From the American Society for Microbiology, a comprehensive report that suggests the need to integrate microbial processes into climate modeling. As they say: “The sum total of microbial activity is enormous, but the net effect of microbes on climate-relevant gases is currently not known…”
I think it is a very good idea, and the full report follows this press release.
Report seeks to integrate microbes into climate models
The models used to understand how Earth’s climate works include thousands of different variables from many scientific including atmospherics, oceanography, seismology, geology, physics and chemistry, but few take into consideration the vast effect that microbes have on climate. Now, a new report from the American Academy of Microbiology, “Incorporating Microbial Processes into Climate Models”, offers a plan for integrating the latest understanding of the science of microbiology into climate models.
“Climate scientists and microbiologists usually work in isolation from each other, and yet their work is intimately connected. Microbes are critical players in every geochemical cycle relevant to climate. “
“The sum total of microbial activity is enormous, but the net effect of microbes on climate-relevant gases is currently not known,” says Edward DeLong of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-chaired the report with Caroline Harwood of the University of Washington.
The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in scientific recognition of the diversity of the microbial world. New DNA-sequencing technologies spurred by the Human Genome Project have made it technically and economically possible to sequence the collective DNA from whole microbial communities. This approach, called metagenomics, has revealed a previously undreamed-of degree of diversity in the microbial world. These microbial community analyses many “‘omics” approaches, such as proteomics and metabolomics, that together provide a detailed picture of community function, potential and change over time.
The report is based on a colloquium convened by the Academy in 2011. Experts in diverse disciplines in microbiology as well as computational and climate modeling participated in the meeting designed to identify specific efforts and activities that will lead to improved integration of microbial biology, biogeochemistry, and climate modeling.
“While the gap between these disciplines is daunting, the need to bridge it is urgent and the science and technology needed to begin to do so is within reach,” says Harwood.
The report suggests a multipronged approach, breaking the challenge into manageable parts. The first recommendation is to choose a few specific biogeochemical cycles that are important, microbially driven and tractable to serve as demonstration projects. Specifically, the report identifies methane, carbon storage and nitrous oxide.
Other recommendations include:
- Assess current data collection methodologies and develop a monitoring/data collection strategy
- Implement validation processes to integrate data collection, modeling and experimentation
- Facilitate and provide incentives for collaborations and interdisciplinary training
- Address technology needs
“There is clear evidence that microbes can have an enormous impact on climate.. In light of the increasingly urgent need to understand and find ways to mitigate climate change, the centrality of microbes in global biogeochemical cycles, can no longer be ignored,” says DeLong.
A full copy of the report and more detailed recommendations can be found on the Academy website at http://bit.ly/aamclimate.
The American Academy of Microbiology is the honorific leadership group of the American Society for Microbiology. The mission of the Academy is to recognize scientific excellence, as well as foster knowledge and understanding in the microbiological sciences. A full list of Academy colloquia reports can be found at http://academy.asm.org/colloquia. For more information about the American Society for Microbiology, visit http://www.asm.org.
Maybe it’s good science, and maybe it’s just a ticket on the CAGW gravy train?
“. . . increasingly urgent need to understand and find ways to mitigate climate change, . . .” says DeLong
Say what?
There are WAY more little guys than big guys, and those little guys do weird stuff. Sometimes those little guys do stuff that we don’t yet fully understand. Like live in heat vents at the bottom of the ocean. The bugs had a big party last summer just south of Bourbon Street and helped out BP with the oil spill. I mean who needs beignets and coffee, when there is all that Light Sweet crude.
Factor in the vast amounts of Fungus Amongus…and they have not got around to factoring in all the little bugs and stuff.
I want to know what the Carbon Footprint of a prion more than a Prius…but that’s just me.
Trains, pots, sink-holes and troughs:
My thought on this one is “another group climbing on the gravy train”. It seems to me that climate modeling is a vast honey-pot and a sink-hole for public funds. Another mouth at the trough isn’t going to change the nature of the trough. How’s that for a gross example of “mixed metaphors”?
Take a field full of cows. The worms in the soil weigh at least twice as much as the cows in the field. Then there are the insects. There are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth. That’s 1.5 billion insects per person. The weight of all the ants in the world exceeds that of all humans. Ditto the termites. Then there are the beetles. All of them are animals digesting, respiring and emitting CO2.
Then we come to the bacteria which outweigh every other living thing by orders of magnitude.
If you’re a worm or insect or bacteria you don’t know or care about the large animals.
WE ARE NOT in charge of this planet. Get over it.
At last some sense! Total bacteria biomass is comparable to all other living organisms combined. I kid you not. Bacteria live everywhere!!
Some of these bugs are amazing. I’m currently looking at magnetostatic bacteria which use tiny magnet implants to propel themselves with help from the earths magnetic field. These guys live 4km beneath the sea floor in bacteria ‘blooms’ within extremely saline, anoxic, dark, high pressure environments and feed on sulfate to produce sulphide, methane and who knows what. Almost everything lowered into these toxic brine pools (eg Discovery, Urania, Atalante, Bannock….to name a few) pretty much dissolves so sampling is not easy.
What we do know is that bacterial contribution to atmospheric gasses is considerable.
Anthony, small stutter in the introduction.
“I think it is a very good is a very good idea,”
[fixed ~mod]
So these microbes have “an enormous influence” on what, exactly did you say? “Climate-relevant gases.”
Well I guess that avoids using the nasty word “greenhouse” gases. Just as well, because the greenhouse conjecture has now been debunked with correct established physics …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-890609
So more rather pointless grants for research, I guess.
Finally. I’ve been saying all along that cows don’t cause global warming; it’s the microbes in cows’ fancy digestive systems. Get rid of the microbes and the globe will cool down like a rejected suitor. Lysol — that’s the solution.
John F. Hultquist. You heard the man. Microbial processes might be one path that allows some mitigation strategies to cope with or reduce AGW. Loys of little workers out there.
Is it the sun, stupid?
Is it atmosphere/ocean coupling?
Is it clouds?
No….
It’s Super bug!…uh well…Mini bug then.
“We too, recognize an important source of new funding of our research and wish to close this daunting gap as soon as possible”…..?
I am curious about the combinatorial explosion that results from adding variables to algorithms, or computer models. For example 10 variables causes about 1,000 possibilities to spend computing time to resolve, but doubling the number to 20 ups the number to 1 million.
If you have 1,000 variables and it takes one day of computing then adding 10 more variables requires 3 years of computing. Adding microbial variables to current computer models will essentially require one iteration of CPU technology (typically 18 months to 2 years) just to keep the computing time the same. 10 additional variables will require about 20 years of Moores law iterations just to keep the computing time the same.
If you want to have higher resolution grid sizes, it takes one new CPU iteration to reduce the grid size by one half the area.
Note that it isn’t complexity that requires super computers to run the models, its the vast number of permutations that need to be calculated that takes a great deal of CPU cycles which only supercomputers can provide in a timely manner, by their large number of parallel processors.
Also note, there are different types of algorithms, some are log and not exponential in terms of computing resources required. Climate models are about the last remaining hole in my climate science knowledge. More articles about what they consist of would be nice.
Don’t bother looking into it or anything, but I am a computer scientist, so I might know what I am talking about. 🙂
As pointed out recently, the effects of phytoplankton on sunlight penetration of the oceans are considerable. And since that’s where most of the sunlight falls …
I don’t understand how one can introduce microbiology into climate models when we don’t even know the order of magnitude of our ignorance.
Improving the climate models? Talk about polishing a coprolite…!
“In light of the increasingly urgent need to understand and find ways to mitigate climate change, the centrality of microbes in global biogeochemical cycles, can no longer be ignored,” says DeLong.
There’s the money shot. They want a seat on the CAGW gravy train.
Mike D. I take it that’s tongue in cheek?
Never mind the models, it is just too difficult to model all the processes going on at once. We do not understand it well enough. We don’t even know what we don’t know. The only Earth that works is the one we are on. Useless to model it, and unnecessary, if we would just observe the one we’ve got.
Wouldn’t it be a very good idea to fix the basic stuff first, such as the sun, clouds and ocean currents ?
This is why I’ve been saying for years that everyone needs to put aside their preconceptions and prejudice and read James Lovelock’s original book.
In it, he explains how anti-entropic earth’s atmosphere is due to the life on the planet, and that this is mostly due to micro-organisms which have radically altered atmospheric composition and maintain the chemical-energy imbalance inherent in an oxygen-rich environment which drives the ability of all nearly all terrestrial life-forms to continue to exist and exhibit anti-entropic behaviour.
In the light of Nikolov and Zeller’s theory showing that surface temperature is due not to atmospheric composition, but mass, we can re-examine the role of life on Earth has in maintaining that mass, rather then worrying about it’s effects on composition. This will lead to exciting new discoveries once the realization of the implications sinks in.
I haz tiny bugs – can I haz gravy train?
tallbloke says:
February 15, 2012 at 12:58 am (Edit)
This is why I’ve been saying for years that everyone needs to put aside their preconceptions and prejudice and read James Lovelock’s original book.
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So we are back to the concept of the “life force” which runs in the opposite direction to entropy. I recall that such a theory was discounted some time ago but I don’t remember what the argument was.
Keith Battye says:
February 15, 2012 at 1:12 am
So we are back to the concept of the “life force” which runs in the opposite direction to entropy. I recall that such a theory was discounted some time ago but I don’t remember what the argument was.
I don’t think there’s any need for a “hippie buzzword” which needs to be contained in scare quotes. Lovelock explains it all quite simply with ordinary physics and chemistry.
I suspect that sooner or later we’ll have to rewrite Genesis:
In the beginning God created bacteria. And bacteria created everything else.
(The current version may actually carry a tribal memory of the correct story: Eve was produced by mitosis, not by conjugation!)