![co2_data_mlo[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/co2_data_mlo1.png?quality=75)
From the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Crops play a major role in the annual CO2 cycle increase
MADISON, Wis. — Each year, the planet balances its budget. The carbon dioxide absorbed by plants in the spring and summer as they convert solar energy into food is released back to the atmosphere in autumn and winter. Levels of the greenhouse gas fall, only to rise again.
But the budget has gotten bigger. Over the last five decades, the magnitude of this rise and fall has grown nearly 50 percent in the Northern Hemisphere, as the amount of the greenhouse gas taken in and released has increased. Now, new research shows that humans and their crops have a lot to do with it, highlighting the profound impact people have on the Earth’s atmosphere.
In a study published Wednesday, Nov. 19, in Nature, scientists at Boston University, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and McGill University show that a steep rise in the productivity of crops grown for food accounts for as much as 25 percent of the increase in this carbon dioxide (CO2) seasonality.
It’s not that crops are adding more CO2 to the atmosphere; rather, if crops are like a sponge for CO2, the sponge has simply gotten bigger and can hold and release more of the gas.
With global food productivity expected to double over the next 50 years, the researchers say the findings should be used to improve climate models and better understand the atmospheric CO2 buffering capacity of ecosystems, particularly as climate change may continue to perturb the greenhouse gas budget.
“This is another piece of evidence suggesting that when we (humans) do things at a large scale, we have the ability to greatly influence the composition of the atmosphere,” says UW-Madison’s Chris Kucharik, a co-author of the study and professor in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Department of Agronomy and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Since the 1960s in the Northern Hemisphere, maize (corn), wheat, rice and soybeans have seen a 240 percent spike in production, particularly concentrated in the midwestern U.S. and in Northern China, the study found.
But until this point, scientists missed the connection between crops and the CO2 seasonality increase.
“Global climate models don’t represent the important details of agroecosystems and their management very well,” says Kucharik.
It was fall 2013 when the study’s lead authors at Boston University approached the UW-Madison scientist and asked him to lend his agricultural land management, carbon cycling and agricultural technology expertise to their examination of the cycle.
Kucharik helped the team determine how the amount of carbon absorbed by the leaves, stems, roots and food-portion of crops may have changed over time. He helped ensure the methodology the team used properly represented agricultural lands and the management practices that drive changes in the carbon balance.
The study found that, while the area of farmed land has not significantly increased, the production efficiency of that land has. Intensive agricultural management over the last 50 years has had a profound impact.
Kucharik attributes this to improvements in plant breeding, post-World War II fertilization innovations, irrigation and other human-powered technologies.
“You get more bang for your buck, more crop per drop,” he says.
Cropland makes up just six percent of the vegetated, or green, area of the Northern Hemisphere and yet, it is a dominant contributor to the 50 percent increase in the CO2 seasonality cycle. This, despite the fact that forests and grasslands have also been more productive as the planet has warmed and growing seasons have lengthened.
“That’s a very large, significant contribution, and 2/3 of that contribution is attributed to corn,” says Kucharik. “Corn once again is king, this time demonstrating its strong influence on the seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO2.”
Earlier work at UW-Madison enabled the research team to make the necessary calculations to incorporate agriculture into the new modeling approach, Kucharik says.
“The person that led the charge was Navin Ramankutty at SAGE (the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment), in Jon Foley’s group in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” says Kucharik. “Those first global maps of agricultural land use over time came out of SAGE and the Nelson Institute.”
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So they finally realized that plants like it, and grow more, when there is more CO2. This is news?
No, they very well have realized this and are attempting to now come after your food next, dirty co2 spewing plants, with peer reviewed papers. I cannot believe others cannot see what they are attempting each day, to make a small cut on your very society each day.
Any farmer knows that increases in yields do not have to mean more plant matter. More seeds per plant is more common than more or taller plants per acre. Add in the genetic tinkering to try and breed shorter crops with larger seed heads, rather than wasting all its available resources growing tall, and I suspect they didn’t do their homework. I would venture that most yield increases do not come with increased plant matter volume. Exceptions would of course be agriculture where the whole plant is the product such as hay land.
Slight veer, but did anyone notice Google just halted its research into renewable energy? Shouldn’t this be shouted from the rooftops?
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/19/7247103/google-renewable-energy-research
Could be because they took a bath on the Crescent Dunes Solar Project…
Which, given the vast amount of corn going into biofuels, is another unintended consequence of the Global Warming crowd?
Good one! It’s the new carbon policy (fraud) cycle.
Save the planet, Halt production of biofuels NOW
Thanks for saying that. Here is their wall of shame and duplicitous behaviour.
Since they have no shame, I am pretty sure thay have no wall of shame. So it is a good thing one is maintained here on Watts…must be getting pretty full.
‘Kucharik attributes this to improvements in plant breeding, post-World War II fertilization innovations, irrigation and other human-powered technologies.
“You get more bang for your buck, more crop per drop,” he says.
Cropland makes up just six percent of the vegetated, or green, area of the Northern Hemisphere and yet, it is a dominant contributor to the 50 percent increase in the CO2 seasonality cycle. This, despite the fact that forests and grasslands have also been more productive as the planet has warmed and growing seasons have lengthened.”
They missed the perfect opportunity to discuss the most relevant item…………..photosynthesis:
Sunshine +H2O +CO2 = Food/Sugars +O2
Increasing use of CO2 by plants is obviously a powerful contribution and is being used as atmospheric fertilizer as proven by hundreds of studies. Such a profoundly positive contribution from CO2 in the real world to crop yields/world food production, vegetative growth/health and our booming biosphere just won’t sink in with many scientists.
That inspires a secondary thought.
As we breed crops that create more sugars are we upping the rate of photosynthesis per plant e.g. per unit of area?
Hmmmm.
And might those extra sugars contribute to – in the ‘advanced world’, at least – greater obesity, greater diabetes rates, etc.
Intrigued rather than embattled . . . . . . .
Auto
Just to check, I downloaded the latest Scripps data on CO2 from Mauna Loa and graphed the monthly seasonal variations. Sure enough, there was an unbelievably regular increase, from just under 3 ppm to about 3.4 ppm over 56 years.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75831381/CO2%20increase%20in%20seasonal%20variation.pptx
But how much is attributable to cropland (6% of global land area), livestock grazing area, and other (think the greening of the Sahel)? Just due to global greening (itself due to increased atmospheric CO2), one might expect an increase in seasonal variation. I’m not convinced they can pin this all on crops.
They are trying to pin it on crops but human population has doubled, and more, in the last 50 years and we all breath in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Shucks! It’s our fault again.
I don’t have any crops on my little 10 acres, but the trees seem to get more vigorous with every year!
I don’t know about my trees, but the thorny vines are definitely more aggressive.
Another contributor would be the increasing ocean-atmosphere CO2 exchange. The ocean area differs between the Northern and Southern Hemisphere and by corresponding hemisphere elements when stratified by latitude. The annual variation in atmospheric carbon dioxide should be expected to increase with the increase in the average increase in atmospheric CO2.
The increase in seasonal amplitude is definitely not from the oceans: if it were the oceans, the δ13C would go up with increasing CO2 (the 13C/12C ratio of the oceans is higher than of the atmosphere), while if it is from vegetation, the δ13C will go down with increasing CO2. The latter is the case:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/seasonal_CO2_d13C_MLO_BRW.jpg
As this research shows that the amplitude increase is for 25% from fast growing crops like corn (which for 100% of the leaves/stems are used for feed, the seeds for feed/food and bio-ethanol, thus CO2 returning mainly in the year following the growth), the other 75% comes from the increase in area and growth of forests in the NH, thanks to more CO2 and increased temperatures…
I would guess that the ocean actually reduces (dampens) the variability as atmospheric concentrations rise.
I’m guessing that the ocean is the majority of the increasing carbon sink. Upper oceans are kept at higher pH by the plant growth, probably keeping the ocean surface CO2 concentration below equalibrium with atmospheric CO2 most of the time. Animal life makes up much more of the biomass of the ocean relative to plants and the bio matterial ends up in the ocean depth for quite a while before it finds it’s way back to the surface.
I’m curious, how do northern and southern concentrations compare? Is the SH properly represented in global concentration estimates? What does disolved CO2 at ocean surface look like seasonally and by hemisphere?
So the solution is to grow more crops and then sequester them?
This looks like a set up for the next Malthusian solution.
Quick – somebody tell Paul Ehrlich. I want to see him have an aneurysm.
He’s already had one I would think, since faced with how much productivity has already increased since the short time he was considered relevant.
Maybe I’ve missed something, but it seems odd that all these crops would have any more or less an impact than the vegetation that would be growing there if the fields were never cultivated to begin with (agricultural processes aside).
Young plants grow more rapidly than older, established ones. A corn field cycles more CO2 than the prairie grass which preceded it would have.
makes sense, thanks!
So. it’s a zero-sum game ?
In northern climates, say anywhere with regular snow, most plant have adapted a cycle of lose each winter. Think leaves from trees and grass browning off above ground and re growing from roots in spring. So the old / young issue would be irrelevant to much of our farmed land. I can see were irrigation could cause much more co2 uptake in plant growth, the vast majority of farming around the world isn’t irrigated. And much of our fertilization is to offset the nutrients we remove from the land in the seed produced. So leaving the natural plants to break down again would provide just as good natural growth fertilization.
I’m not so sure about that. I recall mature trees (though depending on species) actually take in more CO2 than young, they require more energy and their growth, while less noticable due to smaller relative size change, is actually substantial. I imagine that is true for other plants.
They are also usually at higher density than a wild field (due to fertilizing and irrigation). SO there are more of them and hence the allegation of greater impact.
These people exhaust me. Let’s hope they’ve used global warming as an excuse to fund some other covert, USEFUL research. Lord knows they can make up whatever data for publication.
It certainly makes sense that if you devote more area to crops, and if the crops grow more because of increased atmospheric CO2 — no sensible person would deny this — then in the NH summer, there will be a greater amount of CO2 in crops than in the air, vs. what would have happened if there weren’t more crops and more CO2. Common sense, really.
One implication may be quite positive from the viewpoint of an “alarmist.” The more CO2 is in plants, the less is in the air and thus cannot cause warming during that time. So in a way, increasing amounts of CO2 is “rented” by plants during the summer and thus can cause warming for only about 5 to 6 months of the year, (when the plants have died off for the season) not the whole year. If you double crop with alfalfa, maybe not more than a month or two.
With so much co-varience between different types of vegitation, I suspect that they are finding statisitcal significances with proxies. Also, I suspect that phytoplankton blumes in the Arctic are the major sinks and their decay in the tropics are the major sources.
“the researchers say the findings should be used to improve climate models and better understand the atmospheric CO2 buffering capacity of ecosystems, particularly as climate change may continue to perturb the greenhouse gas budget.”
There it is, the call for more money. I knew it was in there somewhere, it always is.
Their new study will reinforce the fact that the only way to fix the planet’s “perturbed”
unicorngreenhouse gas budget will be to lower the number of people on the planet.I wondered when they would get around to telling us to stop eating. And breathing…
. . . . and not to put fires out with CO2 extinguishers
. . . . and not to cremate people
. . . . and not to use coolant gas when welding
. . . . and not to decaffeinate coffee
. . . . and
With global food productivity expected to double over the next 50 years
So, despite all the disasters that will supposedly befall us in the next 50 years from climate change, food production is expected to double over the next 50 years? Are the climate disasters like floods, droughts, and hurricanes and regional climate shifts north and south somehow programmed to divert themselves around crops and livestock?
The CAGW meme contradicts itself just by talking about itself.
Oh yes, good comment. They do pick and choose the CO2 story of the day.
So, in 50 years CO2 should be near 500 PPM. Simply due to the additional CO2 in the atmosphere, the land and water we currently use to grow food, will supply 15 to 20% of that 50% increased food production.
Of the total food production 50 years from now, about 35 to 40% of it will come simply from increasing CO2 from 280 to 500 PPM.
However, do we really expect human population to double in the next fifty years?
David A,
No, more like 30% to 9 billion. As undevoped nations become more devloped, it’s a reasonable expectation that food demand will increase at a faster rate than population — people who are more well off tend to eat more in general, and also tend to eat more meat. So according to this source (citing the UN): https://www.populationinstitute.org/resources/populationonline/issue/1/8/ the numbers work out to 70% increase worldwide, 100% in developing countries. Reading between the lines it seems some of that percentage increase includes bumping up production to adequately address present levels of hunger.
Why the focus on crops and cropland? isn’t 80 percent of the planet’s surface made of seawater? And doesn’t that seawater support photosynthesis in huge numbers of blue green algae? Arent these algae the real ‘lungs’ of Earth?
Good point. And where does all our fertiliser and poop wash into?
The sea.
Yes you are right about ocean ‘crops’. The main claims are, frankly, unbelievable. Crop production isn’t nearly massive enough to pull the entire atmosphere down 5 or 6 ppm in 5 months.
Worse for that argument, the drop and recovery are not well timed to the crop mass increase. So what is really going on? I have written here before that ice and snow expelled CO2. Ice traps water underneath preventing it absorbing more CO2 as the temperature drops. NH oceans cool massively as the winter progresses. In summer they warm.
Water, ice, ocean plants and all the snow in Buffalo have an effect on the spike in CO2. Crops? Not much. The timing is wrong.
Hmmm. did anyone notice the irony in this; @UWMadScience? I think it sums up the CAGW theme quite well.
+1 nice catch.
“””””…..But until this point, scientists missed the connection between crops and the CO2 seasonality increase……”””””
Suggestion to “scientists”.
Don’t assume that YOUR ignorance is shared by everybody else.
YOU couldn’t figure that out, does not mean we didn’t figure it out eons ago.
But then, basic problem solving is not taught in schools any more, so some of YOU scientists, are severely handicapped in that area.
Take up knitting instead.
Can we improve the situation by ending biofuels from crops?
The seasonal variance between CO2 high and CO2 low? Oh its here:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958.0/every:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958.5/every:12
Can be made more readable if we take a short period, say 10 years then de-trend to level the slope.
Do a couple say, 1958~1968 and 2003 and 2013. We can also amplify the variances larger with the “scale” option.
The best way to compare. 🙂 see if there’s any bull being spoken.
Hey, I like this!
If their sponge theory is right, that means:
Less CO2 in summer = less warming, maybe even cooling, in summer
More CO2 in winter = more warming in winter
50% increase in food production in 50 years will make the above more pronounced.
Hands up all you people who think that 50% more food, summers about the same or a bit cooler, and winters that are bit warmer is a bad thing. C’mon, hands up… Gotte be one out there….
There is at least one, so I’ll raise both hands.
Seconded
Well I’m in favor, but mother natural has the veto!
Here’s another WFT but timescales are so large the keeling curve is making it very messy for eye balling a quick answer.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/every:12/to:1983/detrend:27/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958.5/every:12/to:1983/detrend:27/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1983/every:12/detrend:54/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1983.5/every:12/detrend:54/normalise
I don’t agree with their findings.
However, this would be easier to do and more clear using a spreadsheet.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, also known as The Berkeley of the Midwest is located in the city of Madison aka People’s Republik of Madistan (unfortunately it is the capitol of Wisconsin)
Most Wisconsinites consider Madison as 78 sq. miles surrounded by reality. The rest of the 65,420 sq miles is good place to live and getting better with the last two elections. Luckily most of the students at U of W don’t know how to vote.
earwig42 from Northwest Wi.
I’m still waiting for someone to prove (not model) that the rising atmospheric CO2 was causally linked to the 20th Century’s temperature rise.
Can’t disprove it matey but I can prove CO2 is only the canary in the mine.
The top wiggly line is CO2 variance to compare with temperatures below. Note, CO2 follows variations in temperature.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1997/offset:-0.5/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1997/normalise/mean:12/detrend:0.81/offset:0.42/scale:10/plot/esrl-co2/from:1997/normalise/mean:12/plot/wti/from:2000.85/offset:-0.5/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1997/normalise/mean:12/detrend:0.81/offset:0.42/scale:1
Am I missing something or are “scientists” really missing up?
Missing links, missing heat, missing hot spots, missing data, missing replicativity (ok I made that word up, sry), missing dark matter, missing light matter, missing higgs’ mate, bosun, and especially, missing string.
Hiya! 3rd post but a good’un this time. (K.I.S.S.)
Six monthly samples alternating between peaks with a five year high pass filter.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/mean:6/isolate:60
We get peaks and dips of high & low CO2 seasons.
12 Month mean and a derivative shows the growth, which does not appear to have much anything to do with emissions.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/mean:12/derivative
The variability is caused by temperature, the slope is caused by human emissions (which have hardly any variability). The slope of the temperature derivative is near zero, as the temperature was near linear increasing, but human emissions increased slightly quadratic over time…