Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a university sending out a press release showing the potential benefits on crop yields of elevated atmospheric CO2 levels. – Anthony
Public release date: 9-Feb-2009
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uoia-hcb020609.php
Contact: Diana Yates
217-333-5802
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
High CO2 boosts plant respiration, potentially affecting climate and crops
The leaves of soybeans grown at the elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels predicted for the year 2050 respire more than those grown under current atmospheric conditions, researchers report, a finding that will help fine-tune climate models and could point to increased crop yields as CO2 levels rise. The study, from researchers at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Plants draw CO2 from the atmosphere and make sugars through the process of photosynthesis. But they also release some CO2 during respiration as they use the sugars to generate energy for self-maintenance and growth. How elevated CO2 affects plant respiration will therefore influence future food supplies and the extent to which plants can capture CO2 from the air and store it as carbon in their tissues. While there is broad agreement that higher atmospheric CO2 levels stimulate photosynthesis in C3 plants, such as soybean, no such consensus exists on how rising CO2 levels will affect plant respiration.
IMAGE: Andrew Leakey and assistants at work in the Soy FACE facility at Illinois. Click here for more information.
“There’s been a great deal of controversy about how plant respiration responds to elevated CO2,” said U. of I. plant biology professor Andrew Leakey, who led the study. “Some summary studies suggest it will go down by 18 percent, some suggest it won’t change, and some suggest it will increase as much as 11 percent.” Understanding how the respiratory pathway responds when plants are grown at elevated CO2 is key to reducing this uncertainty, Leakey said.
His team used microarrays, a genomic tool that can detect changes in the activity of thousands of genes at a time, to learn which genes in the high CO2 plants were being switched on at higher or lower levels than those of the soybeans grown at current CO2 levels. Rather than assessing plants grown in chambers in a greenhouse, as most studies have done, Leakey’s team made use of the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment (Soy FACE) facility at Illinois. This open-air research lab can expose a soybean field to a variety of atmospheric CO2 levels – without isolating the plants from other environmental influences, such as rainfall, sunlight and insects. Some of the plants were exposed to atmospheric CO2 levels of 550 parts per million (ppm), the level predicted for the year 2050 if current trends continue. These were compared to plants grown at ambient CO2 levels (380 ppm).
The results were striking. At least 90 different genes coding the majority of enzymes in the cascade of chemical reactions that govern respiration were switched on (expressed) at higher levels in the soybeans grown at high CO2 levels. This explained how the plants were able to use the increased supply of sugars from stimulated photosynthesis under high CO2 conditions to produce energy, Leakey said. The rate of respiration increased 37 percent at the elevated CO2 levels. The enhanced respiration is likely to support greater transport of sugars from leaves to other growing parts of the plant, including the seeds, Leakey said. “The expression of over 600 genes was altered by elevated CO2 in total, which will help us to understand how the response is regulated and also hopefully produce crops that will perform better in the future,” he said.
IMAGE: Illinois plant biology professor Andrew Leakey led a team that discovered that soybean leaves speed up their metabolism in response to rising CO2. Click here for more information.
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I’m a little unclear on your idea that tilling releases carbon back into the atmosphere. Can you elaborate? – Anthony
The Carbon Cycle: plants fix it, then they burn or rot and back goes the carbon into the air. Tilling or no tilling (worms, moles, and gophers do a lot more tilling than people do).
Exceptions: peat bogs, Carboniferous swamps, biochar (terra preta), antique furniture.
If it wasn’t for the Carbon Cycle, the thatch on suburban lawns would be 12 feet deep and we’d have to tunnel in to our front doors. Our forests would mile-deep in dead wood. But they aren’t; carbon build-up in forests is principally above-ground and transitory (until the next fire).
attn Tim Clark
Question. In 6 above you quote an increased yield of 1 bu/acre.
What does bu represent? If it is a bushel it hardly seems to be very much over an acre as it were: although it might as a percentage of yield I suppose if soybeans yield only a few bushels per acre. Which does not seem a terribly profitable sort of agriculture.
But it could mean something else entirely.
Could you please clarify this for a simple minded physicist?
Kindest Regards
Scientists losing war of words over climate change
Excerpt from:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16576-scientists-losing-war-of-words-over-climate-change.html
Who understands the probabilities of climate change? Certainly not the general public, if psychological tests on volunteers in the US are to be believed.
The public, it seems, thinks climate scientists are less certain about their conclusions than they actually are. The results could explain why the minority views of “climate sceptics” get proportionally more attention from the general public than those of climate scientists.
Scientists are by their nature reluctant to express results as absolutely certain, and climatologists are no exception. Future projections based on climate models always come with error bars – an indication of how likely the data is to be accurate.
Spelling it out
In an attempt to make this tool clearer to policymakers and the general public, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adopted in its last report, published in 2007, seven verbal expressions of certainty:
• “Virtually certain” (considered more than 99% likely to be correct)
• “Very likely” (more than 90%)
• “Likely” (more than 66%)
• “More likely than not” (more than 50%)
• “Unlikely” (less than 33%)
• “Very unlikely” (less than 10%)
• “Exceptionally unlikely” (less than 5%)
They also used the expressions “very high confidence” and “high confidence” to modify statements that had at least a 9 out of 10 (very high) or an 8 out of 10 (high) chance of being correct. The numerical translations were included in a footnote at the beginning of the summary for policymakers. The degrees of confidence then trickle down to the public through media coverage.
Photosynthesis (carbon fixing) in green plants exceeds respiration or else plants would shrink. But they don’t shrink; they grow. Ergo and thusly, increased respiration means even greater rates of photosynthesis.
The Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the Ca increase alone could stimulate terrestrial carbon (C) sequestration by 350–980 Gt (1 Gt = 1x 10^15 g) C in the 21st Century (Houghton et al. 2001).
Peter (23:36:14) :
Graeme, My thoughts exactly. Expect a new disaster movie, “Attack of the killer soybeans” at a theater near you.
Already done
Day of the Triffids (1962)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5534209725612326856
Heard it as a radio play many years ago. Unforgettable.
vukcevic,
Interesting find. I like the example they use for “very likely” (more than 90%):
“It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.”
Looks like it’s virtually certain that the IPCC was wrong again.
Also, there seems to be a big gap between 33% and 50%. Is that part of the certainty spectrum unimportant? Maybe the IPCC deliberately left it out because that’s the general public belief in AGW.
Art
Thanks for that link to Kay Mullis. Interesting how all the naysayers in the comments go straight for ad hom, rather than deal with his points. I love the one who describes him, a Nobel science Prize winner, as a “moron.”
“”” • “Virtually certain” (considered more than 99% likely to be correct) “””
Rather odd use of language if you ask me; “virtually certain” that is. Almost the exact opposite of what one would want to say.
Virtual means imaginary, unreal, and the like. Particularly in optics, a virtual image is quite unreal; no light at all passes through a virtual image on its way to a final result. So virtually essentially means not in your wildest dreams.
But then it is like sophistication; which has led me to observe that people who consider themsleves sophisticated, usually are.
Why not simply use the word “nearly”, instead of a word that actually has the opposite meaning.
I wonder if future studies will show the affects of nutrient uptake due to decreased (or increased) respiration. Being in the Green Industry myself, many of the chemicals I use also rely on cellular respiration to be effective (i.e., certain herbicides and adjuvants).
Tim, Phil, AJ, & Others:
Thanks for the correction.
My (evidently wrong) understanding was that CO2 release during respiration was minimal, with the bulk of the carbon going into the plant tissue. I guess I need to dig out my old plant physiology textbook when I get home 🙂
Nothing to worry about, skeptics! [snip]
Reply: You’re welcome to post here as long as you have something constructive to contribute. Your pejorative attack on skeptics in general is over the top. ~ charles the moderator
Excellent article in the Canadian Free Press: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/8299
Don’t forget that we consumers are all part of the carbon cycle. Carbon sequestration has been a viable technology for centuries, a.k.a. “six feet under.”
vukcevic,
“Future projections based on climate models always come with error bars – an indication of how likely the data is to be accurate.”
The problem with the article in the post is that it’s barking up the wrong gum tree. Climate modelers may express confidence in those terms (and I won’t quibble with that) of how likely the model’s result will occur, but here is the rub.
the outcome probabilities are based on the input to the model.
This article is – either with intent or just missing the point – obscuring the skeptical view often stated that the input is messed up and the models aren’t accurate to begin with.
It doesn’t matter that I’m Virtually Certain I’ll be hit by a bus tomorrow if I have a model that says a bus will come through my front yard 80% of the time, and my input is 1000 busses travel the road in front of my house each day. The facts are the busses usually stay on the road and there are only about eight of them a day. My model and input are messed up
Mike
Quoting Tamara:
“Don’t forget that we consumers are all part of the carbon cycle. Carbon sequestration has been a viable technology for centuries, a.k.a. “six feet under.””
Interesting. So Al Gore’s Carbon Offset industry should pay me not to have myself cremated. Say, I’ve got some deceased ancestors. How much will you pay me not to dig them up and burn them?
I also had the brilliant idea to cut down all the forests around the Great Lakes and sink them in the cold depths, thus sequestering megatons of carbon. The forests will grow back but the logs will sit on the bottom till the next ice age. Think I’m wrong? There is a thriving industry that lifts old timber out of the lakes to make high end lumber!
You want a really great way to sequester carbon? Just spread a trickle of iron fertilizer in the iron poor regions of the oceans. It makes blooms of plankton, whose carbonate skeletons sink to the -4 C depths to be buried for Eons. Fish feast on the plankton (and each other) and make more fish. It happens all the time when iron rich dust blows off the Sahara into the Atlantic.
Don’t let Greenpeace hear about it, though, because you’d take away their reason to exist. They recently finked on their former member who was trying to do that. Said he was attempting to spread toxic waste.
But, when the New Ice Age gets going you’ll all sing a different tune, won’t ya?
I’ll be expected to pay for that, too, I bet.
Here’s a good laugh.
Study: Birds shifting north; global warming cited
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jpZ8b9L2-UjrsLb82x-BpyYi7y8gD968NKDG0
Richard Sharpe (11:35:24) :
More CO2 means more sugar production during photosynthesis during the day, so there’s more for the plant to burn day and night. The partial pressure of CO2 remains so low that it’s no obstacle to respiration.
Michael Mann Unleashed: Defends ‘Hockey Stick’ – Slams Writer as ‘fuel industry shill’
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/8283
[Note: Also see this report for a thorough rebuttal to ‘Hockey Stick’ claims: – The increasingly “thin-skinned” RealClimate.org gang must have had a meeting over the past two weeks and decided to go on the offensive. Gavin Schmidt has spent his time recently expressing outrage any critiques and he has been throwing around terms like ‘slander’ and ‘abuse’ and demanding critical analysis be removed from websites. Not to be outdone, Antarctic co-author and Real Climate activist Eric Steig, like Schmidt, has also been recently throwing phrases as “fraud” and “libel” after receiving critical analysis of his work. See: First Author of ‘Antarctic Warming Paper’ Claims Libel – Here is a past email alert on the unfolding Gavin Schmidt/RealClimate.org comedy show. – Real Climate does not appear to like criticism. Schmidt understandably does not wish to do any more climate debates with his scientific critics, as he was beaten, and beaten badly, in 2007. Schmidt blamed his failure to win the debate on his team’s lack of persuasive ability. “We were pretty dull,” Schmidt wrote in 2007. [ See: Tough New York City Crowd Reverses opinion on man-made warming following debate—March 2007 -—Also see: See: Prominent Scientist ‘Appalled’ By Gavin Schmidt’s ‘lack of knowledge’—‘Back to graduate school, Gavin!’—Climate Science Blog ]
This makes me wonder if we can genetically modify plants to uptale more CO2, turbo charging them. That should make the plants store more sugar. Hrm maybe not such a good idea, we’d all get fat from eating salad. What were the caloric differences like?
“The increasingly “thin-skinned” RealClimate.org gang must have had a meeting over the past two weeks and decided to go on the offensive. ”
They must have found a parry for the dscovery phase of libel suits: The sea kitten ate my GCM!
I’m amazed that WUWT would publish this and not explain it to the layman. This article is about latent genes that turn on to better handle CO2.
That’s incorrect and misses the important point of this study.
This article is about latent genes that turn on to handle higher atmospheric levels of CO2.
Such genes could only have evolved at higher CO2 concentrations than pre-industrial levels. There is absolutely no question about this. Which means the Earth must have had (much) higher levels of CO2 in relatively recent times. This is directly contrary to currently accepted theory, and blows a very large hole in the tipping point ‘theory’.
To date I had assumed that plants grew better in higher CO2 levels, because the mechanisms that work at pre-industrial levels, work better at higher concentrations of CO2. To see there are so many genes waiting to be switched in response higher CO2 levels was a real surprise.
Art, Thanks for this link:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kary_mullis_on_what_scientists_do.html
It seems rather odd that this was filmed in 2002 and only recently released… Perhaps CHANGE really IS in the wind. The new administration would do well to speak to the real scientists among us.
Mike Bryant
Completely off topic, but I thought this would interest a few people:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7878399.stm
Sammy Wilson is the Northern Irish environment minister and has stated many times he does not believe in man made climate change.
Recently, he has blocked an UK government advert about energy efficiency on the grounds that it has an AGW alarmist agenda.
It seems the tide is turning, even for those in government with a bit of spine!
Add another fact to the AGW list. When Arctic birds show up in southern areas, that’s weather, but when birds show up in northern areas, that’s global warming. Snowy owls showed up in the Willamette Valley in the 70’s. But I digress. That cold decade was just weather.