From the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:
Soils release more carbon dioxide as globe warms
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Twenty years of field studies reveal that as the Earth has gotten warmer, plants and microbes in the soil have given off more carbon dioxide. So-called soil respiration has increased about one-tenth of 1 percent per year since 1989, according to an analysis of past studies in today’s issue of Nature.
The scientists also calculated the total amount of carbon dioxide flowing from soils, which is about 10-15 percent higher than previous measurements. That number — about 98 petagrams of carbon a year (or 98 billion metric tons) — will help scientists build a better overall model of how carbon in its many forms cycles throughout the Earth. Understanding soil respiration is central to understanding how the global carbon cycle affects climate.
“There’s a big pulse of carbon dioxide coming off of the surface of the soil everywhere in the world,” said ecologist Ben Bond-Lamberty of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “We weren’t sure if we’d be able to measure it going into this analysis, but we did find a response to temperature.”
The increase in carbon dioxide given off by soils — about 0.1 petagram (100 million metric tons) per year since 1989 — won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect unless it comes from carbon that had been locked away out of the system for a long time, such as in Arctic tundra. This analysis could not distinguish whether the carbon was coming from old stores or from vegetation growing faster due to a warmer climate. But other lines of evidence suggest warming is unlocking old carbon, said Bond-Lamberty, so it will be important to determine the sources of extra carbon.
The Opposite of Photosynthesis
Plants are famous for photosynthesis, the process that stores energy in sugars built from carbon dioxide and water. Photosynthesis produces the oxygen we breathe as a byproduct. But plants also use oxygen and release carbon dioxide in the same manner that people and animals do. Soil respiration includes carbon dioxide from both plants and soil microbes, and is a major component of the global carbon cycle.
Theoretically, the biochemical reactions that plants and soil microbes engage in to produce carbon dioxide suggest that higher temperatures should result in more carbon dioxide being released. But unlike the amount of sunlight reaching Earth, soil respiration can’t be measured from space and can’t yet be simulated effectively with computer models.
So, the researchers turned to previous studies to see if they could quantify changes in global soil respiration. PNNL’s Bond-Lamberty and his colleague Allison Thomson, working at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md., examined 439 soil respiration studies published between 1989 and 2008.
They compiled data about how much carbon dioxide has leaked from plants and microbes in soil in an openly available database. To maintain consistency, they selected only data that scientists collected via the now-standard methods of gas chromatography and infrared gas analysis. The duo compared 1,434 soil carbon data points from the studies with temperature and precipitation data in the geographic regions from other climate research databases.
After subjecting their comparisons to statistical analysis, the researchers found that the total amount of carbon dioxide being emitted from soil in 2008 was more than in 1989. In addition, the rise in global temperatures correlated with the rise in global carbon flux. However, they did not find a similar relation between precipitation and carbon.
Zooming In
Previous climate change research shows that Arctic zones have a lot more carbon locked away than other regions. Using the complete set of data collected from the studies, the team estimated that the carbon released in northern — also called boreal — and Arctic regions rose by about 7 percent; in temperate regions by about 2 percent; and in tropical regions by about 3 percent, showing a trend consistent with other work.
The researchers wanted to know if their data could provide more detailed information about each region. So they broke down the complete data set by regional climates and re-examined the smaller groups of data using different statistical methods. The regional data from the temperate and tropical climates produced results consistent with other results, such as more carbon being released at higher temperatures, but the boreal-Arctic climate data did not. In addition, removing only 10 percent of the boreal-Arctic data points was enough to invalidate the statistical significance of the boreal-Arctic result. Together, the results support the idea that more boreal data on regional climates is needed to reach statistical relevance.
“We identified an area where we need to do more work,” said Thomson.
The authors designed the database so that other researchers could contribute to it. The paper describing the database can be found online in Biogeosciences.
Reference: Bond-Lamberty and Thomson, 2010. Temperature-associated increases in the global soil respiration record, Nature March 25, 2009, doi:10.1038/nature08930.
This research was supported by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research within the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
“The increase in carbon dioxide given off by soils — about 0.1 petagram (100 million metric tons) per year since 1989 — won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect unless it comes from carbon that had been locked away out of the system for a long time”
Does this statement make any logical sense at all? Is he claiming that somehow carbon dioxide molecules released from soil somehow know better than to absorb radiation? Have they been specially trained to be aware of environmental issues?
You can watch earth breathing in the AIRS CO2 animation
“Plants are famous for photosynthesis”
Yes of course, when I think of plants the first thing I think is photosynthesis… these guys need a holiday.
100 million tons CO2 per year is equivalent to burning about 30 million tons C. We burn about 300 times more than that in fossil fuel.
So if the soil is unlocking “old carbon” then wouldn’t that be indistinguishable from the “human signal” of carbon from fossil fuels?
I believe I’ve made this same argument to global warming advocates…
Wondering aloud
I was wondering the same thing. Apparently only really old carbon is active in the infrared spectrum, probably because it still has bits of crud attached to its protons.
Wondering Aloud (21:10:25) :
“The increase in carbon dioxide given off by soils — about 0.1 petagram (100 million metric tons) per year since 1989 — won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect unless it comes from carbon that had been locked away out of the system for a long time”
Does this statement make any logical sense at all? Is he claiming that somehow carbon dioxide molecules released from soil somehow know better than to absorb radiation? Have they been specially trained to be aware of environmental issues?
——-
REPLY: I understand what they are trying to say: carbon that has been fixed “recently” (not as in the case of peat, or coal) is released and then reabsorbed by green plants and some photosynthetic bacteria, becoming fixed again. This is standard stuff in the carbon cycle.
The underlying theory is that, by dredging up ancient carbon (fixed by plants that eventually became coal, for example) adds more carbon dioxide than the planet can handle through this natural cycle.
The system is far more complex than that, as higher carbon dioxide levels lead to more photosynthesis and higher tree growth etc. I have yet to read a really good accounting of the modern-era carbon cycle that brings in the fossil carbon input without all sorts of hysteria tacked on!! Very frustrating.
Isn’t it amazing what researchers find when it relates to climate change? No matter what, you can rest assured that it’s all bad, and that further research is required.
Climate change has been the greatest boon to research ever invented. All researchers in just about every field can study the effects of climate change. There’s simply no end to the possibilities. No wonder they dare not kill the goose who lays the golden egg- it’s just to good to be true!
Stone cold provery of Gaia. Whar’s muh bong?
Effect of warming. More CO2 released from soil & plants grow faster in warmer weather. Net effect: Zero.
This press release sounds like typical BS from publicity hounds. Wood’s Hole has been calculating greater than 100 petagrams since 2004.
http://www.whrc.org/carbon/images/GlobalCarbonCycle.gif
Modified: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 2:38:04 PM
Additionally, the precision they claim is far beyond the accuracy of their measurements. There is no way they can measure CO2 output within one tenth of a percent, which is why Woods Hole rounds their numbers off to two decimal places.
Oh come on. This is news? Metabolic rates are related to temperature, so higher temps, more CO2 released, but also more CO2 consumed. Anyone who has maintained biotype aquariums would know this.
Funny how nature works… in winter, when the plants are dormant and the soil is frozen, no CO2 is emitted from the soil, but in summer, when plants need lots of CO2 to grow, the soil provides CO2 to help them.
There must be an imbalance in the system since there is more dirt in the Northern hemisphere than in the Southern hemisphere. So, when it is winter in the Norhtern hemisphere the global CO2 must be smaller.
Wondering Aloud
I thought the same. AGW causes warming. Warming causes CO2 to be released from soils. CO2 is a well known cause of AGW. Is this the tipping point? No. The soil CO2 is different to burnt coal CO2. Or does it mean that nature (the real deal) not the journal has everything under control?
It may mean that sequestration of CO2 in soils or trees for that matter as a means of reducing ACO2 is a useless exercise. WWF is trying to lock up 40% of the Amazon rain forrest and pick up 60 billion $s in carbon offsets. That may not work with this latset research.
Can a sharper mind than mine explain, please?
“After subjecting their comparisons to statistical analysis,…”
I hope it’s not Mannian statistics!
George Turner (21:37:45) : “I was wondering the same thing. Apparently only really old carbon is active in the infrared spectrum, probably because it still has bits of crud attached to its protons.”
You mean CRU-dons?
These guys are really grasping at straws!
“There’s a big pulse of carbon dioxide coming off of the surface of the soil everywhere in the world,” Ya think? Wow, this must be something new! And what a surprise that their most recent, cutting edge analysis shows that there has been a recent increase. I will never cease to be amazed by the observation powers of the climate scientist!
I’d like to be the first to propose a geo-engineering fix to correct this distrurbing trend. Lets call it ‘Pave ‘n Save’. We’ll just prevent the respiration of those pesky soils by sealing them off with a nice liitle coating of asphalt.
By the way, does the sun still rise in the east?
I have yet to read a really good accounting of the modern-era carbon cycle that brings in the fossil carbon input without all sorts of hysteria tacked on!! Very frustrating.>>
Have you looked at this one?
http://www.antti-roine.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=73
Almost any dumb dirt farmer could have told them that. This collage education stuff must be hard on the brain.
far too much money in CAGW ‘research’.
the following is the most honest expose of the planned CO2 Bubble, written prior to bloomberg attaching half a dozen writers/editors to every CAGW ‘story’ to ensure ‘political correctness’. if we allow this, at least our eyes are wide open this time. send it to everyone u know:
4 Dec 2009: Bloomberg: Lisa Kassenaar: Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives
Subprime Carbon
http://www.bloomberg.com.au/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M
I’m confused about why locking CO2 in the Amazon wouldn’t work. Yes, I can see how we need to know the Amazon overall consumes more carbon than it releases. But why would we think a rainforest isn’t a net sequesterer (if that’s a word) of carbon? Isn’t that what fossil fuels are: carbon sequestered into plants? Where else to hydrocarbons come from if not natural sequestration?
So now they’ll hoist this flag up as their definitive proof of steady warming and see if anyone salutes.
DesertYote (21:46:21) : “…This is news? Metabolic rates are related to temperature, so higher temps, more CO2 released, but also more CO2 consumed. Anyone who has maintained biotype aquariums would know this.”
But the consensus of six universities’ new aquarium computer models reveals a consensus that the robust unprecedented time for action tipping point is settled worse than we thought.
[sarcoff]
Without AGW fear mongering this study would be regarded as an interesting exercise in number crunching with little or applicability to the real world.
I’m not the first one to mention it but if plants are taking in more CO2 shouldn’t it be expected that they’d crap more out too?
People get paid for this?
Anyone want to bet that from a % standpoint this change in respiration output of CO2 roughly coincides with the increasing atmospheric content of CO2?
There is absolutely no temperature based explanation given… or even looked for it appears. Find a correlation, attribute to AGW, get grant money… rinse, repeat. My kid’s school had better science projects than these jokers are coming up with.
How about this for correlation, the temperature anomalies of a surface station rise when you put an asphalt parking lot next to it. Must be global warming… right?
This is a meta-study, meaning the authors conglomerated the studies of others (818 at last count). All meta-analyses have inherent problems including publication bias (authors are more likely to submit positive rather than inconclusive results). That kind of bias is likely in this area of study given the strong political/funding incentives to find climate change effects.
The 818 individual studies were limited in scope: location, duration, methodology. The methodologies including modeling studies as well as some empirical observations. Pooling the findings is equivalent to extending the individual study inferences beyond their respective scopes, a practice that weakens if not violates the scientific method.
Most of the studies were focused on temperate forests, and other vegetation/soil types are thus poorly represented. The authors of the meta-study characterized a percentage of the forests in the individual studies as “unmanipulated ecosystems,” but that is a stretch. No temperate forests are in truth unmanipulated within any historical context. Nor are temperate forests independent of current political trends in forest management.
For that matter, forest fires are also not independent of current political trends. Forest fires represent the most severe type of soil carbon and soil metabolic change (disturbance).
Given all that, the meta-study purported to find a minute trend in soil respiration that is so small that it is dwarfed by the large uncertainties and biases. Further, no purported trends in gross sequestration of carbon through photosynthesis were considered in this meta-study. A slight increase in photosynthesis would offset soil respiration increases, yielding no net change terrestrial in carbon sequestration.
The upshot is that the “findings” are extremely weak and apparently blown completely out of proportion by the media blitz accompanying the paper — the blitz representing, ironically, a meta-example of publication bias.
Water holds CO2. Cold water holds more CO2 than warm water. When cold water is heated, it can no longer hold as much CO2, and releases CO2.
Soil is moist, it is wet dirt. Soil has water.
Therefore soil holds CO2. Cold soil holds more CO2 than warm soil. When cold soil is heated…
How much more grant money will it take for them to figure out how much of this CO2 release from soil is just general chemistry and whether there even is a separate significant detectable biological factor?
OMG the Tipping Point!
We are all going to die!
OMG! Was this allowed for in the models!
These little chaos termites keep nibbling away at number crunchers!
The whole exercise is just downright soily. Next thing they will do is to connect this to Genesis and claim that since G*d made men out of clay this is really AGW.
You sure you have your units right?
In the Headline, you say: “Soils Add 100 million tonnes of Carbon per Year”, but in the text it says: “The scientists also calculated the total amount of carbon dioxide flowing from soils, which is about 10-15 percent higher than previous measurements. That number — about 98 petagrams of carbon a year (or 98 billion metric tons)”.
I think that what we have here is an estimate of total emissions of CO2 flowing from soils of 98 billion metric tonnes per year, but that it is increasing at 100 million tonnes per year. Do I have that right?
Nick Stokes (above) says: “100 million tons CO2 per year is equivalent to burning about 30 million tons C. We burn about 300 times more than that in fossil fuel.” But I think that the proper comparison should be (accepting Nick’s figures on fossil fuel) 98 billion tonnes coming from soils each year compared with 9 billion tonnes coming from burning fossil fuels.
We should anticipate a steady stream of these kind of ‘new findings’ and ‘breakthrough analyses’ stories from the popculture/polysci rags (Nature, Science, et al.) in advance of the impending push for cap ‘n trade legislation later this spring. Good thing for them that the parrots in the press have no clue about the other than man-made inputs to the carbon cycle. At least we’ll get a chuckle out of them!
fhsiv,
Concrete has a higher albedo than grass or trees and according to Trenberth the earth’s average surface evaporative/transpirative effect is roughly equivalent to an albedo of .39 so, doing the same math that I think goes into the models implies that new concrete at an albedo of .50 would break even and the new LEED white concrete (.7-.8) could cool down that hot old backyard of yours.
I can see it now… “Stop Global Warming – Pave the Planet”
davidmhoffer (21:59:17) :
I have yet to read a really good accounting of the modern-era carbon cycle that brings in the fossil carbon input without all sorts of hysteria tacked on!! Very frustrating.>>
Have you looked at this one?
http://www.antti-roine.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=73
—–
Thanks, that is helpful information!
This topic of atmospheric carbon & its effects seems to be changing day to day….This one just came up, about cattle methane:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100031389/now-its-cowgate-expert-report-says-claims-of-livestock-causing-global-warming-are-false/
There is so much obfuscation and spin put onto the topic of the modern-era carbon cycle that it is difficult to ascertain the truth from the junk (same with Arctic ice trends etc.). However, I am most convinced by data showing an overall balance between carbon dioxide production and uptake in the oceans.
The great ecologist Paul Colinvaux was writing about oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide and subsequent formation of carbonates back in the early 1970’s. I still tend to believe he was correct.
It’s amazing to me we don’t all wake up dead every morning. With one climate catastrophe following on the heels of another, shouldn’t we be seeing piles of bodies? Or are the oil companies hiding the evidence? As a minimum I’d think there would be polar bear pelts aplenty for sale on Craig’s List. In fact, when I look for true fallout of all this climatic hell that embraces our time on this wobbly orb I don’t see the jetsam one would expect of such careless stewards of spaceship earth.
Any wide scale disaster as pervasive and destructive as global warming is claimed to be and that does not produce a reflexive signature in the defensive behavior of humanity is probably not what the progenitors imagined it to be.
This is such a …..doh! Yes. That is why CO2 is a lagging indicator. Biologic activity. And as the solar quiescence has a global effect it will diminish. Thank nature for absorbing billions of tons via plant growth. But it is also important to remember that the earths atmospheric density, the CO2 has a relatively limited ability to contain heat.
So lets get this straight. This research claims that more CO2 is given off by the soil than ‘previously thought’. About 15% more, amounting to 98GT per year.
So … if this research is correct … there is 13GT more C being added to the atmosphere every year that ‘previously thought’. That amount is approximately double the annual ‘evil fossil fuel anthropogenic Carbon’ release, which is somewhere on the order of 6GT per year.
No one knew that this 13GT of soil sourced C was entering the atmosphere, and still no one knows where it is going. There has been a large hole in our understanding of the Carbon cycle for a long time. It’s size was pegged at approximately 3GT, based on the assumption that observed C rise was anthropogenic. We keep adding what is assumed to be 6GT per year, but the measured atmospheric CO2 was only showing an increase equivalent to about 40% of that. Some ‘missing sink’ was swallowing up 3GT, and no one could find it. Now, that missing sink must be more than five times the ‘previously thought’ size, and is swallowing 13GT more C every year?
We dont understand $#!^ about this planet.
dp (23:32:55) :
I think it works like this… the bodies have been stealthed away at night and converted in huge human-to-oil factories and sold to you as premium fuel for your automobiles. We actually passed peak oil decades ago but the human-to-oil program has kept up the supply to meet the growing demand.
It’s kinda like soylent Green meets Fight Club /nod
NickB. (23:11:31);
Hey, not so fast! I think you may have missed some significant items in your calculations!
While your ‘new’ concrete may have a favorable albedo, it is carbon intensive to manufacture. All that blasting, mucking, hauling, crushing, and sorting requires the combustion of lots of fossil fuel. Not to mention the tremendous amounts of CO2 liberated in the calcining of portland cement.
I think you need to submit a grant request to study whether or not paving the planet will be carbon neutral!
Practically every day of the week we’re privy to another unanticipated “discovery” about how the earth interacts with its atmosphere and how that atmosphere interacts with outer space. Doesn’t that belie the contention that “the science of AGW is settled”?
Carbon dioxide slumping
There is a report about a development that has received mysteriously little attention: according to numbers from the Energy Information Agency, greenhouse gas emissions fell sharply in 2008 (by more than 2½%), are falling even more in 2009 (about 6%), and in the next few years are almost certain to remain easily below the levels of 2005.
The oil price spike in 2008 deserves some credit. Some might wish to try to give some credit to policy too. But there can be no doubt that the main reason for the sharp fall in emissions is the slump. A simple statistic for the uninitiated: although carbon dioxide emissions in an average year rise by 0.8%, they fell that much in both 1991 and 2001, the last two slump years, in addition to the much larger drop in the much larger recent slump. That’s not a coincidence.
How should one weigh a 9% fall in emissions against a 3.8% fall in real GDP (from the 2007Q4 peak to the 2009Q2 apparent-trough)? I strongly suspect that a majority of Americans, no matter how well-informed, would think that the output loss far more than outweighs the climate benefit. A minority, in favor of very drastic action on climate change, might implicitly choose the other way.
__________________________
Projected carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide) emissions from fossil fuels fall by 5.9% in 2009. Coal leads the drop in 2009 carbon dioxide emissions, falling by 10.1%. Changes in energy consumption in the industrial sector, a result of the weak economy, and changes in electricity generation sources are the primary factors for the decline in carbon dioxide emissions (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). The projected recovery in the economy contributes to an expected 1.1% increase in carbon dioxide emissions in 2010.
“A convergence of several factors has contributed to the projected decline in carbon dioxide emissions in 2009 (see STEO Supplement: Understanding the Decline in carbon dioxide Emissions in 2009). EIA estimates that the combined effects of the decline in consumption of coal and natural gas in the industrial, commercial, and residential sectors, the substitution of natural gas for coal in the electric power sector, and the forecast increase in non-carbon dioxide emitting electricity generation (hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, solar, wood and wood waste) reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 242 million metric tons, or 70% of the total projected 2009 decline. The projected reduction in petroleum consumption accounts for the remaining 30% of the decline in carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions from petroleum are expected to fall by 102 million metric tons in 2009, with over two-thirds of the decline attributable to economy-related reductions in consumption of jet fuel and distillate fuel oil, including both diesel fuel and home heating oil. Reduced petroleum demand in industry also contribute to the overall reduction in petroleum use.”
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/gifs/Fig24.gif
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents.html#Carbon%20Dioxide%20Emissions
“dp (23:32:55) :
I think it works like this… the bodies have been stealthed away at night and converted in huge human-to-oil factories and sold to you as premium fuel for your automobiles. We actually passed peak oil decades ago but the human-to-oil program has kept up the supply to meet the growing demand.”
Anyone seen Big Al lately?
That there is a conspiracy to deny a public airing of the “debate” is clear. Russian scientists continue to report a mini Ice Age starting 2010 to 2020 and lasting past 2050 – despite the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Such scientific theories are suppressed.
Humans contribute 0.03% of the total carbon dioxide in the ecosystem. There are 28,000 gigatonnes in the oceans, 8 gigatonnes in the air. Breathing by humans and all animal life is between 2 and 5 gigatonnes. Humans alone contribute almost 1 gigatonne through breathing out carbon dioxide. Plants absorb carbon dioxide as food.
To reduce the 0.03% to zero will not change the temperature of the Earth.
This is a challenge to all you carbon-dioxide-causes-global-warming people:
Show us the published “Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming” and the raw data that underpins your Holy Grail of a Theory. The Theory does not exist in any published paper. Now the data has been mysteriously “lost.” How convenient for the political scientists at the CRU.
====================================
1 gigatonne = 10 to the 9 tonnes, or 1,000,000,000 tonnes
Human activity produces about 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. The atmosphere contains 3,600 billion tons, so humans produce an insignificant amount of all “new” carbon dioxide (0.166666%).
The greatest greenhouse gas is water vapor and clouds, accounting for up to 90% of all effects. The other 10% is from C02, CH4, S02, N0x, fluorocarbons, SF6, and a few others.
150 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide go into the atmosphere from natural processes every year. This is almost 30 times the amount of carbon dioxide humans make.
“Together, the results support the idea that more boreal data on regional climates is needed to reach statistical relevance. “We identified an area where we need to do more work,” said Thomson.”
Cha-ching! (sound of the successful funding hook…)
On a more serious note: I’ve no doubt that the assumptions underpinning the statistical analysis could be torn to shreds by a realistic individual with the right combination of education; however, the (cultural, not scientific) convention among colleagues in the field is to “overlook” such things…
Despite agreeing with Mike D, JJ and Pat above that we’ve got to be careful (and we really don’t understand shit about this planet), this fits nicely with what I’ve been saying for years, viz., that as the surface warms more CO2 comes out of solution, soil bacteria ramp up their activity, peat bogs dry out and rot and permafrost melts and releases methane which oxidises to CO2.
What else do you need to explain the 4-800 year lag of CO2 behind temperature? The quantities are certainly not yet well enough constrained to disprove the hypothesis numerically, but they all seem to be in the right area.
In the lab, CO2 certainly absorbs IR, but its contribution in a real, turbulent, water-laden atmosphere is extremely dubious and from the fact that the ice cores show temperature falling while CO2 goes on rising (with no other apparent cause) makes it look as though any CO2 contribution to warming is trivial at best.
Interesting study. But it is actually way more important than first glance, and I’m sure that the modelers will be looking very closely at it. The whole chicken and egg argument is now alive again, i.e. CO2 follows temp or temp follows CO2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/science/earth/26climate.html?src=me
The Cantwell-Collins plan is almost exactly what Mr. Obama proposed in the campaign and after first taking office — a 100 percent auction of permits and a large tax rebate to the public.
“He called our bill ‘very elegant,’ ” Ms. Cantwell said. “Simplicity and having something people can understand is important.”
===
So why isn’t Obama looking at this option seriously, which is a much more taxpayer friendly option? Is it because he and his banker buddies won’t be able to make as much money from gullible taxpayers?
Would it be fair to say that in fact there is a view of the carbon cycle that is so simple as to be naive?
Folks who learned the water cycle at school, evaporation, rain, river, sea, evaporation… think there’s a similar carbon cycle. There is not. It is waaaay more complicated, and nobody has a real handle on it.
The flows are massive. 100 million tons is a drop in the bucket, far larger amounts are unaccounted for, get fixed for indeterminate periods, enter and leave the ‘cycle’. It’s not well-described anywhere, yet some speak of it as if it was.
This Nature study appears to directly contradict the findings of Emmett et al (2010) who found that soils in Great Britain have lost NO carbon in a huge study conducted between between 1978 and 2007. The summary is at http://www.countrysidesurvey.org.uk/news.html – links to technical documents are given on the website.
Emmett also thereby trashes a similarly alarmist paper by Bellamy et al, also in Nature, which reported that UK soils were losing carbon at rate 10x the level predicted by IPCC lead author Pete Smith’s models.
Emmett made the point that measuring such a tiny signal against the heterogeneity of hugely differing soil types and plant cover is very troublesome – so making claims of actually detecting a 0.1% change sounds like more alarmist bedwetting to me.
OMG. SOIL RESPIRES CO2. IT HAS GOT TO BE TAXED OR IT HAS GOT TO GO, OR BOTH!!! WHERE WILL IT END? CLEARLY THE WHOLE PLANET IS ADDICTED TO CO2 AND NEEDS TO GO INTO COLD TURKEY DETOX IMMEDIATELY!
This “finding” doesn’t change the overall balance of the carbon cycle: humans emit some 8 GtC/year as CO2 and the atmospheric increase is about 4 GtC/yr. So whatever the individual flows involved, the overall balance shows that nature as a whole is a net sink for CO2.
How that is distributed over the different compartiments is not easy to follow: temperature increases increase soil activity, releasing more/faster carbon that was captured in previous years by vegetation (leaves, stems, rotting wood/roots). But at the other side increases vegetation growth: the earth is greening. The balance between soil respiration and vegetation can be calculated from the oxygen trends: fossil oil burning uses oxygen, which can be calculated from fossil fuel sales and burning efficiency. The balance shows that slightly less oxygen is used that calculated from fossil fuel use.
This means that in balance there is more vegetation growth than decay (which produces resp. uses oxygen), including soil, human and animal respiration. Thus total biolife on earth is a net sink for CO2. The calculations can be found here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/5462/2467
and with free admission:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
The amounts absorbed by biolife are around 1/3rd of total sink capacity, the rest of the balance in sink capacity is absorbed by the oceans…
AlexB (21:26:11) :
“Plants are famous for photosynthesis”
Yes indeedy, I was at the Plant Oscars years ago, I saw Daffodill get hers the very first time in Spring, then dear sweet Rose. Alas they died so young, Rose covered in greenfly, then brutally grassed up, so sad, Daff faded away as the months wore on, but she said she would return next Spring! Then the loon pretending to be a light bulb got released & I could no longer work at the bench in the dark! Woopie it’s medication time!!!!!!!!!!!!
Seriously this must have been a EU study, it has all the hallmarks of one. It’s always worse than was thought. However there is the tinge of doubt being sown, that could lead to a Get Out Of Jail/Gaol Free card for these guys, the simple fact as has been noted here, that they are sneakily admitting that as a race of beings, we know diddly squat about how the planet works! I wish the BBC would repeat “Earth Story”, (they do everything else), when in the last episode Aubrey Manning praises carbon & the carbon cycle, seeing carbon being subducted at a tectonic plate on the ocean floor then sitting atop a volcano watching the “same” carbon being emitted to the atmosphere, it’s so brilliant compared to the crap we get today, when the very mention of carbon raises hackles on many a neck! Any guess as to what Carbon Nanotubes will be called before too long so as to avoid the very mention of the word CARBON?
Interesting article. Sounds like good quality research and whilst it adds to the debate, unfortunately, it just reminds me how much the research has been slanted by funding to the “pro” lobby so that whilst individual research may try not be biased, the overall effect is to create biased results creating a biased environment which then becomes considered the “norm”.
What if the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty has “soil”ed the entire research?
Yes, the carbon cycle. The benefits of doubled CO2 are KNOWN, whereas the harm consists of what if and maybes..
We know that we will get worldwide increase in crop production of no less then 33%, given the same acreage devoted to such production. We know it will not take additional water to achieve this increase in yield. We know that vast tracts of newly available land will be open in to increased production in agriculture, further increasing crop yield. We know growing seasons will lengthen. We know that the benefits of increased CO2, up to at least 1000 ppm, continue at a linear or slightly higher pace. We know that the “projected” and questionable negative warming effects decrease exponentially.
This is why I ask some reasonable proponents of AGW, such as Mr Gates, to discuss the effects of doubled CO2.
Wondering Aloud (21:10:25) :
Wonder about the plants that ate C02 voraciously to produce the coal beds of the world. Wonder about the formations of limestone (CaC03) laid down by ages shellfish. The notion that the biosphere cannot handle the extra C02 is nonsense, and mightily proven wrong by the geologic past.
It’s called Life on Earth.
Great. So the ice core record that shows us that CO2 rises AFTER an increase in temperature is correct – ‘cos warmer weather makes soils release more CO2. Which means that when the ice core record tells us that elevated CO2 cannot prevent the temperature from falling – it’s right about that too.
The bottom line (both figuratively and literally) is.
“We identified an area where we need to do more work,” said Thomson.
JJ (23:51:16)
I was reading the posts with frustration as I was wanting to comment, and then I read your comment JJ now all I need to say is, THANK YOU SIR.
” But unlike the amount of sunlight reaching Earth, soil respiration can’t be measured from space and can’t yet be simulated effectively with computer models.”
Duh. Neither can the earth’s heating/cooling/drought/flood or whatever the climate change word of the day is be simulated. These guys are really starting to grasp at anything like a drowning man(or rat).
A bit OT, but a question.
Today’s “Scotsman” newspaper reports that the UK’s carbon emissions were down by nearly 10% due to the recession. The recession didn’t just hit the UK, so presumably there was a similar effect in other countries.
Yet the atmospheric CO2 plot from Hawaii continues on an astonishingly smooth upward trend, as it has since these measurements started.
Is there ANY correlation between global economic conditions and this parameter? Surely, if the principal reason for the increase is anthropogenic, we should see the effect of economic downturns, and upturns; I find it very hard to believe that globally, our emissions average out to such a smooth trend.
(or 98 billion metric tons)
Anthony, dumb question. Is it 98 billion or 98 million? The title implies the latter.
From way back in my chemistry lab days I have a very solid appreciation of how readily CO_2 dissolves in water. A flask of CO_2 inverted into a tub of water will suck the water right up into the flask as the CO_2 rapidly goes into solution. Nobody who has ever seen this demonstration done is ever going to believe that CO_2 hangs around in the atmosphere for long.
MOST CO_2 quickly ends up as carbonate or bicarbonate in the oceans, and what happens to it there is not all that well understood. The carbon clearly gets taken up by algae and enters the food chain, and some of it eventually sinks and rots onto the ocean floor releasing methane and adding to clathrate deposits, a truly massive carbon sink. The rates of these processes are crucial for understanding global carbon balance as the amounts of carbon in the oceanic part of the carbon cycle dwarf the terrestrial quantities. I really don’t think we can claim to have a good handle on the carbon cycle until we understand what is going on with carbon in the oceans a lot better than we do today.
OT but…Congratulations!! 40 million hits at about 1030 UT
you are the best
John Cooke (03:34:45) :
Today’s “Scotsman” newspaper reports that the UK’s carbon emissions were down by nearly 10% due to the recession. The recession didn’t just hit the UK, so presumably there was a similar effect in other countries.
Yet the atmospheric CO2 plot from Hawaii continues on an astonishingly smooth upward trend, as it has since these measurements started.
John, the emissions were some 8 GtC per year in the last years. Even with a worldwide recession causing 10% less emissions, the emissions still are 7.2 GtC per year. With the current (supposed stable) sink rate of 4 GtC/yr, the increase still is 3.2 GtC/yr. If that holds for several years, some change in the trend would be seen, but still strongly going up (with 1.6 ppmv instead of 2 ppmv/yr).
Ian H (03:36:24) :
From way back in my chemistry lab days I have a very solid appreciation of how readily CO_2 dissolves in water. A flask of CO_2 inverted into a tub of water will suck the water right up into the flask as the CO_2 rapidly goes into solution. Nobody who has ever seen this demonstration done is ever going to believe that CO_2 hangs around in the atmosphere for long.
Two important differences with the lab test: seawater is not fresh water and the driving force (the pCO2 difference) is very, very much lower than in the labtest. We are speaking about a globally average difference of 7 microatm between atmosphere and ocean surfaces, not one (or several) atmosphere(s) as in the lab flask…
Further the diffusion speed between air and seawater and in seawater is slow, only enhanced by wind speed mixing. See for a lot of information:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml and following pages…
JJ (23:51:16) : Right on, but they do know that estimates of the potential size of the U.S. cap-and-trade market range from $300 billion to $2 trillion.
This is an important issue, with some very poor journalism. We talk about air, ground and sea temperature, but the earth, the ground under our feet is a huge biosphere. We know so little.
Can we change the term “sceptic” to “questioner” ?
Denier implies refusing a truth.
Sceptic implies being unconvinced of a truth.
But both these terms suggest there’s a truth out there. There isn’t.
There’s actually a big gaping hole where the truth, theory, data, and understanding should be. It’s a theatre of imaginary science.
The planet is so unknown that we’re still asking basic questions. We’re just learning what questions to ask.
I’m a questioner.
“won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect unless it comes from carbon that had been locked away out of the system for a long time”
They can’t simply say that there have recently been warm periods, and carbon was also released then. So they can’t admit that until temperatures get warmer than they recently have been, the carbon being released now is part of the normal cycle of warming and cooling.
Anthony,
See
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/science/earth/26climate.html?hpw
‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice
What an incredible turn of events over the last four months.
Well done to the forces of truth and justice!
As usual, everyone here gives widely different numbers for the flows of the carbon cycle, and even for the amount of carbon in the system. This is very confusing.
In the following two charts by IPCC and NASA they lump together soil and vegetation, and the flow give for this pair is about 120 petagrams (or gigatons) in both charts.
IPCC chart:
http://tinyurl.com/y8s4m6m
NASA chart:
http://tinyurl.com/624cbs
So now all of a sudden these researchers are saying that soil *alone* gives off 98 petagrams?? So this means that soil flows represent more than 80% of the soil-vegetation pair?? Or what exactly does it mean?? The more I look at all these ever changing numbers the more confused I become.
Ha! Vindication is sweet. Keeling and Calendar, your statues are toppled, wankers.
Next the fluence of the oceans. Please.
My cola does the same. Odd how science works.
May be something to this CO2 increase after temperature increases. Who knew the very stuff that drives the carbon cycle of life would do this. Warm good for life, cold not so good. Strange.
Sometimes science and scientists just need a time out from pushing the scam.
I bet that next they will be telling us that tilling the soil makes plants grow faster. Will wonders of science never cease.
OT and I’m sure not the first… 40,000,000+ reached; nice work Anthony et al.
Keep it up, the 50M milestone next :o)
Cheers
Mark.
What they are PROVING is our planet’s gases are building-up in our biosphere.
Due to rotation, the gases build-up and push against the atmosphere, not down on the planet.
The ocean’s surface salinity changes is theorized to be from evaporation. If that were the case then all the ocean would be effected an not just the surface.
Our planet pulls the atmosphere and adding more density can change speed of the atmosphere being pulled along.
This study goes hand in glove with Cap and Trade. That is, every time a farmer tils his soil he is responsible for adding to the GHGs. Solution: tax the person who feeds the world. Perhaps there shall be a gardening tax levied in the near future. Think I’m kidding?
Surely we know roughly how much C02 is in the atmosphere, so this does not affect the previous results (the carbon that came from soil must have been accredited to something else to make the figures add up). Although this will presumably be added to the models for the future predictions because it is positive feedback.
Do the models already include the increased c02 absorption by plants with increased c02 and temperature.? The discussion on tree ring data seemed to imply that it is not known if the growth is proportional to temperature. Presumably this is not linear either, as there can only be so much c02 in the soil (if it is absorbed and re-emitted by the plant, surely it would make more sense to calculate it as part of the plant absorption).
There is no way to escape from armageddon!, I suspect all that earth´s bad breath is originated only in the US, as the soil is being poisoned by your peeing after drinking too much Kool-Aid.
@ferdinand meeus Engelbeen
Two important differences with the lab test: seawater is not fresh water and the driving force (the pCO2 difference) is very, very much lower than in the labtest. We are speaking about a globally average difference of 7 microatm between atmosphere and ocean surfaces, not one (or several) atmosphere(s) as in the lab flask…
I’m not talking just about ocean surfaces. Think about clouds. Think about what happens when it rains. We’ve got fresh water in droplet form (high surface to volume ratio) thoroughly mixing with the air. It would scrub CO_2 from the air quite efficiently.
Sincerely you should stop all that crazy kind of “research”, that´s throwing the money in the sewage!
This is great news! I was worried that the progressives were going to run out of things to tax,,, death, health care, air and now co2 breathing soil.
I can’t wait.
@BC Bob (21:38:32) :
“Isn’t it amazing what researchers find when it relates to climate change? No matter what, you can rest assured that it’s all bad, and that further research is required.”
(Bold added by me)
Thank you BC Bob. You’ve just given us all a very handy, very green acronym that will save thousands of keystrokes and trillions of electrons.
IABAFRR (It’s all bad and further reasearch is required.)
Best news I heard today. I am excited. Soils become richer when manure, dead stalks leaves etc decompose and rot. This composting action is how soils become more fertile.
Example:
Near a river we have previous flooded areas which are the dark rich bottom land.
This has very high nutrient and carbon content. Decay of dead trees and leaves are a step in the soil replentishment process in forrests. This releases CO2 and CH4.
The bed wetting urban dwelling scientists don’t understand the cycles in the biosphere and scare easily.
I have read some very abusinve methods of farming suggested by the not smart folks pushing ethanol. Over time the deep rich loam soails will become exhausted. How much CO2 is released by the Sahara dessert?
Is that a sign of great producing land?
By the way, when moisture is missing, CO2 output falls.
Nick Stokes (21:27:02) :
100 million tons CO2 per year is equivalent to burning about 30 million tons C. We burn about 300 times more than that in fossil fuel.
==============
I think you are confusing the total increase (since 1989) with the rate of increase (of the increase). In any case, their own statements contradict each other by a factor of 5.
First they say that the “total amount of carbon dioxide flowing from soils is about 10-15 percent higher than previous measurements.” And they add that “this number is 98 petagrams of carbon a year (or 98 billion metric tons).”
So, assuming a 12.5% increase (i.e. halfway between 10 and 15) this puts “previous measurements” at about 87, so we have an increase of 11 petagrams since “previous measurments”
Which means the *rate* of increase since 1989 would be 11/21 or about 0.5 petagrams per year.
But one paragraph down they say that “the increase in carbon dioxide given off by soils is about 0.1 petagram (100 million metric tons) per year since 1989.”
Which is 5 times below what can be inferred from what they had just said in the previous paragraph. I wonder who writes this stuff??
As with most of this nonsense, the noise massively overshadows the trend. I hereby pledge $1,000 to anyone who can convince me that it does not in this case.
I am looking forward to reading a great many studies of the ‘peer-reviewed’ literature of this era in my dotage, discussing how science can be so easily derailed and statistics can be made to falsify reality.
I am sure they will be asking for more funding and pandering to the latest ‘trendy’ scare that millions of mindless morons are getting their daily fear fix from. Give it a rest – coffee is easier and cheaper, people.
Frankly, so what or should that be so watt
100 million tons is like the attempts to blame Volcanoes with emission of less than 300 million tons per year
Human emissions are ~30 BILLION tons per year and rising
This is kind of ridiculous. It is only one small component of one side of the equation.
Plants and soils are absorbing about 122 GTs (petragrams or billion tonnes) of Carbon each year and releasing 120 GTs.
[The atomic weight of CO2 is 44 while Carbon only makes up 12 of that 44 – We are talking about Carbon and the Carbon Cycle here. In CO2 terms, plants and soils are absorbing about 447 GTs of CO2 and releasing 440 GTs of CO2 each year.]
Plants and soils are are taking in 2 GTs of the 8.5 GTs of Carbon we are releasing each year.
[Oceans are absorbing another 92 GTs per year and releasing 90 GTs].
Furthermore, the ratio that plants and soils and oceans are absorbing of our Carbon emissions has stayed at close to that 50% rate even as our emissions have increased over the last 150 years.
So, a 0.1 GT change in one small component of the Carbon Cycle is more-or-less meaningless especially when plants and soils and oceans are absorbing a net 4.0 GTs (and that rises each year as our emissions and the concentration in the atmosphere increases).
So maybe the rate that soils emit Carbon has increased by 0.1 GTs, but the rate that soils are absorbing Carbon has increased by 0.2 GTs. The climate scientists never tell the whole story. It is always slanted to scare.
It’s a small victory, but maybe only a Pyrrhic one:
The premise remains the same: carbon dioxide is a ‘pollutant’ that is responsible for ‘climate change’.
And Crap and Tax is not quite moribund, either. Two of the most bull-headed fools in the Senate, John Faux Kerry and Lindsay Grahamnesty, are working hard to bring it back to life.
Fortunately, there are Senators from coal and oil producing states who will resist. Maybe the trick is to get the Senators from agricultural states to join in. After all, CO2 is plant food!
We will not have won the war until the Congress (forget the Great Pretender in the Oval Office) stands up as a body and declares, “Carbon dioxide is good for plants, good for the planet, and good for you!”
/Mr Lynn
Luke (22:13:55) : wrote
The problem with tropical rainforrest sequestration is time-scales, they are so biologically active that any carbon-sinking of organic materials only lasts for years, and barely decades but certainly not centuries or millennia. Any dead-fall from the trees or plants only last a year or two before being completely decomposed. When a section or Forrest is cleared, the land becomes infertile in a couple years because all the organics are consumed that quickly; that’s why the WWF’s carbon-offset scheme down there is so bogus! Now ocean dead-zones, that’s where carbon is really sunk. Algae sucks up the CO2, makes 30% vegetable oil, dies, sinks gets cover in silt that becomes shale and in a million year you get petroleum oil back!
“…soils add 100 million tons of CO2 per year”
Ah, all that wonderful marvelous life gas, without which all life on earth would perish. Give us more! Give us more! Swathe our globe in a warm blanket of magical life-giving gas. The earth breathes! Men rejoice!
“After subjecting their comparisons to statistical analysis, the researchers found that the total amount of carbon dioxide being emitted from soil in 2008 was more than in 1989”
There’s some Canadian guy these people need to consult with?
Since at least the pre-Cambrian era some 550-million years ago, atmospheric oxygen accumulation has gone hand-in-hand with CO2 absorption/emission in self-sustaining cycles amenable to measurement on geophysical time-scales. (The Chixculub meteor-strike 65 million years ago burned off near two-thirds of the atmospheric oxygen that fueled the dinosaurs.) On this basis, three general principles apply: Punctuated Equilibrium, the Principle of Mediocrity, and Regression-to-the-Mean.
Punctuated Equilibrium illustrates “persistence”: The fact that long-term phenomena tend to remain unchanged until extraneous shocks force abrupt transitions in radically altered circumstances. The so-called Principle of Mediocrity asserts that, in any given case, odds are high that conditions approximate a long-term mean. Regression simply states that, absent generally unpredictable phase-shifts, abnormal circumstances will tend to equilibrium, clustering about persistent means.
In this 2.6-million year Pleistocene Era, periodic glaciations averaging 102,000 years are regularly interspersed by warming episodes of a median 12,250 years. At present, Equilibrium plus Mediocrity has defined our Holocene Interglacial Epoch since the Younger Dryas “cold shock” c. BC 8800 (a 1,500-year astronomical rather than climatic or geophysical event
ending c. BC 7300, i.e. 9,300 years-before-present [YBP]). So regardless of a 500-year Medieval Warm period (c. AD 850 – 1350) compensated by an offsetting Little Ice Age (c. 1375 – 1890), Earth’s recent temperatures exhibit a millennial fluctuation quite in accord with statistical expectations.
The problem we now face is that, absent the Younger Dryas, Earth’s Long Summer would likely have ended c. AD 500, coincident with the Fall of Rome. In other words, the Holocene Interglacial is 1,500 years past-due to “punctuate”, that is, to shift abruptly to a typical Pleistocene chill-phase engendering miles-deep continental ice sheets persisting some 102,000 years. Now on the threshold of a 20-year “dead sun” Dalton if not a 70-year Maunder Minimum, to let peculating Luddite Climate Cultists –the Green Gang of Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al.– purposefully continue sabotaging Earth’s global energy economies is akin to embracing global civilization’s suicide.
fhsiv (00:01:19) :
While your ‘new’ concrete may have a favorable albedo, it is carbon intensive to manufacture. All that blasting, mucking, hauling, crushing, and sorting requires the combustion of lots of fossil fuel. Not to mention the tremendous amounts of CO2 liberated in the calcining of portland cement.
Good point, and would of course have to be considered before one seriously entertained that idea in the real world ; )
…but if one could put aside CO2 for a second, the point I was driving at is that per the math – that I have found at least – driving the climate models, one would expect a concrete patio to be as cool or cooler than the surrounding lawn.
Someone please correct me on this! I have been trying to find where they have accounted for this, and the only evaporative effect representation I have been able to find is Trenberth’s global average (described above)
H.R. (06:11:05) : I think that acronym would better work as MRR or MSIW (More Silly Ideas Welcomed).
et. al.,
“An increasing global RS value does not necessarily constitute a positive feedback to the atmosphere, as it could be driven by higher carbon inputs to soil rather than by mobilization of stored older carbon. The available data are, however, consistent with an acceleration of the terrestrial carbon cycle in response to global climate change.”
The above is the most important (reveling?) sentence in the writ-up. They HAD TO CREATE a difference between types of carbon. Why? Because if they didn’t then their study would show IT CAN NOT BE CO2 THAT IS DRIVING ANY GLOBAL TEMPERATURE INCREASE!
“….terrestrial carbon cycle in response to global climate change.” There it is in nut shell! If all CO2 is alike AND the global warming models are correct, then THAT sentence would HAVE TO READ, “…. consistent with the increases in global temperatures in response to an acceleration of the terrestrial carbon cycle.”
But then they would have to explain why we do not have a run-away system and situation. And the ONLY explanation for that is – increase density of CO2 has an unmeasurable effect on global atmospheric temperature average.
So there has to be good CO2 and bad CO2 – opps, I mean, ROTTEN CO2. I forgot how we all here are suppose to use only scientific terms.
Hey wait! I see opportunity here. Maybe I’ll write a grant for a few million bucks to come with a scientific explanation as to how IR radiation knows the difference. I can see the WUWT headline 4 yrs from now – “New Study Shows IR Radiation Has Intelligence Level Equal To Most Scientists.”
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. I KNOW most scientists ARE really good – people. WE, collectively – the human race, world wide – are to blame for this type of report. When “scientists” are beholding and work for politicians why would we expect their work product to be – anything other than whatever is expected of them. Wasn’t it Henry VI who said to his science advisor, “Be beholding or be beheaded.”???
Why is this being treated as news? We know from ice core data that after a rise in temperature there is an increase in CO2.
In trying to find what is the reason why these post normal scientist usually arrive at such wird conclusion is that they work in closed air conditioned/central heated environments, where the same air is recycled, so noxious emanations from all the body holes, specially H2S, CH4, and CO2 increase, altering the behaviour of those anthopopithecus subjected to this peculiar kind of nasty atmosphere.Then It would be advisable to add some chemical canisters filters (containing LiOH or NaOH/KOH, activated carbon) to the system as to provide some neutralization of the above quoted gases.
Being subject to this kind of atmosphere surely provokes a projection/generalization making themselves believe the same happends outside their confinement.
fhsiv @ 21:59:00 asked:
“By the way, does the sun still rise in the east?”
I hate to disapoint you but the sun doesn’t rise, let alone rise in the east.
Molds are used to obtain Citric Acid from glucose and if CO2 is present as carbonates they change it into succinic acid:
if these organisms are grown submerged in well-aerated glucose solutions containing CaCO3, appreciable quantities of succinic acid are formed together with noticeable amounts of acetaldehyde and acetic acid.
Just in case some Global Warmer Fanatic wants to reduce CO2:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC533661/pdf/jbacter00816-0034.pdf
So what. Tax people that own land?
How does this compare when they claim the earth was covered with bogs and the vegetation was brewing itself into petroleum?
We will always have decomposition yield CO2. Actually it improves when we have moisture. Not much rotting action in the desert.
Starbuck (06:37:02) :
Frankly, so what or should that be so watt
100 million tons is like the attempts to blame Volcanoes with emission of less than 300 million tons per year
Human emissions are ~30 BILLION tons per year and rising
===========
Well, I’ve just realized there is further confusion generated by this article, because they switch back and forth between CARBON and CO2. So the discrepancy I thought I spotted in my previous post looks even worse.
To clarify things in this mighty sloppy mess. 1 petagram = 1 gigaton = 1 billion tons.
And 1 unit of carbon = 3.67 units of CO2 by weight (44/12)
[By the way, the figure I keep seeing for human emissions is about 6.5 billion tons of CARBON /year, which would be about 24 billion tons of CO2 (not 30)]
Anyway, the reported increase in annual soil emission by these researches is about 11 billion tons of CARBON since 1989, based on the fact that they report a 10-15 percent increase since “previous measurements” with current measurements given as 98 billion tons of carbon per year (see my earlier post).
So, those 11 billion tons of carbon are the equivalent of about 40 billion tons of CO2.
This would mean soil emissions have been increasing at a rate of some 2 billion tons per year (of CO2) since 1989, if you go by their first statement.
Or they have been increasing at 100 million per year if you go by their second statement. That’s only a 20-fold difference. But remember this science is infinitely elastic, so it does not matter. Take your pick.
I wonder if am overlooking something, but that’s how I see it.
Whatever the rate of increase is, it is indeed meaningless without considering the increase on the other side. We know the net balance of natural processes is a sink. And we know the sinks intake has been increasing because they keep taking about half of our emissions, which have increased since then.
More crap research from a crap science published in a crap journal. No surprises here.
“Plants are famous for photosynthesis…”
No, no really, no photographs, but I will be signing autographs
after the show. Snookie?….she’s nothing…..
Re: Francisco (Mar 26 09:03),
They’re mixing annual respiration, which is indeed on the order of 98 Pg carbon/year with net emission of 0.1 Pg carbon. Respiration is in approximate balance annually so they’re just fiddling around at the edges. And they’re neglecting the unknown sink which is absorbing ~1 Pg carbon/year. So if we’ve underestimated net emission from the soil, we’ve also underestimated the absorption rate of the unknown sink. It’s basically a wash and certainly isn’t newsworthy.
DesertYote (21:46:21) : So are reproductive rates of microorganisms. Metabolic rates of current organisms increases + new organisms added to the mix = increase of CO2 via respiration pathways. Which is what we see happening and it didn’t take a funded study to figure that out.
Soon they will be asking each bacteria on the planet to pay tax.
It will be an orgasmic experience when I DO NOT SEE any more BS on CO2. Dreaming of the day… So entirely OVER this BS argument.
COWGATE
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100031389/now-its-cowgate-expert-report-says-claims-of-livestock-causing-global-warming-are-false/
Now it’s CowGate: expert report says claims of livestock causing global warming are false
COULD WE RUN OUT OF GATES?
There are two main ways that (IF AGWT is correct) a true climate catastrophe could develop, and both involve positive feedback loops– one to CO2 and one to methane. This is ultimate danger and the ultimate “alarmist” position.
Undoubtedly, CO2 and Methane are rising, and also being emitted from the soils, peat bogs, ocean beds, etc, but:
1) Are they rising due to the establishment of a positive feedback loop to anthropogenic GH gas emissions?
2) Are they rising enough to affect the global climate beyond natural variability?
3) Are they rising enough to trigger some kind of positive feedback induced climate nightmare scenario?
The answers to #1 and #2 may be strictly academic. The answer to #3, while perhaps likely to be “no”, is obviously important enough to study to see what the chances are that it is “yes”.
kwik (10:51:53) :
Soon they will be asking each bacteria on the planet to pay tax
It’s not only paying taxes, that is only a small part of the story, it is about POWER, big money, and we, commoners, we don’t even imagine what’s that. (I just can’t figure out what is it the need for power and exorbitant amounts of money, for what?). Evidently we lack a gene or something like that, that people like traditional banking families inherit in their blood, while others eagerly seek for being their servants, like Al Baby or J.Coal Trains H. ; frankly unexplainable, but thus is our world.
The trouble comes when their eagerness increases so much as to begin affecting our simple lives, that’s when, as history shows, they awaken our self defense instintcs and they end up as always, crying for momie to help them.
DeWitt Payne (10:21:15) :
Now that make sense. Thanks for the clarification. I think the terminology in these matters is highly unstable and leads to these confusions.
Note that in the two charts I posted before, they give “soil” as distinct from vegetation/plants, under the same category.
The IPCC chart lists “Vegetation, Soil and Detritus” http://tinyurl.com/y8s4m6m
The NASA chart lists “Plants and Soil” and calls this pair “Land”
http://tinyurl.com/624cbs
Whereas here they refer to all the above as “soils” (and they switch back and forth between CO2 and C):
“The scientists also calculated the total amount of carbon dioxide flowing from soils, which is about 10-15 percent higher than previous measurements. That number — about 98 petagrams of carbon a year…”
I also enjoyed that phrase: “Plants are famous for photosynthesis…”
Did they include earthworm belches and toots in the study?
Inquiring minds want to know!
My statistics are a little (ok, a lot) rusty. Could someone verify what they are saying here to justify two “robusts” and a real?
Our analysis is based on climate anomalies and is thus robust to the fact that more high-flux sites have been measured in recent years. But it would be theoretically possible for the jump in measurements between 1989-1998 and 1999-2008, N=348 and 773 respectively, to induce a trend. When the decades are analysed separately, temperate forests (which dominate the data) show a significant trend driven by temperature anomaly (P=0.004) and P=0.10 respectively; the full global data show a weak trend (P=0.09) for 1989-1998, although not for 1999-2008. We thus conclude that the 1989-2008 trend is robust and real.
Ian H (05:50:37) :
I think you are right about clouds and rain (huge surface area in contact with the air).
Ferdinand seems to ignore that the seawater is in fact full of CO2 using micro-organisms and the partial pressure of CO2 is only relevant to the absolute amount dissolved in a given time. The time constants should be the same.
Why should a reduction in human emissions take several years to be noticed? There are seasonal signals in the CO2 atmospheric concentrations as measured. The effect should be immediately apparent.
Ferdinand lost me when he claimed here that we couldn’t derive the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere from the C14 residence time from bomb tests as “there was so little that the plants scarfed it all up”. Or words to that effect. He has a knack of sounding reasonable while making arguments which are full of holes to put it politely.
Mia Nony (12:15:39) :
(…)
COULD WE RUN OUT OF GATES?
Hope not, since then the horsies will run away.
Did the IPCC make any claims about disastrous animal migrations that involved wild horses? When those are disproven, then we can have GaitGate!
So they measure how much extra CO2 is being released due to higher temperatures, but not how much is being stored (presumably someone else is studying this). With higher temperatures, and more CO2, biomass increases and certainly must also be storing more CO2 than in cooler and CO2 deprived times.
Also, what is the significance, 68%? or 95%. While the uncertainty of an individual measurement must certainly dwarf what they are finding (0.1% per year, 2% over 20 years), collectively the trends may be more certain (assuming the + = the -). The uncertainty in the total CO2 being released or stored must be even larger since this can only be estimated, and not measured.
Climate science continues to keep uncertainty locked in a closet, and pretend it does not exist, so they can pretend to a certitude that does not exist.
Ray (21:52:12) :
“After subjecting their comparisons to statistical analysis,…”
I hope it’s not Mannian statistics!
I suspect the statistics is wrong too. We now know that time series require special handling that has not typically been done in climate studies. So, chances are pretty good we can toss this study in the garbage can.
Starbuck (06:37:02) :
Human emissions are ~30 BILLION tons per year and rising
Technically falling at the moment, as some posts above explain.
Quite how this is going to be made to fit with the “hottest year EVAH” that we are sure to have will be interesting to see.
Yes, I know the long-term trend is clearly upward, but one of the features of the extreme warmists fiddling of their data is that they are doing it even when it is contrary to what they seek to prove.
If it is super-hot this year and CO2 output has been down for a couple of years, then the link between the two is weakened, not strengthened.
Mike Borgelt (14:33:45) :
Ian H (05:50:37) :
I think you are right about clouds and rain (huge surface area in contact with the air).
Ferdinand seems to ignore that the seawater is in fact full of CO2 using micro-organisms and the partial pressure of CO2 is only relevant to the absolute amount dissolved in a given time. The time constants should be the same.
Why should a reduction in human emissions take several years to be noticed? There are seasonal signals in the CO2 atmospheric concentrations as measured. The effect should be immediately apparent.
Ferdinand lost me when he claimed here that we couldn’t derive the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere from the C14 residence time from bomb tests as “there was so little that the plants scarfed it all up”. Or words to that effect. He has a knack of sounding reasonable while making arguments which are full of holes to put it politely
To start with CO2 in rain: That is part of the normal cycle of CO2 in the atmosphere and helps to dissolve carbonate rocks on land. The only difference may be that warmer temperatures increase moisture and thus rain, dissolving more CO2 back to earth (which may be released again when drying up). But I haven’t seen any figures until now if that makes a huge change in the balance, neither in atmospheric CO2 levels when it is raining.
There are two important points in the release/uptake of CO2 by the oceans: the local partial pressure difference and the diffusion speed. The first can be quite high: ocean pCO2 hundreds of microatm below or above the atmospheric pCO2, from near the poles to the equator. Temperature makes the main difference, but biolife goes the opposite way. But in average, the pCO2 difference is only 7 microatm, which is the only driving force to push extra CO2 into the oceans. The diffusion speed is the main limiting factor which makes that with the current pCO2 difference only some 3 GtC extra CO2/year is absorbed by the oceans (humans emit 8 GtC/year).
May I urgently ask you to read the papers of Feely e.a. who have looked at the transfer rates of CO2 in/out the oceans:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml
The noise in CO2 levels caused by temperature changes (Pinatubo, El Niño) is about +/- 1.5 GtC/yr in the atmosphere (see http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em.jpg where 1 ppmv = 2.1 GtC). To see a change in trend, the difference in increase should be at least 1.5 GtC to be visible out of the noise. The current increase in the atmosphere is about 4 GtC/yr caused by 8 GtC emissions. With a 10% reduction in emissions and a steady state sink capacity, the increase sinks to 3.2 GtC/yr. That means that you need at least 2-3 years before a reduction in increase speed is observed.
About the residence time: what you (and many others like Segalstad) are looking at is how long a certain molecule CO2 (whatever the origin or type) resides in the atmosphere, before getting exchanged with oceans or vegetation. That is about 5.2 years average. That is governed by the exchange rates between atmosphere and oceans/vegetation of about 150 GtC/year, or near 20% of what resides in the atmosphere. That doesn’t change the total quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere with one milligram, as long as it is only exchange and the net balance over a full seasonal cycle is zero.
What the IPCC looks for is how long an additional quantity (whatever the origin or type) stays in the atmosphere. That is governed by the sink capacity of the oceans and vegetation to absorb at least a part of the extra CO2 over time. But currently that is only 4 GtC/year, halve of what is emitted, only 0.5% of what is in the atmosphere. If we should stop all emissions today, next year the amount in the atmosphere would sink with 4 GtC, the year after that with 3.xx GtC (as the pressure difference air-oceans is reduced), etc…
The decay rate for extra CO2 in the atmosphere has a half life of about 38 years (see Peter Dietze at http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm ), much longer than the 5.2 years residence time, but much better than the “hundreds of years” of the IPCC…
Ferdinand Engelbeen
The only difference may be that warmer temperatures increase moisture and thus rain, dissolving more CO2 back to earth (which may be released again when drying up>>
While this makes sense on land, does it not rain over the ocean too?
Ferdinand Engelbeen
May I urgently ask you to read the papers of Feely e.a. who have looked at the transfer rates of CO2 in/out the oceans:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml>>
I skimmed the paper. My question relates to ocean circulation. Various ocean currents move large amounts of water from warm to cold and vice versa. The paper seems to treat the oceans as static except for upwelling etc. Would not the ocean currents be constantly moving co2 laden cold water to warm, releasing CO2, and co2 defficient warm water toward the poles, where its capacity to absorb increases as it cools?
Wondering Aloud (21:10:25) :
“The increase in carbon dioxide given off by soils — about 0.1 petagram (100 million metric tons) per year since 1989 — won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect unless it comes from carbon that had been locked away out of the system for a long time”
Does this statement make any logical sense at all? Is he claiming that somehow carbon dioxide molecules released from soil somehow know better than to absorb radiation? Have they been specially trained to be aware of environmental issues?
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Carbon cycle
Richard M (16:50:32) :
Ray (21:52:12) :
“After subjecting their comparisons to statistical analysis,…”
I hope it’s not Mannian statistics!
I suspect the statistics is wrong too. We now know that time series require special handling that has not typically been done in climate studies. So, chances are pretty good we can toss this study in the garbage can.
====
If you get the right answer by faulty method, forget it. Throw that answer in the trash. We want right methods, not right answers.
Mia Nony (12:15:39) :
COWGATE
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100031389/now-its-cowgate-expert-report-says-claims-of-livestock-causing-global-warming-are-false/
Now it’s CowGate: expert report says claims of livestock causing global warming are false
COULD WE RUN OUT OF GATES?
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Not as long as the Telegraph has Gerald Warner spinning. Much better coverage of the this study can be found at
http://www.pigprogress.net/news/eating-less-meat-has-no-effect-on-global-warming-4065.html
pigprogress is a far more accurate source of information than the Telegraph.
As a humane gesture to the elderly on fixed incomes we should get as much coal as we can out of the earth so the price of coal goes down. Then build more coal powered electricity plants. That would translate to lower electric bills. This would alleviate some of the pressure on those with tight budgets.
Plus there would be the benefit to plant life from the extra co2 in the air. Food prices would go down a little. That would be great for those on fixed incomes too!
What a wonderful gesture it would be! 🙂
Wren (20:08:58) :
If you get the right answer by faulty method, forget it. Throw that answer in the trash. We want right methods, not right answers.
……………………………………………………………………………………………….
A broken clock is precisely right twice a day. I can see you are the type that would feature this clock as a fine working machine even though it is broken. After all, getting something right, even with a wrong method, is ok.
But really, we need to toss out the broken clock and the broken ‘global warming’ computer climate models, hypothesis’, and data handling procedures. No more ‘trick’ from Mike.
It would be a cleaner world then.
And isn’t that what global warming is all about—a cleaner world?
Wren (20:32:40) :
pigprogress is a far more accurate source of information than the Telegraph.
………………………………………………………………………………………….
I know an even more accurate source: WattsUpWithThat
If Tommy Gold’s ideas merit attention, then CH4 and CO2 emmisions from the solid earth from the subterranean biosphere represent another “unfactored” forcing in the climate system.
Folks,
We humans are a life form that oxidises carbon to live.
To then penalise carbon consumption for some maligned political goal is nothing other than extremist misanthropical belief. They are simply, to coin a coarse term, brain-[snipped]. (Or dead).
[Sorry Louis, we’re ‘Mericans here, started by Puritans (who escaped from the Roundheads’ rule). Some folks would be offended by dropping the f-bomb. Protecting our innocent womenfolk & all. ☺ ~dbs]
davidmhoffer (19:03:49) :
While this makes sense on land, does it not rain over the ocean too?
I skimmed the paper. My question relates to ocean circulation. Various ocean currents move large amounts of water from warm to cold and vice versa. The paper seems to treat the oceans as static except for upwelling etc. Would not the ocean currents be constantly moving co2 laden cold water to warm, releasing CO2, and co2 defficient warm water toward the poles, where its capacity to absorb increases as it cools.
Even with heavy rain (100 l/m2 = 10 cm water increase by rain), over the oceans, that will mix in quite rapidely in the upper ocean layer, which is about 100 m thick (in average). Thus the local/regional mixing in is about 0.1% of the upper ocean volume. That hardly changes the composition and thus the pCO2 of the surface seawater, which is the dominant factor for CO2 releases/uptake. Depending where it rains, the CO2 dissolved in the drops will be released immediately or retained and added to the sink rate.
Moreover, raindrops are formed at hundreds to thousands meter altitude, warming up (thus loosing CO2) while falling down. There is little difference in CO2 levels between altitudes over the oceans…
The main CO2 flow is via the deep oceans: huge dissolving in the NE Atlantic, upwelling in the equatorial Pacific (some 1,000 years later)… Surface flows are in constant connection with the atmosphere and act as source/sink at the place where they are, based on temperature, DIC (dissolved inorganic carbon) content, pH, biolife,… It doesn’t make much difference if the ocean surfaces are static or dynamic transporting CO2 over the latitudes, as most of the exchanges with the atmosphere are regionally controlled, mainly by temperature and up/downwelling from/to the deep oceans.
Wren said:
“COULD WE RUN OUT OF GATES?”
————
I’ve done my part to make sure that doesn’t happen, adding two little carbon footprints in the process…
Wouldn’t this same process have happened during the MGWP? (I renamed MWP to MGWP – Medieval Global Warming Period)
Is ice core sampling capable of verification one way or the other?
And… just restating the obvious… it remains meaningless at a fundamental level if no credible evidence can be produced to prove that CO2 level has any measurable impact on earth’s climate.
Mike M (08:53:08) :
Wouldn’t this same process have happened during the MGWP? (I renamed MWP to MGWP – Medieval Global Warming Period)
Is ice core sampling capable of verification one way or the other?
Indeed there is a small drop of CO2 levels from the MWP to the LIA of about 6 ppmv. If we may assume that the temperature difference was about 0.8 C (NOT derived from Mann’s HS), then the difference is about 8 ppmv/C. That is similar to changes found during glacials-interglacials over the past 420,000 years.
That includes all processes, including ocean absorption/releases, forest/ice cap area changes, plant growth and decay, soil respiration…
Indeed there is a small drop of CO2 levels from the MWP to the LIA of about 6 ppmv. If we may assume that the temperature difference was about 0.8 C (NOT derived from Mann’s HS), then the difference is about 8 ppmv/C>>
This would seem reasonable provided that the NH and SH change temperature in concert with each other. The current trend of the last few years shows temperature in both hemisphere’s rising, but prior to that the temperature record shows the SH following a different trend in opposition to the NH and thus having a tendency to cancel each other out to some extent. If they were in concert with each other in MWP/LIA then 8 ppm/C makes sense, but if they were in opposition to each other then it would more correctly be X-Y=8ppm/C ?
davidmhoffer (10:32:55) :
The 8 ppmv/C indeed is only for global temperatures (during ice ages/interglacials in fact for SH SST, as the dD or D18O of the inland ice cores is mostly influenced by SH ocean temperatures). For the MWP-LIA transition, that depends of where the proxies were sampled. In the case of the Moberg (and Esper) reconstructions, the bulk of the samples is in the NH, with some from the Carribean and a few in the SH…
For the modern variability of CO2 increase around the trend, there is a good correlation with global SST (and/or satellite trends). The 1992 Pinatubo temperature dip and 1998 El Niño rise of temperature shows some 1 month lag for CO2 levels and 4 ppmv/C change.
I suppose that if NH and SH sea surface temperatures were going in exact opposite directions that the CO2 levels wouldn’t change…
Ferdinand Engelbeen
I suppose that if NH and SH sea surface temperatures were going in exact opposite directions that the CO2 levels wouldn’t change…>>
If I use NASA/GISS broken down by latitude and focus on the 44N to 90N, and 44S to 90S (too short a time period to be conclusive of course, and far arctic weather station is iffy too…) I can observe the following temperature anomalies:
1901 – 1923 NH- SH-
1923 – 1970 NH+ SH-
1970 – 1979 NH- SH+
1979 – 2009 NH+ SH+
So, if we focus on those portions of the world that show the most temperature variation (and hence the most change in CO2 absorbtion) we get both hemispheres below normal for 1/4 the record, both above normal for 1/4 the record, and in opposite directions for half the record. Perhaps this nets to zero on a millenial scale, but I think this shows why I question calculating temperature sensitivity for CO2 on a global temperature calculation. In the event that we could get rid of all the noise in the system and only look at temperature and ocean obsorption, if we used global temperatures only, we would get one value for 1923 – 1979 and a completely different (much higher) value for the timeline before and after.
davidmhoffer (14:20:50) :
I don’t think that the NH/SH behaviour makes much difference for the temperature/CO2 ratio. Pieter Tans of NOAA used a response function for temperature (and precipitation) changes over the past 50 years, which explains about 2/3rd of the observed CO2 rate of change variability. See the second halve of his presentation at the festivities for 50 years Mauna Loa CO2 observations:
http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf
Thus that covers the data over three periods with different behaviour of the NH and SH…
Ferdinand,
On the 8 ppm/C, I know there was a recent paper that was close to this number and I’ve seen it quoted before but I get about 15 ppm/C for the ice ages.
CO2 changes from 287 ppm at the height of the last Eemian interglacial (temp +2.0C) to 185 ppm at the height of the last ice age (temp -5.0C) or about 15 ppm/C.
If one is using the deep ocean as the final arbitrator of the ppm/C ration, it would be much higher since deep ocean temperatures probably only changed by about 2C or 3C through the glacial cycles.
Ferdinand Engelbeen
Thus that covers the data over three periods with different behaviour of the NH and SH…>>
I made the point about temp anomalies being +ve or -ve to explain, but I should have gone into more detail. It’s not just a function of which hemisphere is up and which is down, it is also a function of which way each is trending. On a seasonal scale, they obviously trend in opposite directions.
On GISS, they both trend up from about 1967 on. Prior to 1934 however, the NH trend was up and the SH trend was down going back to 1880. The part in between is wishy washy. So the last 50 years of data would not demonstrate what I’m trying so poorly to articulate.
Oh Noes, Mother Earth is killing herself. Looks like soil and all the natural good things in it needs to be listed as being hazardous to the environment and have the EPA ban it all and tax it all out of existence.
Bill Illis (07:39:43) :
On the 8 ppm/C, I know there was a recent paper that was close to this number and I’ve seen it quoted before but I get about 15 ppm/C for the ice ages.
I have seen similar figures somewhere between 8 and 12 ppmv/C, depending of what you take as proxy for temperature. Further the 8 ppmv/C is only releated to the SH ocean temperature, as that is what influences the dD and d18O in the high altitude ice cores of Antarctica. It may be that the temperature differences in the NH were more pronounced with more land ice during glacials and higher land temperatures/forests area during interglacials. On the other hand, some 8 ppmv/C was also found for the MWP-LIA difference, which was mainly based on NH proxies over land (Moberg, Esper)…
Anyway, it is somewhere around 10 ppmv/C, including all slow changes of ice caps and forests growing and waning, ocean currents,…