This could be a game changer. From the University of California, Irvine press release, a finding that suggests soil microbes have a negative feedback with temperature increase. This has broad implications for the amount of CO2 emitted estimated in climate models. It had been assumed that as temperature increased, microbes and fungii would increase their CO2 output. Globally, this microbiotic contribution is large. The amount of CO2 released from soils worldwide each year is estimated to be about 8-10 times greater than the amount released by humans.
This study shows that soil microbes won’t go into a an “overdrive” mode when soil temperature increases.
Soil microbes produce less atmospheric CO2 than expected with climate warming
Key players in the carbon cycle, they multiply slowly when overheated
— Irvine, Calif., April 26, 2010 —
The physiology of microbes living underground could determine the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from soil on a warmer Earth, according to a study published online this week in Nature Geoscience.
Researchers at UC Irvine, Colorado State University and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies found that as global temperatures increase, microbes in soil become less efficient over time at converting carbon in soil into carbon dioxide, a key contributor to climate warming.
Microbes, in the form of bacteria and fungi, use carbon for energy to breathe, or respire, and to grow in size and in number. A model developed by the researchers shows microbes exhaling carbon dioxide furiously for a short period of time in a warmer environment, leaving less carbon to grow on. As warmer temperatures are maintained, the less efficient use of carbon by the microbes causes them to decrease in number, eventually resulting in less carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere.
“Microbes aren’t the destructive agents of global warming that scientists had previously believed,” said Steven Allison, assistant professor of ecology & evolutionary biology at UCI and lead author on the study. “Microbes function like humans: They take in carbon-based fuel and breathe out carbon dioxide. They are the engines that drive carbon cycling in soil. In a balanced environment, plants store carbon in the soil and microbes use that carbon to grow. The microbes then produce enzymes that convert soil carbon into atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
The study, “Soil-Carbon Response to Warming Dependent on Microbial Physiology,” contradicts the results of older models that assume microbes will continue to spew ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the climate continues to warm. The new simulations suggest that if microbial efficiency declines in a warmer world, carbon dioxide emissions will fall back to pre-warming levels, a pattern seen in field experiments. But if microbes manage to adapt to the warmth – for instance, through increased enzyme activity – emissions could intensify.
“When we developed a model based on the actual biology of soil microbes, we found that soil carbon may not be lost to the atmosphere as the climate warms,” said Matthew Wallenstein of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. “Conventional ecosystem models that didn’t include enzymes did not make the same predictions.”
Mark Bradford, assistant professor of terrestrial ecosystem ecology at Yale, said there is intense debate in the scientific community over whether the loss of soil carbon will contribute to global warming. “The challenge we have in predicting this is that the microbial processes causing this loss are poorly understood,” he said. “More research in this area will help reduce uncertainties in climate prediction.”
Is this peer reviewed ?
Pamela Gray says:
“We are talking about such a small change in an already extremely small percent of atmospheric gases that this will never be observed as a measurable event.”
That is the key point. The climate alarmist crowd wants people to think that the increase in CO2, coinciding entirely by chance with the industrial revolution, is due to human emissions.
That is a deliberate misrepresentation. Almost all of the increase in CO2 comes from natural sources.
Only about one-quarter of one percent of all GHG emissions are from human activities. CO2 is only one minor fraction of total GHGs. Further, CO2 is a minor trace gas, comprising only 0.00039 of the atmosphere.
The entire global warming scare is based on the misguided belief that human produced CO2 has a measurable effect on global temperatures. It does not. No empirical measurement of human emitted CO2 causing a quantifiable change in global temperature has ever been made. The effect is simply too small to measure.
****************Ed Caryl says:
April 28, 2010 at 6:57 am
Jim
“Tree roots growing through limestone.”
http://www.redrockcanyonopenspace.org/page65.html
No. It’s purely mechanical. Small root hairs grow into small cracks going after moisture, then grow bigger.
****************
That does not appear to the mechanism I see. I have a large limestone rock in my yard for decoration. It had roots all through it when we got it. There are holes where the roots were, not cracks. (Some roots are still in it.) The holes are smooth-walled, not jagged as if they had been produced by mechanical force.
After my garbled earlier attempt to make the point that soil organics are a HUGE part of the picture, Tom in Co. made the (erroneous) point that carbon requires an “inoxic” environment to stay in the soil. Not So. In the relatively small deposits of anthropogenic Terra Preta soil in the Amazon basin, there are enormous stores of almost-permanently sequestrated CO2.
Proper forms of horticulture can sink CO2 into farmlands much more cheaply than compressing it and pumping it into salt formations. With any reasonable cropping methodology, the humics are there to stay. Even better in a warming, high CO2 world.
Buried long enough, yes, even coal and oil might form. Right now we need it to produce food with lower synthetic fertilizer input.
OT News: Beaconsfield candidates cheered over global warming ‘doubts’
With the main two UK political parties (Lib-Dem/Tory) agreeing with X government party (labour) on Global warming, we’ve not heard much about global warming in the UK election. So this article from a small local paper is interesting because it shows the kind of response candidates will be getting when they raise this issue in the UK election.
TWO parliamentary candidates were cheered by sections of a hustings audience in Beaconsfield when they expressed doubts about global warming.
When asked about the importance of reducing our carbon footprint Quentin Baron, standing as an independent, said: “I’m personally not convinced about climate change or global warming. I don’t think we are being told the truth.
“There are too many conflicting reports in my opinion…I don’t know what to think.”
Delphine Gray-Fisk, the UKIP candidate for the Beaconsfield constituency, said the climate has been changing for thousands of years adding: “I don’t yet feel convinced that it’s anything to do with man.”
She said there was a limit to fossil fuels however, and efforts should be made to decrease pollution.
Jem Bailey, representing the Green Party, responded: “Oh dear…I’m not going to win votes from certain people in this room. It’s sad to see that some people have been mind-washed.
http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/localnews/beaconsfield/8125675.Candidates_cheered_for_global_warming__doubts_/
From the press release: “But if microbes manage to adapt to the warmth – for instance, through increased enzyme activity – emissions could intensify.”
So, we should continue to run up CO2 levels and see what happens. If we ruin this planet we can always move to another one, right?
REPLY: The whole AGW issue is built on “what if?”. You could come up with a hundred more “what if” scenarios. What if microbes develop super powers? What if they develop an affinity for increased CO2? What if nothing happens at all? The planet and the microbes did just fine before when CO2 levels were higher in ancient past. I’m not going to worry about them and neither should anyone else as we have virtually no control over the sum of the biospheric microbiotics. -A
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
One must learn to think well, before learning to think; afterwards, it proves too difficult.
There is something truly amiss in the climate science field. One is taught early about the biologic source of the Earth’s atmosphere. That oxygen is unlikely to exist atmospherically in the absence of biological activity. That the primary exchange gas for oxygen is CO2. Yet the climate scientists are constantly conjecturing as if they are unaware of entire fields of study. In order to study climate properly every field from astrophysics thru oceanography must be accounted for. Instead we have test tube experiments on CO2 and suspect tree ring sizing.
OMG!
It was all going so well until they snuck in…
Have any shown signs of adapting?
Well no… but wait ’till they do, then the excrement will really hit the fan!
& what if microbes adapted to the current conditions to grow to super-sized microbes the size of houses?
They’ve shown no signs of doing so but when they do…
DaveE.
The good news is that their business it is, up to now, BROKE. All but negative feedbacks.
Gotto do something Al baby!…if you don’t, boss will fire you!
“stevengoddard says:
April 28, 2010 at 5:50 am
CO2 emissions have increased much faster than atmospheric CO2. The deficiency in atmospheric CO2 probably indicates that CO2 is removed from the atmosphere much faster than our CAGW friends want policymakers to believe.”
Absolutely true. There appears to be a disregard of Henry’s Law and a failure to take into account the surface area of every cold pure water droplet in clouds worldwide; a significantly higher surface area than the oceans. These droplets then fall as rain taking the CO2 to the surface. CO2 gets washed out of the atmosphere VERY much faster than admitted. This could also account for CO2’s not well mixed state.
I use Chrome for everything these days, even on my droid phone. Firefox is slow and buggy.
I can’t post to tips section anymore from work, so I thought I’d try here…
Well, it was only a matter of time. Global warming may cause cancer and mental illness.
I thought global warming REQUIRED mental illness…
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/64827
I think it’s completely obvious – and it had to be obvious for more than 100+ years for anyone who knows basics of science – that all these biological feedbacks have to be negative.
If there is an excess of a compound (or energy), those objects and processes that consume it begin to thrive, while those that need place to emit extra of this excessive stuff get suppressed. So all the objects and additional processes act against the initial change.
That’s what the La Chatelier principle implies – and while the principle is normally applied to “chemistry” only, it’s pretty clear that the microbes’ activity is just a set of complex chemical reactions, so the principle still applies.
my 2 cents – the study appears to fit the naturally recurring Carbon cycle for flora.
During hotter seasons, plants store more carbon in the soil which is then broken down the following year by Microbes which in turn release the CO2 as food. Given that its never “hot” all the time, the CO2 is produced and consumed under optimal conditions.
Why did they need a “model” for this?
Let’s see now….
Microbes account for 8-times more CO2 than man and the feedback is not well understood.
Clouds are not well understood while albedo affects 35% of solar energy directed at Earth. Cosmic ray effects are not well understood but there is a greater correlation between solar activity and temperature versus the correlation (nearly zero except during the 30 years between 1970 and 2000) between CO2 and temperature.
With all that “not well understood” hanging out there, I am sure glad that the science is settled. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
Paul says:
April 28, 2010 at 6:00 am
….To my mind, the most revealing hockey-stick graph would be the funding directed towards ‘climate science’ since the weather ceased being the weather and became man-made and catastrophic to boot.
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Here is the climate funding: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/23/climate-science-follow-the-money/
Tom in Co. says:
April 28, 2010 at 8:46 am
The biggest unknown in my mind with this cycle, is the generation of carbonate sediments in the ocean (that which becomes limestone). It would make sense that if the CO2 content in the ocean were to increase that the rate of carbonate sediments would also increase, but I have not seen any quantification of this process sensitivity. If this were true it, could be the biggest negative feedback of all.
Actually, more CO2 in the ocean makes it (slightly) more acidic via the formation of small amounts of carbonic acid, as I understand it. This could potentially have adverse impacts on coral reefs.
Climate catastrophism depends of a chain of causes and effects. If any link is broken the chain fails. If this link can be broken, it will be a game-changer.
I don’t think that extra CO2 will have any significant effect on temperature, as the CAGW theory has cause and effect the wrong way round.
However, this paper should help to reassure those that do worry about extra CO2 and is a good example of the way the ecosystem stays in balance. There are also marine and soil bacteria which have the ability to fix CO2 and, which also thrive when levels of this life giving gas increase.
As illustrated by Milwaukee Bob’s post, will still only understand a fraction of what part the Earth’s estimated 5 million-trillion-trillion microbes play in maintaining the ecosystem.
#
Enginer says:
April 28, 2010 at 9:30 am
…..Proper forms of horticulture can sink CO2 into farmlands much more cheaply than compressing it and pumping it into salt formations…..
________________________________________________________________________
I had made a half in jest comment to another post that we should be using sealed green houses to sequester CO2 if the idiots in government insist on CO2 legislation. Dumping all that nice plant food into a hole and burying it is crazy.
Quiz:
What is the meteorological phenomenon which repeats itself much more times in the earth on a daily basis?
Answer:
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00239.htm
Gail Combs : What everyone should do is to Cap&Dump green politicians.
The third reference provided by Jimbo @ur momisugly April 28, 2010 at 5:48 am
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-196
is disconcerting with regard to ststements made about positive feedbacks by water vapor. (see below) Is this corroborated by others? Has Lintzen weighed in on this? I’m surprised this hasn’t been touted in the alarmist press, or maybe I’ve just missed it. Any knowledgeable comments?
Here’s what I’m referring to:
“In another major finding, scientists using AIRS data have removed most of the uncertainty about the role of water vapor in atmospheric models. The data are the strongest observational evidence to date for how water vapor responds to a warming climate.
“AIRS temperature and water vapor observations have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.
“Dessler explained that most of the warming caused by carbon dioxide does not come directly from carbon dioxide, but from effects known as feedbacks. Water vapor is a particularly important feedback. As the climate warms, the atmosphere becomes more humid. Since water is a greenhouse gas, it serves as a powerful positive feedback to the climate system, amplifying the initial warming. AIRS measurements of water vapor reveal that water greatly amplifies warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide. Comparisons of AIRS data with models and re-analyses are in excellent agreement.
“The implication of these studies is that, should greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current course of increase, we are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century, unless some strong negative feedback mechanism emerges elsewhere in Earth’s climate system,” Dessler said.”
gcb says:
April 28, 2010 at 11:01 am
“…..Actually, more CO2 in the ocean makes it (slightly) more acidic via the formation of small amounts of carbonic acid, as I understand it. This could potentially have adverse impacts on coral reefs.”
__________________________________________________________________
That whole line of thinking is discussed here. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/11/not-as-bad-as-we-thought-coral-can-recover-from-climate-change-damage/
and here: http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/bleached-coral-reefs-bounce-back