutant. So is oxygen a minor pollutant?
Is there no end to this kind of nonsense?
First CO2 then nitrogen. It is as if the environmentalists have discovered the periodic chart and have deemed it bad. Now we need to make heaven and earth respond to their calls, although I am not sure what one is supposed to worship.
I’m sorry folks I studied agriculture in university and based on what I just read somebody is definitely trying to blow smoke up our butts!
Arguemnet we hear for CO2?
Looks like the major pollutant is that of logical thought inside academia.
If, but maybe, could, might, when do we defund these people?
When will this team do the ground breaking research on the deadly dihydrogen monoxide?
A major pollutant, corrosive agent, oxidizer and deadly by the gallon.
Let me guess. . . . . . millions and millions and maybe even billions of dollars needs to be appropriated for further research and “monitoring our grasslands and forests” — and what better person could it be given to than the authors of the paper?
And anybody who has any questions about spending money that way is an ignorant nitrogen denier, right?
Oh God, the depths to which some ‘scientists’ are prepared to sink leaves me awe struck.
Where can I get one of these grant supported jobs?
We need to outlaw the atmosphere, then, we will be all safe…./sarc
OMFG!
So its not April already.
Seriously, I had this issue in two sister aircraft factories. They treated N2 as a poison!!! What we had to do was freeze the components well away from other people, where there was less ventilation, UNDER THE OFFICE STAIRS!
At my long time proper place of work there are huge towers of this stuff. Being in the fire response team we knew full well its not a pollutant but an inert gas (80% of what we breathe) and obtained by sequestering, (freezing out) from fresh air. Most of our call-outs were from the oxygen sensors dropping below 18% (that matters); usually from the sensor going faulty.
There is obviously some terminological confusion in the reporting above. The atmosphere is about 80%N2. No matter what civilization does, it won’ affect that much. The nitrogen in ecosystems is ‘fixed’, for example by bacteria symbiotic to legume roots. It is fixed nitrogen that has to be supplemented by nitrogen fertilizers such as anhydrous ammonia, urea, or nitrates (guano being a natural example) in monoagriculture. It is wholly unsurprising that fixed nitrogen cycling has remained unchanged in natural ecosystems. It has precious little to do with carbon dioxide, except affecting plant rate of growth on the margin, which has lots of other delimiters than CO2. You know, like winter, rain, sunlight, plant age distribution,…
Universities really need to work on their PR about new minor papers. Not everything is important, and not everything is climate change.
People have been really interested in
nitrogendihydrogen oxide in current times because it’s a major pollutant,…What’s next? Man made water as a “major pollutant”? UGH!
MtK
This article is total gibberish because nitrogen and “available” nitrogen are two entirely different things. Oxidized or reduced nitrogen is fertilizer. Nitrogen gas is useless except to nitrogen-fixing bacteria. As available nitrogen is quite often limits growth as does available CO2, more nitrogen is going to be good, in general, for the biosphere.
“The toxicity is in the dose.” Too much fertilizer can be harmful but such conditions are more the exception than the norm.
To talk about “nitrogen” as a pollutant is to talk stupid as it simply makes no sense. I SENSE that these people really have only a vague understanding of the nitrogen and carbon cycles and use their unextensive knowledge to extrapolate to inanity.
I’m waiting for them to deem oxygen a pollutant.
Anthony; “argument we here fro Carbon Dioxide”? In your opening paragraph.
OK . Now we must spend $billions on NCS [Nitrogen Capture and Sequestration] and OCS[Oxygen Capture and Sequestration] as well as CCS [Carbon Capture and Sequeastration].
Then nearly ALL the atmosphere will be undergraund and all our problems are solved.;^)
/sarc.off
A broad definition of “pollute” would include any over-abundance of an organism that affects its environment, in which case all organisms, at one time or another, pollute their environment. They thus need to be regulated from now on, such that their populations NEVER fluctuate—that would create loads of green jobs—never mind that we would have NO IDEA what the proper populations should be and thus would create all kinds of unintended results which would call for more green jobs to either hunt the overpopulation or rescue those populations that are crashing due to our expert regulation. Sounds like a plan.
The half lifes of the isotopes of Nitrogen are generally in seconds or less.
I have no idea what method can be used on fossil records with this element.
Is this woman a fraud?
Idiots are a major pollutant of both the gene pool and what passes itself off as science these days. Tax them before we’re doomed!
Can environmentalists name anything that is not a “pollutant”?