University of Helsinki via Eurekalert
Unaccounted feedbacks from climate-induced ecosystem changes may increase future climate warming
The terrestrial biosphere regulates atmospheric composition, and hence climate. Projections of future climate changes already account for “carbon-climate feedbacks”, which means that more CO2 is released from soils in a warming climate than is taken up by plants due to photosynthesis. Climate changes will also lead to increases in the emission of CO2 and methane from wetlands, nitrous oxides from soils, volatile organic compounds from forests, and trace gases and soot from fires. All these emissions affect atmospheric chemistry, including the amount of ozone in the lower atmosphere, where it acts as a powerful greenhouse gas as well as a pollutant toxic to people and plants.
Although our understanding of other feedbacks associated with climate-induced ecosystem changes is improving, the impact of these changes is not yet accounted for in climate-change modelling. An international consortium of scientists, led by Almut Arneth from Lund University, has estimated the importance of these unaccounted “biogeochemical feedbacks” in an article that appears as Advance Online Publication on Nature Geoscience‘s website on 25 July at 1800 London time. They estimate a total additional radiative forcing by the end of the 21st century that is large enough to offset a significant proportion of the cooling due to carbon uptake by the biosphere as a result of fertilization of plant growth.
There are large uncertainties associated in these feedbacks, especially in how changes in one biogeochemical cycle will affect the other cycles, for example how changes in nitrogen cycling will affect carbon uptake. Nevertheless, as the authors point out, palaeo-environmental records show that ecosystems and trace gas emissions have responded to past climate change within decades. Contemporary observations also show that ecosystem processes respond rapidly to changes in climate and the atmospheric environment.
Thus, in addition to the carbon cycle-climate interactions that have been a major focus of modelling work in recent years, other biogeochemistry feedbacks could be at least equally important for future climate change. The authors of the Nature Geoscience article argue that it is important to include these feedbacks in the next generation of Earth system models.
This work was promoted by iLEAPS (Integrated Land Ecosystem and Atmospheric Processes), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, and developed through workshops supported by the Finnish Cultural Programme.
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Journal Reference: (note the actual paper was not provided with this press release)
A. Arneth, S. P. Harrison, S. Zaehle, K. Tsigaridis, S. Menon, P. J. Bartlein, J. Feichter, A. Korhola, M. Kulmala, D. O’Donnell, G. Schurgers, S. Sorvari & T. Vesala. Terrestrial biogeochemical feedbacks in the climate system. Nature Geoscience, July 25, 2010 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo905
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Found some of them.
A swedish assistant prof:
http://lucci.lu.se/people_arneth.html
A german:
http://bgc-jena.mpg.de/bgc-systems/visitenk-bilder/soenke.zaehle/index.shtml
Studied in my hometown. Tsk.
2 GISS persons:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/ktsigaridis.html
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/authors/smenon.html
A prof from Oregon:
http://geography.uoregon.edu/bartlein/
Stopped with Bärtlein.
Enneagram & Ric Werme
Basically circuit is OK, but incomplete, it should look like this:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/feedback.htm
They estimate a total additional radiative forcing by the end of the 21st century that is large enough to offset a significant proportion of the cooling due to carbon uptake by the biosphere as a result of fertilization of plant growth.
Whatever.
How much?
NB. must work on sentence structure.
Nothing to see here, again.
The warmists have lost control of the narrative, and they must come up with something…anything…to regain control. Look for more of the same doom and gloom rhetoric buried in studies that say could…maybe…it’s possible, etc. Quite frankly, the warmists/totalitarians are losing, but they are far from finished. And this is why letting these people take complete control of our educational system was a bad idea. Many honest people who would have gone into the education field didn’t because they were fooled by the comparitive lower salaries. Who knew it was such an easy path to millions in grants, studies, publications and speeches?
There should be a branch C looping back to a circular node with a ‘-’ sign in it too.
Not really. This is just a generic summing input. The inputs could be anything. They could both be positive numbers, one positive and one negative, or both negative. The idea is that you will get the sum of the two inputs; with a large negative input and a small positive input, when you sum them, you get a negative output, so this diagram would handle negative feedbacks with no problem.
“Unaccounted feedbacks from climate-induced ecosystem changes may increase future climate warming”
How about:
“Unaccounted feedbacks from climate-induced ecosystem changes may increase future climate cooling“?
CAN: Computer-aided Numerology.
The abtract is here:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo905.html
but, you probaqbly figured that out …
No wonder it is so very hot on Mars.
John Wright says:
July 26, 2010 at 7:47 am
“(…)it acts as a powerful greenhouse gas as well as a pollutant toxic to people and plants.”
— as a what?!!!
Actually, ozone is more toxic than chlorine. Happily, it is extremely reactive so if you are more than 50 feet away from a concentrated source you are reasonably safe.
Long term exposure to ozone will cause you breathing difficulties. That is why you get ozone alerts during periods of thermal inversion where there is extreme heat.
I have figured out the diagram. Eureka! Perpetual motion.
We really need a dedicated graph that tracks all predictions against reality as it unfolds. It can start with Hansen’s Model A crap and go from there.
John Prendergast says:
July 26, 2010 at 9:13 am
“Of course with this sequence, if it did not get hotter, it would cool, if it cooled then the feedback would set in fast, aided by increasing albedo. I wouldstick to a modest globals warming if I were you, it avoids hypothemia. Hypothermia kills far more people currently than heatstroke.”
Considering that all of the carbon the warmists are concerned about was once in the atmosphere, and that atmosphere produced the lush growth that is now coal and oil, simple logic tells us there will be no problem caused by putting it back from where it originated. History tells us that warm is better than cold: more crops, better livestock, and less disease is good for everyone. That is, of course, if anyone believes the non science of global warming.
Oh, my god! it’s worse than we thought! The world is running out of URL by 2012! What about all those poor 3rd world people who will have to do without URL! Somebody do something, quick!
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/26/world-run-internet-addresses-year-experts-predict/?test=latestnews
Ken Hall says:
July 26, 2010 at 8:38 am
“The crap will never stop, as long as there are people that are hearing what they want to hear.”
That is sad. But sadly it is true of people on ALL sides of the climate change debate. I think, myself included.
=============================================================
Ken, I don’t agree, but you know that. 😉
One side is only required to believe.
The other side is required to believe in computer models that have not been right yet. The models did not get the Arctic ice right, there is no hot spot in the tropics (which is required for them to be right), and did not get the temperatures right (which is a travesty)….
The whole premise of global warming is based on computer models which are worthless. Without the computer models, there’s nothing.
Dave L says: July 26, 2010 at 7:47 am “When is this virtual reality crap going to stop?”
When all our money has been spent by socialist/fascist international consortiums of pseudoscientists.
Graham Green says:
July 26, 2010 at 9:01 am Hit the nail on the Head, it is all about Money, forget the Science it doesn’t matter as long as they get published and the Grant money keeps rolling in this kind of utter non science will continue.
“Or even better, give me this money-spinning machine. I’d perform this public service for half of what these 13 people take; that would still leave me with 6.5 wages.”
—
you sceptics like to say that climate is so complicated. So what better
way than collect 13 people and explore the issue from different angles?
A. Arneth, S. P. Harrison, S. Zaehle, K. Tsigaridis, S. Menon, P. J. Bartlein, J. Feichter, A. Korhola, M. Kulmala, D. O’Donnell, G. Schurgers, S. Sorvari & T. Vesala must NOT have got the message that the science is settled.
sorry, that was a reply to:
DirkH says:
July 26, 2010 at 9:25 am
Oh my. We now have a new word that will be strategically placed in all new catastrophic chicken little research reports “unaccounted”. The new way to do research. Just drum up something that could happen and call say, “heretofore unaccounted feedbacks”. You don’t even have to do a literature review. In fact, the idea is to come up with a feedback that “could happen” that no one else has mentioned.
So I will start with this new way of doing research. Here are a few areas we could study:
“Unaccounted For Feedbacks In High Altitude Baking Practices”
“Unaccounted For Feedbacks In Butterfly Flying Habits”
“Unaccounted For Feedbacks In Household Dust”
“Unaccounted For Feedbacks In Asthma-Related CO2 Emissions”
Don’t laugh! These are dead serious topics that are Ph.D. worthy!
My apologies to the R.T. mod. So many threads to keep an eye on (sorry Rog).
Mikael Pihlström says:
July 26, 2010 at 10:51 am
“[…]you sceptics like to say that climate is so complicated. So what better
way than collect 13 people and explore the issue from different angles?”
We say that climate is complicated? Gavin Schmidt will tell you – if you dare ask him a question he deems stupid – to go and read 800 peer-reviewed papers realclimate links to; and then read some more. Paraphrased but you’ll find this boilerplate advice in any realclimate thread by him.
This paper is just science by committee. And somebody will in the end have revised some numbers to the right border of the estimate interval to get the desired outcome… you know, some slightly positive “forcing”… Producing new ammunition for the next IPCC report.
How about if we just put some “large uncertainties” in the code of these climate models–like screwed up statements (we’re quite uncertain what they do) or illogical procedures (again, we’re uncertain what any of that does, too). Does the fact that such gobbledygook would not even compile give them a hint that perhaps inserting “large uncertainties” in any system is simply a bad idea?
DirkH says:
July 26, 2010 at 9:40 am
Found some of them.
A swedish assistant prof:
http://lucci.lu.se/people_arneth.html
Stopped with Bärtlein.
—
Markku Kulmala is a physicist and well known aerosol expert. As such
he is seems to be rather neutral on the ‘warmist-sceptic’ scale.
According to SCOPUS he has been cited 2680 times in the period 2008-2010.
That must mean that his fellow scientists find something interesting in his
work? According to SCOPUS about 90% of Energy & Environment articles
(2008-2009) have zero citations.
Point suggested: you get in there; do the concrete scientific work; it is
good for you, for science and society, and you still have the freedom to
be sceptic if there is cause for it. Chances are you will be better informed
scientifically and less ideology driven.
BTW, Kulmala’s group recently tested Svensmark’s ideas about cosmic
rays and cloud formation. They found little evidence supporting the
hypothesis:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/1885/2010/acp-10-1885-2010.html
Maybe he is a a-whole warmist after all. Go figure