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.”
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@Milwaukee Bob:
Any idea how many microbes line the human alimentary canal? Any idea what happens when they are not present?
If I’m reading this correctly, this study suggests we should have _less_ bacteria and fungus in warmer climates. That certainly isn’t true. Nor do we get less bacteria or fungus in a given region when it gets warm.
As far as I can see, this is just another bogus computer model being used to generate funding. They’re junk when the AGW guys use ’em. They’re junk when the skeptics use ’em.
John Galt says:
April 28, 2010 at 6:59 am. It likely won’t be a game changer because it will be ignored. When ignoring fails, it will be summarily dismissed. However, it may be one more thing the climate models got wrong. As always, this study needs to be followed up by others to validate the conclusions.
The real crime is how many of the 21+ General Circulation Models (used to project temperature in the year 2095) include a term for microbial CO2 with a positive feedback. We don’t know. And if we do know which models have a positive feedback term for this, will the factor be removed and the programs rerun? I doubt it.
Ocean Acidification: Chicken Little Strikes Again
Oceanic pH and Atmospheric CO2 over last 6,000 years
Flinders Reef (1700-1988, data from Pelejero et al., 2005)
Great Barrier Reef – 60 Reef Data Set (data from De’ath et al., 2009)
Calcification rates with elevated CO2 under laboratory conditions (data from Ries et al., 2009)
Coccoliths and CO2 (data from Iglesias-Rodriguez et al., 2008)
I’ve got a game changer for the global warming agenda. The volcano in Iceland is still spewing ash into the upper atmospher. It’s a well established climate model that can demonstrate the effect of this volcano for the next 2 to 5 years at least. That scientifically established effect is known as global cooling. It’s true what is said above, that nature doesn’t give a crap about climate models. Now there’s a game changer.
Straight from IPCC AR4 ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch7s7-3-3-1.html ):
“Soil warming experiments typically show marked soil respiration increases at elevated temperature (Oechel et al., 2000; Rustad et al., 2001; Melillo et al., 2002), but CO2 fluxes return to initial levels in a few years as pools of organic substrate re-equilibrate with inputs (Knorr et al., 2005). However, in dry soils, decomposition may be limited by moisture and not respond to temperature (Luo et al., 2001).”
So…. what is new in this study anyway? What is revolutionary here, when IPCC already said the same?
[quote David44 says:]
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.
[/quote]
Baloney.
As the climate has gotten warmer:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/BarChartsForSattelliteTempTrends.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/images/BarChartsForSurfaceTempTrends.gif
Water vapor has deceased:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/TotalColumnWaterVapourDifferentAltitudesObservationsSince1983.gif
[Note: WordPress uses HTML, and requires angle brackets. Examples are shown below the comment box at the bottom of the page. ~dbs]
P.S.
The AIRS stuff is probably referring to the same stuff that scienceofdoom talks about on his web site. Increased water vapor does cause warming in the weather. There is no question about that and the science is very well understood.
But, as our friends over at RealClimate like to say, weather’s not climate. In the climate there’s no indication that increased water vapor leads to increased temperatures. In fact, it’s the other way around, as temperatures are going up, water vapor is going down.
Was the microbial soil test done on grounds that was saturated with RoundUp or DDT, these compounds do not break down easily and they do inhibit soil microbial growth.
Jim says:
April 28, 2010 at 9:20 am
****************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.
*****************
I kept looking. And guess what, I found a paper that mentioned that bacteria and fungi grow alongside roots.
http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/784.pdf
Also found:
http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/sciences/botanicalsciences/plantsstructure/MatureRoot/MatureRoot.htm
With this:
“Mineral Uptake: Root hairs are responsible for initiating and maintaining cation exchange relationships with microscopic soil particle. Here the root hair secretes hydrogen ions onto the soil particle, exchanging them for mineral ions (calcium, magnesium, iron, etc.). Then the root removes those minerals from the soil water surrounding the soil particle. ”
That process would obviously produce CO2 from limestone. Jim, you were correct.
[quote ~dbs]
[Note: WordPress uses HTML, and requires angle brackets. Examples are shown below the comment box at the bottom of the page. ~dbs]
[/quote]
Perhaps there was a shift change or something, but I’ve already replied that I like using square brackets.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The quote is actually “A little learning is a dangerous thing”
From An Essay on Criticism, 1709 by Alexander Pope
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.”
This has been a standard mantra of the AGW crowd for a positive feedback, that the ocean will acidify and the carbonate reefs will dissolve and release even more CO2. But this is not supported by the geologic record at all. For the past 300 million years, the CO2 content in the air, has been more than three times what it is today (>1000 ppm). If the AGW theory were true, there would be no carbonate rocks in the geologic column (because it would have all dissolved in the “carbonic acid” rich ocean). Yet the geologic column is rich with lots of carbonate rock, in fact there is much more carbonate rocks in the past than they can see forming in the present.
Enneagram says:
April 28, 2010 at 5:42 am
Organic life on earth is closely linked to carbon cycle simply because WE are made out from CARBON and WATER. Every individual absorbs and emits energy according to its inner structure.
I think you raise such a thought provoking point, that the government wants to actually regulate our place in the carbon cycle, in nature itself! That is something that puts it on a spiritual or religious plane, because they are telling us what we must do to live at one with the planet, to atone for our existence. I hope your post gives people a little shock, as they always do for me! 🙂 🙂
What Professor Motl says above is exactly what I was thinking about this post, and about the stuff that Willis Eschenbach has been writing about Earth as a “thermostat.” It is a well-observed and proven principle that nature somehow always seeks an equilibrium, and that all of the processes of nature appear to be designed in a manner to produce that effect. What we are seeing in the daily data we observe is nature striving in its own way to attain an equilibrium state. We just want to learn more about how and when that happens. Mankind can really do little by itself to disturb those processes on a global scale (even though it can occasionally do so on a local scale).
Let’s not forget the lowly anaerobic microbes which accomplish the exact opposite. They love co2 and hate o2. Maybe we could send a few to Venus;-)
David Middleton says:
April 28, 2010 at 6:28 am
Is the current estimate of the natural carbon flux actually measured?
Or is it based on a model?
When I use Knorr’s 0.55 decay rate for atmospheric CO2, I come up with a residence time (RT) of ~15 years (with 95% cycled out of the atmosphere within 5 years).
When I use the CDIAC anthropogenic emissions history back to 1751 and the 0.55 decay rate, I back calculate a natural CO2 flux to the atmosphere of 437 GtC in 1751, gradually rising to 592 GtC in 2006. The highest value I can find for a pre-industrial natural flux to the atmosphere is 244 GtC from the TOTEM model.
David, you are confusing between residence time (which is about 5.2 years) and excess removal time which is about 40 years. The 55% year by year removal rate is the result of the second halve life time. That it was such a constant ratio is quite coincidencal, because until a few years ago the emissions were increasing more or less exponentially, thus the accumulation in the atmosphere increased too. If the emissions were at a constant rate, the increase in the atmosphere would increase assymptotically until a new equilibrium was reached (at some higher level), where emissions and sinks were of the same size.
flows in/out the atmosphere were deduced from different items like d13C changes and oxygen use for vegetation sink/source rate over the seasons and dCO2 partial pressure differences between the oceans and the atmosphere from the tropics to the poles. These figures still have large margins of error, but are not that important for models, as for the models the seasonal flows are not important, only the net increase of CO2 and water vapour over the years is important.
See further:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/287/5462/2467.pdf Battle ea. partitioning
http://www.agu.org/journals/gb/gb0504/2004GB002410/2004GB002410.pdf Bender ea. idem
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf until 2002.
For the oceans:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml
Some models may assume that the 55% sink rate in the future will reduce as the oceans become saturated, but there is no sign of that.
magicjava @April 28, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Just to clarify, I’m not saying that, just quoting Dressler from that Dec09 JPL article. Just trying to find out if he has a leg to stand on based on the Aqua/AIRS data or if he’s just spouting reflex AGW dogma. Clearly you don’t think he does, but the water vapor/humidity graph you link to in your response isn’t too helpful without attribution and explanation – but thanks for the attempt. If anyone has a more developed response to Dressler’s statement, please chime in. Mean time, I’ll see what I can find at scienceofdoom as magicjava suggests. Thanks.
Jimbo says:
April 28, 2010 at 5:48 am
Co2 is lumpy, contrary to the IPCC assumption of it being a well mixed gas
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-196
Milwaukee Bob says:
April 28, 2010 at 6:59 am
Jimbo, thanks for that reference, been looking for something like that for years, knowing there is no way CO2 is a “well mixed gas” as REQUIRED by the GW models to work.
Even the AIRS data show that in average (over a year), CO2 is well mixed. That doesn’t mean that CO2 at every moment everywhere on earth is exactly the same. Of course not, as we have huge sources and sinks at work, especially over the seasons: some 20% of all CO2 in that atmosphere per year is exchanged (back and forth) with the oceans and vegetation over the seasons. Despite that, the differences as yearly averages from the North Pole to the South pole are less than 2% of the atmospheric CO2 content…
The Mauna Loa data and the AIRS data over the same area show a quite good fit:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/411794main_slide8-AIRS-full.jpg but the accuracy of the AIRS data is less than these of Mauna Loa and other ground based stations. The advantage of AIRS is its global coverage.
Oceanic phytoplankton produce a strong negative feedback through the generation of dimethyl sulfide. The summary essay at CO2science:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/d/summaries/dms.php
The last paragraph in the summary:
In conclusion, it is unfortunate that in light of the overwhelming empirical evidence for both land- and ocean-based DMS-driven negative feedbacks to global warming, the effects of these processes have not been properly incorporated into today’s state-of-the-art climate models. Hence, the warming they predict in response to future anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be considerably larger than what could actually occur in the real world. In fact, it is very possible that these biologically-driven phenomena could totally compensate for the warming influence of all greenhouse gas emissions experienced to date, as well as all those that are anticipated to occur in the future.
Chris Riley says:
April 28, 2010 at 7:28 am
“This could be a game changer” Well put.
In that soil respiration is about an order of magnitude larger than fossil fuel emissions, any small deviation from from the assumption that plant respiration + soil respiration equals plant assimilation ( minus actual growth in biomass carbon) would would require a rethinking of the impact of current emissions of CO2 on future concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is not a big game changer at all. Soil respiration is part of the natural carbon cycle, which shows little variation over the years, only influenced by temperature (about 4 ppmv/C) and precipitation. Temperature influence on CO2 levels is small and includes ocean warming and all biological processes (vegetation growth and decay, soil respiration, animals use of vegetation,…). The net effect is that about halve of the human emissions (in quantity) is removed from the atmosphere, of which 2/3rd in the oceans and 1/3rd in the total biosphere). Thus while the individual flows may be large the net natural variance is small and a net sink for CO2.
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.
There is some quantification done at two stations: for the Atlantic at Bermuda, for the Pacific at Hawai. Sedimentation is a rather slow process, and mainly from coccoliths (see: http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/soes/staff/tt/eh/ ). Most of the CO2 is captured in the upper few hundred meters of the oceans as new equilibrium with the atmosphere and more permanently in the deep oceans by the sinking flows of the THC.
Dave38,
“It’s not all the things that people don’t know that get them in trouble, but all the things they do know that just ain’t so.” Quote often attributed to Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain) though I believe the originator of this quote predated him. Unfortunately my advanced state of senility precludes my ability to recall his name. Suffering from CRS I guess.
Smokey says:
April 28, 2010 at 9:18 am
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.
Come on Smokey, by chance? I don’t know of any natural process that may be able to exactly follow the emissions at such a straighth percentage. As good as in quantity as in quality (13C/12C ratio). And what natural source could that be? Both vegetation and oceans are net sinks for CO2, not sources. Maybe from space?
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.
Except that the natural “emissions” are no emissions at all, but part of a cycle, where the natural sinks are larger than the natural sources…
The effect of the human induced increase of CO2 on temperature, that is a different discussion, there we can largely agree, but the cause of the increase is from human emissions, there is overwhelming evidence (and no disproof) for that:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html#The_mass_balance
Spector says:
April 28, 2010 at 6:38 am
I think it would be highly ironic if our minor 1000-year climate cycles were eventually found to be biota-related and analogous to the classic predator-prey cycles.
That would be fun. It has been in the back of my mind, and will stay there.