From the PRINCETON UNIVERSITY and the department of 97% consensus and 911 Trutherism comes this study that I’d put zero stock in for two reasons: 1) Author William Anderegg, forerunner of the widely debunked 97% consensus meme and Pieter Tans, keeper of the official CO2 record and an avowed 911 “truther”. 2) Besides, the study itself is nothing new, as biologists, farmers, botanists, and greenhouse operators have known for decades that warmer temperatures increase plant growth. In this case, they are arguing for a positive feedback that will put leave more CO2 in the atmosphere. Given a fixed amount of biomass, that “might” be true, but satellite remoste sensing studies have shown that the planet is greening, and biomass is increasing thanks to increased CO2.
Next!
Warm nights could flood the atmosphere with carbon under climate change
The warming effects of climate change usually conjure up ideas of parched and barren landscapes broiling in a blazing sun, its heat amplified by greenhouse gases. But a study led by Princeton University researchers suggests that hotter nights may actually wield much greater influence over the planet’s atmosphere as global temperatures rise — and could eventually lead to more carbon flooding the atmosphere.
Since measurements began in 1959, nighttime temperatures in the tropics have had a strong influence over year-to-year shifts in the land’s carbon-storage capacity, or “sink,” the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Earth’s ecosystems absorb about a quarter of carbon from the atmosphere, and tropical forests account for about one-third of land-based plant productivity.
During the past 50 years, the land-based carbon sink’s “interannual variability” has grown by 50 to 100 percent, the researchers found. The researchers used climate- and satellite-imaging data to determine which of various climate factors — including rainfall, drought and daytime temperatures — had the most effect on the carbon sink’s swings. They found the strongest association with variations in tropical nighttime temperatures, which have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (33 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1959.
First author William Anderegg, an associate research scholar in the Princeton Environmental Institute, explained that he and his colleagues determined that warm nighttime temperatures lead plants to put more carbon into the atmosphere through a process known as respiration.
Just as warm nights make people more active, so too does it for plants. Although plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they also internally consume sugars to stay alive. That process, known as respiration, produces carbon dioxide, which plants step up in warm weather, Anderegg said. The researchers found that yearly variations in the carbon sink strongly correlated with variations in plant respiration.
“When you heat up a system, biological processes tend to increase,” Anderegg said. “At hotter temperatures, plant respiration rates go up and this is what’s happening during hot nights. Plants lose a lot more carbon than they would during cooler nights.”
Previous research has shown that nighttime temperatures have risen significantly faster as a result of climate change than daytime temperatures, Anderegg said. This means that in future climate scenarios respiration rates could increase to the point that the land is putting more carbon into the atmosphere than it’s taking out of it, “which would be disastrous,” he said.
Of course, plants consume carbon dioxide as a part of photosynthesis, during which they convert sunlight into energy. While photosynthesis also is sensitive to rises in temperature, it only happens during the day, whereas respiration occurs at all hours and thus is more sensitive to nighttime warming, Anderegg said.
“Nighttime temperatures have been increasing faster than daytime temperatures and will continue to rise faster,” Anderegg said. “This suggests that tropical ecosystems might be more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought, risking crossing the threshold from a carbon sink to a carbon source. But there’s certainly potential for plants to acclimate their respiration rates and that’s an area that needs future study.”
###
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation MacroSystems Biology Grant (EF-1340270), RAPID Grant (DEB-1249256) and EAGER Grant (1550932); and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellowship administered by the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research.
William R. L. Anderegg, Ashley P. Ballantyne, W. Kolby Smith, Joseph Majkut, Sam Rabin, Claudie Beaulieu, Richard Birdsey, John P. Dunne, Richard A. Houghton, Ranga B. Myneni, Yude Pan, Jorge L. Sarmiento,? Nathan Serota, Elena Shevliakova, Pieter Tan and Stephen W. Pacala. ” Tropical nighttime warming as a dominant driver of variability in the terrestrial carbon sink.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online in-advance of print Dec. 7 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521479112
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But maybe the Carbon will be in pure crystallized form and will cover the floor of the forests with pretty diamonds that the unicorns can graze on!!
That’s obviously ridiculous. If the amount of plant mass increases with increased CO2 levels, the plants are converting CO2 into plant matter at a greater rate, and regardless of how they breathe, more carbon is captured in the plant itself as plant matter. The plants don’t create CO2 out of nothing. For the plants to increase the atmospheric CO2 level, they would have to decrease in mass themselves which is the opposite to reality (ref. the greening of the planet and case/control studies of plant growth under enhanced CO2 levels)
Plants and trees survive darkness by converting sugar to energy and heat, the warmer the night the LESS they need that energy for warmth. There is an effect where trees will actually protect the grass underneath them in parts of the world where frost is just an early morning event that then goes away. The trees are generating heat, the average plants DO NOT DO IT. They simply die.
Its the energy cycle of the plants. This is why in dense no-breeze conifer copses you can get that “not enough air” effect, they’ve chewed up a higher average of the ambient oxygen overnight and replaced it with a denser gas.
Well, since you replied to tobyglyn’s post, I have to assume you’re one of those horrible “de-nayers” with his head in the sand. Running off on some crazy rant about “more plants means more breathing” or some-such nonsense whilst refusing to address – at all – the unicorn issue!
You are so wrong … 97% of scientists agree that unicorns poop diamonds
My dog doesn’t bark and eats glass… from a well known poet… …… this study makes about as much sense
“My dog doesn’t bite. My dog wears a muzzle. My dog is fenced in. My dog is tied down. My dog has no teeth. And, besides, I don’t even own a dog.” (From a lesser-known attorney.)
Bob
“They found the strongest association with variations in tropical nighttime temperatures, which have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (33 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1959.”
From paragraph 3 of the article as quoted above at 1835 Z/8th.
Apologies if others have commented appropriately below.
In my view this qualifies the authors for an entry level job asking ‘You want fries with that?’
Auto
Flooded with Carbon? Is that the equivalent of saying water evaporation is flooding the atmosphere with Hydrogen? Help me with this logic. Someone?
The logic tells us that we must now deforest all lands that have hot nights.
It seems to be the equivalent of claiming that if AGW causes higher rainfall, sea levels will rise.
They found the strongest association with variations in tropical nighttime temperatures, which have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (33 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1959. Is this correct at all ?
Not annually. In total. 1.08 F. Given that this time period cover large increases in deforestation and slash and burn agriculture in tropical areas, changing temperatures is hardly surprising.
Well if that atmospheric carbon engorgement consists of ” soot “, that will nucleate the mother of all Monsoon rains, which will just wash all of that carbon back down to the ground. Problem solved.
If instead it is in the form of CO2, then the increased atmospheric water vapor (due to the warmer air’s holding capacity) will result in more clouds and more rain, and block more sunlight, to cool down the surface at least.
Don’t mention the word ” feedback ” unless you are going to describe … ALL … of the feedbacks that come into play, including the very powerful and negative cloud feedback.
g
Why is it that these doom and gloomers feel that they are free to abrogate all the laws of physics, and keep things constant except the two variables they want to study ??
When ‘something’ changes, EVERYTHING changes.
+100000000000
Well the crystalline form of carbon that is likely to be stable at climate temperatures is graphite; not diamond.
g
Yet another promising theory, the investigation of which will attract more of our money. This AGW meme has been an absolute godsend to scientists everywhere, and this is just another example of the way in which they are becoming more and more inventive in their expansion of the CO2 scare.
A godsend? Or a temptation of Satan?
I suppose that depends on which god they are praying to. Verdad?
I’m starting to think they got their thermometers up Satans…
0.6C rise in nighttime temperatures probably derives from surface minimum temperature measurements and doesn’t reflect warmer nights. Rather it results mainly from earlier minimums due to increased early morning insolation from decreased urban air pollution (and decreased seeded lowlevel clouds).
So adjusting daytime SST to show the same warming rate as nocturnal marine air temperature is not “correcting” the data , it is CORRUPTING it.
This is why Karl et al are refusing to comply with the congressional subpoena.
If nighttime temperatures continue to rise faster than daytime temperatures, how long will it take until it is warmer at night than during the day? But for that to happen, the sun would have to exert a cooling effect on temperatures. Is that possible, even after factoring in the magical capabilities of CO2?
With ‘Climate Change’ all things are possible (apparently).
Not perhaps with the magical properties of CO2 but certainly with the magical properties of models; note the authors’ reliance on “scenarios” – which are derived from magic models
Before night time temperatures can continue to rise faster than daytime temperatures, they first have to start rising faster than daytime temperatures.
Wake me when that happens. I’ve been up before sunrise and seen how fast daytime temperatures can rise once the sun rises.
g
When did 0.6C convert to 33 F I wonder? Even without the order of magnitude howler there is something wrong with the arithmetic.
After a crossover in the early 60’s average lows have indeed lead the charge in the BEST data, but nowhere near as strikingly as highs led previously. A convergence (and impending crossover?) took place early this millenium at the end of the dataset.
Is your y axis °C or °F?
Celsius.
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Global/Complete_TMAX_complete.txt
Like most of the warmist propaganda, this assumes that CO2 has a strong effect on the surface temperature owing to an excessively high sensitivity that’s so wrong its absurd as it violates many laws of physics (Stefan-Boltzmann for one). One of the problems I see is that many are reluctant to doubt the ‘consensus’ because they can’t comprehend how so many ostensibly intelligent scientists can be so incredibly wrong about something so important especially since being wrong either way is harsh and which wrong is worse is itself debatable.
……comprehend how so many ostensibly intelligent scientists can…….
Their paycheck depends upon e agenda.
It’s a matter of confusing “being earnest”, with “being right”.
Are we accounting for the carbon that was sequestered by the plant as hydrocarbons?s
Yes- it’s worse than we thought. With all that extra food consumed, unless they exercise more those plants will get fat and suffer from cardio-vascular diseases and die younger. Millions will starve, unless they get run over first by those exercising trees. After all, who ever heard of a tree using its horn to let someone know they are in its way?
Another major study needed, but either way, it’s worse than we thought.
Another triumph for the National Science Foundation and NOAA.
Paging Lamar Smith, Ted Cruz…
I can’t believe it took Princeton so long to get around to this angle on the Sky-Is-Falling alarm-ism. I’ll put money on the idea that we’ll be able to grow more food than we can eat by orders of magnitude, requiring us to make more humans post haste. Hmmm….
When the next ice age inevitably gets going, the biggest challenge man will face is how to pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible to keep agriculture viable. If man is still around, this post will be somewhere in the cloud, so In the words of Nelson; Ha Ha.
More Biomass = higher atmospheric carbon dioxide
Hike around a mature forest in the Northern Hemisphere and look around the forest floor. A lot of carbon being liberated. Much more than being sequestered.
The greener you are the more carbon you emit.
Just open your eyes .
Absurd
Why not provide some evidence rather than just gainsaying what John said. WattsUpWithThat had a good story in October. link The final map shows the CO2 averaged over the whole year. While it shows forested areas with high CO2 concentrations it also shows other forested areas with low concentrations. The thing that gets me is that the whole Canadian Shield has high CO2 levels. WUWT?
@ur momisugly commieBob:
John claims that in a mature forest, more carbon is liberated than sequestered. “Much more”, actually.
If this situation were to persist, (“mature”) eventually the soil carbon store will be exhausted and the soil will be totally depleted, unable to support life. This is similar to the situation in the barren volcanic ash fields of Iceland. But we know that this does not happen. In fact, we know that just the opposite happens. Life builds up organics in the soil.
The assertion is contradicted by huge amounts of prior observation, therefor DOA.
As far as OCO2 goes, I do not think anyone is going to be using it to measure the full Carbon mass balance of a biome or whole ecosystem any time soon.
Mature forests fix the balance in nature by eventually burning due mainly to lightning storms. Then a new forest grows. For the last hundreds of millions of years this is how Life On Earth processed itself over and over again.
Johnny – “Carbon liberated more than Sequestered.” ??
Reminds me of a tree at the home place blown over in the 1962 Columbus Day Storm in Oregon. At least 40 years old when it went down and still visible today. Pretty slow with the liberating.
Both excessive cold and excessive heat affect the various processes involved with plant biology which has adapted to a range of climate extremes that dwarfs even the worst case scenarios claimed by alarmists. But like all other natural processes, the alarmists deny them in favor of speculative causes by man. The usual case when “Carbon liberated more than Sequestered” in plants occurs in the fall as decreased sunlight limits photosynthesis, the plant dies and decomposes into CO2 to start the cycle over. Along the way, CO2 is sequestered as carbonates and fossil fuels, so if not replenished by natural or artificial means, the planets biosphere will die. Our CO2 emissions allow the biosphere to flourish independent of its reliance on natural replenishment. and this seems to be the only effect that we can actually observe.
Hey DD,
Whatever grows eventually dies. Been to Oregon, just as much biomass on the forest floor decomposing as there is upright sequestering carbon if not more. Pretty sure, reforestation of the Northern Hemisphere correlates better with atmospheric carbon dioxide than coal emissions.
“The greener you are the more carbon you emit.”
So… to be ‘green’ you have to kill as many living plants as possible, including old growth forests and my favorite… shrubbery.
Interesting concept. Talk about having your cake and eating it too. I still say, “Ni!” to the whole thing.
Rick – Everything lives and eventually dies. Forests, initially sequester carbon until they mature and then they release carbon over time as they age and die.
Just take a walk around a mature forest and observe before you discount it.
“Ni!” to the whole thing.
And Peng, and Neuuwhom!
We all know how much CO2 is required to build an acre of trees suitable for logging, right? According to the US Forestry it requires the stripping of 20 cubic kilometers of air to obtain the carbon needed (0.04% CO2 .. not much C per cubic meter).
those trees are starved of CO2 and the bacteria and fungi on the forest floor breaking those leaves back down don’t do it awfully fast.
Please – just go look at a tree. it’s built from gas that resides at 400ppm in the air. Now think about it..
…”Hike around a mature forest in the Northern Hemisphere and look around the forest floor. A lot of carbon being liberated. Much more than being sequestered.”
==============================================================
As a satirical rebuke to the study, this is not bad. (It was a satirical rebuke correct?)
If not please explain where the CO2 came from that grew the carbon sink, (forest) and how a larger forest equates to a smaller sink, or a non existent forest is a greater sink then an existent forest.
John,
I did what you suggested … I went out, walked around in the woods, I looked for carbon being liberated and I didn’t see any.
Please help me out, how will I know when I am seeing liberated carbon; what does it looks like? I saw some bugs that utilize the organic mass for food, I saw a lot of fungus that also seem to use the dead and living organic mass as an energy source. Is this somehow tied into the liberated carbon?
When a person passes the Professional Surveying licensing exam they are issued special glasses that allow them to see the property lines on the ground (this is somewhat of a secret, I’m really not supposed to talk about this); in the same vein, are there other special glasses that I can get, so I can see the liberated carbon (plumes)? Do I need to pass some sort of test to qualify for the carbon glasses, or is it a type of society/association that I would need to join?
Help me out here John,
Thanks.
This crap weasel is conflating basic physical science with biochemical pathways which are regulated by enzymes. Positive feedback in living organisms kills and is not evolutionary favored except rarely, eg., pregnancy. In the test tube, yes increased temperatures and concentrations of reactants speeds reactions from products to reactants. Besides, the carbon is needed by plants for their mentobolism. Likely this mendacious twit failed organic and bio chemistry. Dumbass.
“which have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius (33 degrees Fahrenheit)”
Should read “0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit)”
I hope that was Ander-egg that did that and not AW !!
It’s official!
November 2015 was the coldest November on record. Weather events included heavy rain in the Northeast, bitter cold and snow in the Midwest, and cooler temperatures in California (and elsewhere).
It’s official!
November 2015 was the hottest November
http://www.hortweek.com/warmest-november-20-years/edibles/article/1375150
&
LAST month was the dullest November ‘on record’, according to provisional statistics from the Met Office.
Only 36.6 hours of sunshine were recorded, making it the dullest November since 1929
a mild month, with a UK mean temperature of 8.2C, 2.0C above the November average.
**However, both November 1994, 8.8C, and 2011, 8.7C, were warmer. For the individual nations, it was the third warmest on record in England, second warmest in Wales, seventh warmest in Scotland and fourth warmest in Northern Ireland.
Read more: http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/November-dullest-warmest-months-UK/story-28293597-detail/story.html#ixzz3tgR9S45f
So the coldest, the hottest (or 2nd or 4th or 7th) & the dullest = Average !!!
Nearly all the warmist weather sites run by our governments here in America and England and elsewhere begin their ‘hottest whatever’ based on data that begins in 1978 which was the coldest year of the previous cold cycle. This dishonesty permeates everything.
Seeing red, sorry. Reac to prod. Seeing skeptics on wanted flyers in Paris after terror attacks is a bridge too far…
Plants are close to carbon neutral. They take in carbon to grow. The carbon goes back to the environment when they die and decay. Some carbon is sequestered in the soil.
The folks who wrote this study should go back and take high school chemistry and biology.
And then they need to remember that the largest plant biomass in the world is in the oceans, where the die-off byproducts fall to the ocean floor not to be heard from again for thousands of years if ever. Lots of sequestration going on there.
~2 BMTC per year, as I have read.
I thought that the fact that plants use oxygen to generate energy by oxidising carbohydrates, fats and proteins via the Krebs cycle was common knowledge, likewise the fact that non-warm-blood organism’s metabolic rate is governed by their environments temperature and of course photosynthetic plants are only photosynthetic during daylight, which is about half the time in the tropics; so yes plants are going to respire more CO2 per night the warmer the night is.
That’s why fish sometimes suffocate during hot summer nights in still water, the algae use so much O2 it kills them!
But conservation requirements dictate that plants can never emit more CO2 than they absorb. Of course, conservation requirements are yet another manifestation of reality alarmists causally disregard. For example, for an 0.8C temperature increase to arise from 1 W/m^2 of forcing, the surface must emit 4.3 W/m^2 more Stefan-Boltzmann emissions. How can 1 W/m^2 be amplified into 4.3 W/m^2 without violating COE? If each of the 239 W/m^2 of total input forcing increased emissions by 4.3 W/m^2, the surface temperature would be close to the boiling point of water! It seems that they miss the basic COE requirement that the climate must be linear in the power domain and that any joule of energy captured by the atmosphere can only be returned to the surface and/or emitted out into space once and only once.
As a rule, never rely on the paper’s PR or the authors PR statements. Paper is paywalled and not worth the price (see below) but there are always two fast free checks. 1. Read the abstract, carefully. 2. Read the SI, which is always free, and usually where bodies get buried.
One might think that with such an important assertion about changing carbon sinks, there might be some actual plant data. You know, from greenhouse experiments. Night and day differences at difference temps and CO2 concentrations, C3 vs C4 plants, that sort of thing. Does increased daytime photosynthsis and biomass sequestration (since greening and increased GPP is an observed fact at least for C3 plants) more than offset nightime respiration? (Logically, it has to if there is a net biomass increase like in the Sahel). NOPE.
Statistical models all the way down. Even for GPP ( gross primary [plant] production). Even though there are over 277 studies actually measuring GPP down to ‘roots and shoots’ in 14 different regional ecosystems! Essay Bugs, Roots, and Biofuels.
And, the SI admits that things like deforestation and fires (Malaysia) create great uncertainty. But, since the authors could not find any suitably broad convenient prepublished datasets to throw into their lazy models, they ignore the issue except acknowledging resulting uncertainty in the SI.
This is not science. This is pseudoscience, reporting the results of obviously logically faulty toy computer simulations. A new low. Even for Paris.
Actually, this is a new, amazing science. We have always thought that plants take CO2 from the atmosphere to grow, These geniuses discovered that plants actually grow by releasing CO2. There is a Nobel – possibly even an ig-Nobel – there.
Sorry ristvan, this is not pseudoscience, it is science of the most fantastical kind. No models or computer simulations, experiments, or even data, just pure imagination and wonderful logic. The most important point is of course, “But there’s certainly potential for plants to acclimate their respiration rates and that’s an area that needs future study.” Future studies can show anything and these guys are covered … just show me the money!
Let me see if I got this right. Plants eat CO₂ which through photosynthesis is converted to sugar, starches, cellulose and lignin (for the most part). Then throughout the day [u]and[/u] night, the sugars are burned for energy. Right? And on warm nights they respire more CO₂, which may cause a net increase in CO₂. Right?
You’d think we’d have heard about these guys finding a perpetual motion machine. I hope their tuxes are clean and pressed; I’m sure the Nobel committee will be calling just any day now.
How the hell does the plant exhale more food than it ingests? A lot of that CO₂ isn’t even converted to starch, it is converted to cellulose and lignin, the parts of the plant that allow it to stand up, the same parts that the plant cannot autolyse. The same parts that caused the coal seams to be laid down prior to a few cellulose digesting bacteria evolving to fill the niche in the food chain.
Princeton, NSF, NOAA and PNAS are satisfied with this sorry level of scholarship? Oh my god!
gary
Said the same just above. You said it much better. Simple irretrievable logic fail. +10.
I was going to say that. I can’t believe it passed “peer review”!
Pal review!
Science is dead.
Science is not dead. It just has a crazy uncle called climate science.
Don’t blame them so hard , they used green doctrine when you produce something, in this case mass, you cause pollution, CO2. It’s just that simple.
Isn’t that how they are taught to do it in university now?
One of the earliest measurements by C.D. Keeling in the early 50’s was in Big Sur state park in California. He sampled CO2 every hour in during day and night and saw a huge diurnal change. He was smart enough to test the samples on their δ13C (a measure for the 13C/12C ratio) level, which showed a nice reverse correlation: the extra CO2 at night was from the trees…
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/diurnal.jpg
That was one of the reasons he was later looking for places to measure CO2 far from vegetation, which he found at the South Pole and Mauna Loa.
That the biosphere is growing can be seen by satellites, but the net increase is also seen in the oxygen balance: there is less oxygen used than calculated from burning fossil fuels, thus the biosphere is a net sink for CO2, at least since 1990 when (night) temperatures were still increasing, be it that during an El Niño the (tropical) biosphere is a temporarily source, which turns into an extra sink with a La Niña:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
“the extra CO2 at night was from the trees”
Just looking at the CO2 graph it would actually appear that the trees acted as a sink in daytime and the CO2 levels returned to “normal” (relative to Mauna Loa) during the night.
BFL,
The Mauna Loa levels in 1958 were around 315 ppmv, begin 1950’s probably around 310 ppmv. Thus the nighttime levels are a lot higher than “background”. A modern station at Giessen, Germany, semi-rural shows a similar change under inversion:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/giessen_background.jpg
Compared to the “background” levels at Barrow, Mauna Loa and the South Pole (all raw data), the night time levels are a lot higher (including an extra peak by traffic in the morning hours) while the daytime levels are below background: a mix of photosynthesis and more turbulence, mixing in air and CO2 from the higher layers.
Ferdinand
Whilst I was working my way through the comments, I was waiting to see this very much this type of response from you.
But it seems to me, to be a matte of where you draw the line. For example, is it that during the day, CO2 is reduced, and during the night, CO2 is increased (expired by the forest)?
What was global CO2 at the time when the data taken for the plot? I guess it was probably at least 370ppm, and if this is so it suggests that forest overall sequester more CO2 and that the night time peak is very short lived.
As we have been exchanging for many months now, CO2 is anything but well mixed at and near ground level. CO2 is only a well mixed gas at high altitude, and your plot once more establishes this.
You are an expert in this. What is your view? Do you consider that forests/plants are a net CO2 sink, or not?
Do you consider the way in which the globe has been greening these past 30 or so years, is one reason why carbon sinks have increased in total capacity?
Your further views would be appreciated.
.
Richard Verney,
As said in my response to BFL, CO2 levels around 1950 were about 310 ppmv.
Levels don’t say much about fluxes, as during the night there is often no wind and inversion, thus CO2 can build up near ground. During the day, the warming of the ground and vegetation gives more turbulence and thus more mixing with the above air layers.
The net effect since at least 1990 anyway is that the biosphere as a whole is a net sink for CO2: more uptake than decay/feed/food.
That is seen in the oxygen balance: plants use CO2 as building bloc, meanwhile releasing O2. If they decay or are eten, that porcess needs oxygen. As there is less oxygen use than calculated from fossil fuel burning, the difference shows that the biosphere as a whole is a net producer of oxygen, thus a net sink for CO2 and preferentially of 12CO2. Thus the biosphere is not the cause of the CO2 increase, neither of the δ13C level (13C/12C ratio) decline. See:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5462/2467.short
and
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
For most (not all!) plants the growth is proportional to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere if all other necessities: water, nutrients, are available in abundant quantities, which is the case in greenhouses. In nature, that is often not the case, where other items necessary for growth are the main restrictions: drought, nutrients,… For drought, more CO2 helps, as the plants need less stomata and thus loose less water as vapor: the semi arid areas (like the Sahel) are greening.
The 30% increase of CO2 in the atmosphere gives currently ~1 GtC/year extra uptake for a land biomass of ~550 GtC, or an increase of ~0.02 %/year. Not really much, but that is the net uptake, which is the balance of human destruction (slash/burn tropical forests) and extra growth…
…until the plant dies or begins to deteriorate, it has to be a net sink. CO2
The authors next study will demonstrate that in the fall CO2 enhanced trees will drop more leaves, thus they will release more CO2 into the atmosphere, which will be very bad creating more terrorism in the middle east.
That’s why they put o2 in the greenhouses, I was wondering. (Sarc)
Another feeble attempt to explain why the carbon sink is currently bigger than all of the co2 produced in 1965 by 7 billion metric tons. Deflection… oh look at this, plants produce co2 at night.
We’re doomed again, aren’t we?
Yeah, it never stops.
And to think a few years ago I got a letter from these people wanting to buy the carbon sinking rights to my timberland. Whoa! Another tax steam! Since it is a net producer of co2, I guess they’ll have to tax that to.
Who were the peer reviewers?
Prospective employees of the Guardian.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2015/11/23/quote-of-the-day-science-with-guardian-characteristics-editi.html
By orders of magnitude, the oceans are the lungs of the planet!
Photosynthesis and respiration are the two sides of plant growth, public school level biology.
If respiration dominated, plants would shrink, not grow. This sort of thing is embarrassingly bad for any sort of science. This is from Princeton University and published in PNAS? Even a school kid knows better. These sorts of assertions are an insult to everyone who passed a college science course.
Consider this:
A) Photosynthesis (daytime) – CO2 out from the air.
B) Respiration (nightime) – CO2 back into the air.
C) Overall, the plant acquires mass – photosynthesis wins out, something any kid with a house plant knows.
Seems you can publish anything in service to the Great Global Warming, but there is a consequence.
It has now been shown that (previously prestigious) Princeton University has lower academic standards than your basic American high school.
“…Princeton University has lower academic standards than your basic American high school.”
Common Core will soon fix that.
“I’d put zero stock in” this as well. Some of us live in the tropics AND monitor CO2 levels, but only from time to time as we don’t get funding. No evidence of temperature change here other than the well-known cycles. Airport measurements allegedly show a 1°C rise since the 40’s. Unlikely to be UHI as 60% of the airflow is over open land and off the Pacific, but the change from occasional prop planes to far more frequent military and civil jets would have had an effect.
Daytime CO2 in the 60% airflow is around 380 – 390. Goes over 400 after sundown (6 – 6:30), peaks at 425 – 450 at 9pm, so yes, that could be respiration occurring after dark. Could also be the enormous brew from the mangrove swamps.
Why wouldn’t that just be the affect of water vapor condensing out of the atmosphere?
They can not do grade school math either, how the mighty have fallen.
No, no TonyL, they’re right. 0.6 deg. C is 33 deg. F. You can put 0.6 deg. C into any online converter and get that result. ROTFL Some of God’s children really need His help.
Wow! What idiots the PR writers are. I hope that isn’t in the paper. A 0.6C change in temperature is 1.08F. A temperature of 0.6C is 33F (ok 33.08F). Apples and Oranges don’t directly add, but they can be a good basis for fruit salad.
It is amazing this simple feed back (forcing) hasn’t already killed off every living thing given nobody has been in charge of this kind of thing for billions of years.