Now according to this press release from UC Irvine, green spaces in cities are bad for the planet….but wait, what about the UHI offset? Can I buy grass credit certificates?
Urban ‘green’ spaces may contribute to global warming, UCI study finds
Turfgrass management creates more greenhouse gas than plants remove from atmosphere
— Irvine, Calif., January 19, 2010 —
Dispelling the notion that urban “green” spaces help counteract greenhouse gas emissions, new research has found – in Southern California at least – that total emissions would be lower if lawns did not exist.
Turfgrass lawns help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and store it as organic carbon in soil, making them important “carbon sinks.” However, greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer production, mowing, leaf blowing and other lawn management practices are four times greater than the amount of carbon stored by ornamental grass in parks, a UC Irvine study shows. These emissions include nitrous oxide released from soil after fertilization. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that’s 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, the Earth’s most problematic climate warmer.
“Lawns look great – they’re nice and green and healthy, and they’re photosynthesizing a lot of organic carbon. But the carbon-storing benefits of lawns are counteracted by fuel consumption,” said Amy Townsend-Small, Earth system science postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study, forthcoming in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The research results are important to greenhouse gas legislation being negotiated. “We need this kind of carbon accounting to help reduce global warming,” Townsend-Small said. “The current trend is to count the carbon sinks and forget about the greenhouse gas emissions, but it clearly isn’t enough.”
Turfgrass is increasingly widespread in urban areas and covers 1.9 percent of land in the continental U.S., making it the most common irrigated crop.
In the study, Townsend-Small and colleague Claudia Czimczik analyzed grass in four parks near Irvine, Calif. Each park contained two types of turf: ornamental lawns (picnic areas) that are largely undisturbed, and athletic fields (soccer and baseball) that are trampled and replanted and aerated frequently.
The researchers evaluated soil samples over time to ascertain carbon storage, or sequestration, and they determined nitrous oxide emissions by sampling air above the turf. Then they calculated carbon dioxide emissions resulting from fuel consumption, irrigation and fertilizer production using information about lawn upkeep from park officials and contractors.
The study showed that nitrous oxide emissions from lawns were comparable to those found in agricultural farms, which are among the largest emitters of nitrous oxide globally.
In ornamental lawns, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilization offset just 10 percent to 30 percent of carbon sequestration. But fossil fuel consumption for management, the researchers calculated, released about four times more carbon dioxide than the plots could take up. Athletic fields fared even worse, because – due to soil disruption by tilling and resodding – they didn’t trap nearly as much carbon as ornamental grass but required the same emissions-producing care.
“It’s impossible for these lawns to be net greenhouse gas sinks because too much fuel is used to maintain them,” Townsend-Small concluded.
Previous studies have documented lawns storing carbon, but this research was the first to compare carbon sequestration to nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions from lawn grooming practices.
The UCI study was supported by the Kearney Foundation of Soil Science and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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Trees are better.
Sheep you darn fool!
Since the greens are now losing the CO2 battle they are now turning to laughing gas?
Can we please get over this misconception that planting grass or trees is a good carbon sink that should be rewarded with credits?
Credits, moral or monetary, should only be handed out when (a) the planting increases the net bound carbon per unit area over its previous level (b) such increased carbon sequestration is held that way forever – yes, forever, otherwise it’s just a blip in history and (c) the emissions of GHG involved in planting and maintenance are less than undisturbed levels, as the above study shows.
There is a current myth about biochar. It is a myth because if it was a permenent sequestration device, the whole of the earth’s soils whould have become pure carbon over the last few millions of years. They are not because in the usual case (organic) carbon in soils reaches a few percent by weight and excesses are oxidized to CO2 which finds its way back into the air.
Any arguments?
a way to get grant money for UC Irvine
Since the entire premise of this article is that CO2 and other gases, like NO2 act to warm the earth, shouldn’t there first be proof that these gases actually perform in that way?
Global temperatures are decreasing, AGW theory falsified, this article is pointless.
Sorry, should read N2O in above posting
Geoff Sherrington: Trees as carbon sinks is not just a myth: Boreal Forests are very good carbon sinks, since they accumulate carbon in the soil.
Don E (22:12:20) :
Since the greens are now losing the CO2 battle they are now turning to laughing gas?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Proving once again that the Greens have no sense of humour.
Interesting point as an aside… in The Netherlands the road verges and median strips are not mowed anymore but left to grow wild. One presumes the justification being that this is a more natural state.
No doubt the horse & buggy will be re-introduced there soon.
Well I love me a good lawn, but I use an old-fashioned (but new) hand-pushed drum-blade mower instead of power tools. It cuts better, is cheaper to buy, costs nothing to run, is easier to store and gives a good workout when mowing the lawn. It even makes very little noise and doesn’t annoy the neighbours.
And I don’t even buy the AGW theory! Little did I know I was so ‘green’.
OT but…. (please no one reply to this comment it’s here just for you information).
I have seen this NASA and retreating glaciers mentioned a couple of times now. On their Google cached page snapshot of 13 Jan 2010 23:49:42 GMT they have said.
—————–
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:0osmsixKS-sJ:climate.nasa.gov/evidence/+http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk
http://tinyurl.com/yblpx6u
—————–
Now that same page reads:
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http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
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Now Real Climate currently has a post defending the IPCC glacier dissapearance story by 2035 stating among other things:
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http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/the-ipcc-is-not-infallible-shock/
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Well it looks like another error sneaked through – instead of 2035 (IPCC) we recently got 2030. So two error sneaked through 1 at IPCC and the other at NASA.
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Moderator please feel free to snip this comment.
When I was in Beijing in ’91 I noticed their lawns were made from a short Rye grass that was around 6″ tall. They were very attractive.
One day I observed a long row of people moving across the lawn on their knees – they were weeding the lawn!
“Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that’s 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, the Earth’s most problematic climate warmer.” And I thought water vapour was important. Silly me.
The Pink Floyd tune sprang straight into my head….”The Lunatics are on the grass”!
Does Amy Townsend-Small, Earth system science postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study actually get grant money for this Loony Tunes Stuff!
Greenways bad for the climate?
Good!
I vote we keep them – for two reasons. The first reason is that they’re NICE. The second reason is that it’ll wee off the Warmists and Greenies. And there can be nothing wrong with that!
I want a grant to study different types of grass.
Especially those exotic varieties you find in the Netherlands……
Of course, the real solution for global warming is to bulldoze Brazil.
Remove all that dark green leafy stuff around the Amazon that is soaking up the solar radiation, yielding heat. It also gives off water vapor, a greenhouse gas. Convert the landscape to parched wasteland, which has a much higher albedo and will reflect the unnecessary sunlight into space. The removed organic matter shall be tossed into the Amazonian waters, where it will become a flow of added nutrients into the ocean, where assorted phytoplankton will flourish and pull large quantities of excess CO2 from the air.
Problem solved.
Well, I don’t like the effort of mowing lawn. Therefore I’ve replaced almost half of my 1 acre yard with wildflowers. No watering necessary, I just let Nature do it. Trimming the dead stuff after the first frost is done manually with the residue being composted. The yard is in bloom from mid-March to late October.
Other parts of the yard are maples that I’ve grown from seed. Again, I just let Nature do its thing.
I didn’t do it to be “green.” I did it because I don’t like mowing and I like trees and wildflowers.
A side benefit has been the HUGE increase in finches of all types and other native birds that haven’t been in my neighborhood in years. My neighbor complains that his finch feeder is ignored by the goldfinches now. They are all in my front yard.
Geoff Sherrington (22:15:54) :
Credits, moral or monetary, should only be handed out when (a) the planting increases the net bound carbon per unit area over its previous level (b) such increased carbon sequestration is held that way forever – yes, forever, otherwise it’s just a blip in history and (c) the emissions of GHG involved in planting and maintenance are less than undisturbed levels, as the above study shows.
You manage to colossally miss the real point. Carbon credits and carbon sequestration are both worthless boondoggles and the only sense that morality relates to either is the complete immorality of devoting finite financial resources to either when investing those resources in any number of other areas could be accomplishing improvements in the lives of millions of people worldwide.
If we really feel the need to cutback on our CO2 emissions the first step should be to summarily shut down all the various governmental organizations worldwide currently engaged in shoveling money down the rathole of the nonexistent “carbon problem” and withdraw public funds from NGOs similarly occupied. That would seriously curtail the ongoing farce of almost daily conferences and gatherings in various garden spots across the planet which have over the last couple of decades probably had a larger carbon footprint than a number of not so small countries. Next we could quit devoting time on very energy intensive supercomputers to running worthless GCMs until someone develops one that has some expectation of generating useful output.
Actually what is most important for humanity to realize is that what will be most valuable, no matter where the climate moves in the future, is maximum human adaptability and since nearly all the current plans out there involve investing more and more power in the kind of centralized bureaucracies which have proven themselves to be perhaps the least adaptable institutions humanity has ever created we need to stop right now.
What a bizarre conclusion!
Let’s go down the rabbit hole yet again…
““We need this kind of CARBON ACCOUNTING to help reduce global warming,”
Oh spare me for heavens sake. Next thing you know when an 8yr old makes a fart joke he’ll be slapped with a CH4 penalty by his teacher Mrs Green.
And what sort of administrative costs and nightmares will be involved in this? What tenth of a fifth of a quarter of next to nothing CO2 will be “scrubbed” from the air with this idiocy?
Geoff Sherrington (22:15:54) :
Yes I have an argument.
“Credits, moral or monetary, should only be handed”……to the secure shredding company used by govts. Then maybe we can get on with our lives without the incessant catastrophy scenarios we’ve suffered in the last 50yrs.
You could dissappear up your own arsehole several times a day trying to follow all the findings of these studies. Just look at the ones on eating eggs. First they kill you and then they help you live longer. Then theres the UK Govt saying the pension age is being extended saying people are living longer and at the same time saying there is a hugh increase in obesity and alcohol related deaths which is effecting life expectancy.
What remains shocking is the way the AGW campaign ran itself straight into totalitarian socialism. They dropped any pretense of real science back with “The debate is over,” claim. By throwing the real science under the bus, the alarmists allowed the marxist faction access to their formidable PR machine.
Apparently they forgot that western democracy does not subscribe to marxism. American democracy in particular despises central government, collectivism, and tax the air-type schemes. The unfortunate result is the greens had a winning hand given to them – along with bucks to support it – but they let radical leftists commandeer the agenda. And that p-o-ed the good ole regular folks.
Now the science and lack of ethics and Climategate malfeasance have come back to haunt them. Ruining a brilliant opportunity and setting back good enviro policy some twenty years. Thank you algore and comrades too proud to admit your blunders. Pride is the destroyer of ambition. That’s your lesson. That’s why a conservative named Brown sits in Kennedy’s Senate seat tonight.
Irony overdose!!!!!!
Pave the green spaces!!!!! Plant plastic grass made of petrochems!!!!
Unfortunately (or not) I think UC Irvine just washed out to sea in the record LA floods.
Somebody please turn down the laughing gas before we all get hernias from the unstoppable chuckling!!!!!
New research funded by Readycrete Paving Solutions (joking)
I have several areas of lawn, some large, I use an electric mower to cut it, my power comes from a hydrolake so its “clean” in theory:. I dont fertilise it as I spread the cuttings over the lawn to keep nutrients in the soil. Oh yeah, and it provides food and habitat for wildlife, helps recharge ground water, helps maintain the hydrological cycle, reduces surface albedo, reduces stormwater run-off which inturn reduces flood risk and channel erosion etc… etc… etc….
but hey, grass is bad! lol!
Should I tarmac my lawn to save the planet? Maybe I could chop down a few trees as well whilst am at it to help??