From the University of New Hampshire comes this press release that made me recoil when I read the methodology involved because it is Mannian-Tiljanderish in the approach. Instead of doing top down heating (as occurs in Nature), they do bottom up heating with electric cables. In the photo below, note how they’ve warmed the soil enough to melt snow, which suggests to me that they’ve not only got the thermal process of nature backwards in the experiment, they have overdone the energy input outside the bounds of reality. For example, what sustained increase in air temperature (from global warming) would be needed to produce a permanent 5 degree warming in the soil they tested? How much efficiency difference of the mass transfer function form air to soil versus the underground cables is there?
And the result of the study? Microbes become more active with warmer temperatures and release more CO2, up to a point. Sheesh, any bread or beer maker can tell you this. The temperature increases CO2 production until the food runs low. It amazes me that this project got funded when it seems to be little more than rehashed grade school science. Maybe they should have modeled it first, but that wouldn’t keep the funding going for 18 years I suppose. – Anthony
Warmer soils release additional CO2 into atmosphere; Effect stabilizes over longer term
DURHAM, N.H. — Warmer temperatures due to climate change could cause soils to release additional carbon into the atmosphere, thereby enhancing climate change – but that effect diminishes over the long term, finds a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study, from University of New Hampshire professor Serita Frey and co-authors from the University of California-Davis and the Marine Biological Laboratory, sheds new light on how soil microorganisms respond to temperature and could improve predictions of how climate warming will affect the carbon dioxide flux from soils.
The activities of soil microorganisms release 10 times the carbon dioxide that human activities do on a yearly basis. Historically, this release of carbon dioxide has been kept in check by plants’ uptake of the gas from the atmosphere. However, human activities are potentially upsetting this balance.
Frey and co-authors Johan Six and Juhwan Lee of UC-Davis and Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory were curious how increased temperatures due to climate change might alter the amount of carbon released from soils. “While they’re low on the charisma scale, soil microorganisms are so critically important to the carbon balance of the atmosphere,” Frey says. “If we warm the soil due to climate warming, are we going to fundamentally alter the flux of carbon into the atmosphere in a way that is going to feed back to enhance climate change?”
Yes, the researchers found. And no.
The study examined the efficiency of soil organisms – how completely they utilize food sources to maintain their cellular machinery – depending upon the food source and the temperature under two different scenarios. In the first short-term scenario, these researchers found that warming temperatures had little effect on soils’ ability to use glucose, a simple food source released from the roots of plants. For phenol, a more complex food source common in decomposing wood or leaves, soils showed a 60 percent drop in efficiency at higher temperatures.
“As you increase temperature, you decrease the efficiency – soil microorganisms release more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere – but only for the more complex food sources,” Frey explains. “You could infer that as the soil warms, more carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate problem.”
That effect diminishes, however, in the second scenario, in which soils were warmed to 5 degrees Celsius above the ambient temperature for 18 years. “When the soil was heated to simulate climate warming, we saw a change in the community to be more efficient in the longer term,” Frey says, lessening the amount of carbon dioxide the soils release into the atmosphere and, in turn, their impact on the climate. “The positive feedback response may not be as strong as we originally predicted.”
The research team also examined how changes in soil microorganism efficiency might influence long term storage of carbon in soils as predicted by a commonly used ecosystem model. Models of this type are used to simulate ecosystem carbon dynamics in response to different perturbations, such as land-use change and climate warming. These models generally assume that efficiency is fixed and that it does not change with temperature or other environmental conditions. The team found a large effect on long-term soil carbon storage as predicted by the model when they varied carbon use efficiency in a fashion comparable to what they observed in their experiments. “There is clearly a need for new models that incorporate an efficiency parameter that is allowed to fluctuate in response to temperature and other environmental variables,” Six says.
The researchers hypothesize that long-term warming may change the community of soil microorganisms so that it becomes more efficient. Organism adaptation, change in the species that comprise the soils, and/or changes in the availability of various nutrients could result in this increased efficiency.
This study was based on work done at the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research site in Petersham, Mass., where Frey and Melillo have been warming two sites – one 9 meters square, the other 36 meters square — with underground cables for two versus 18 years. “It’s like having a heating blanket under the forest floor,” Frey says, “allowing us to examine how this particular environmental change—long-term soil warming—is altering how the soil functions.”
The article, “The Temperature Response of Soil Microbial Efficiency and its Feedback to Climate,” is published in the advanced online publication of Nature Climate Change on Jan. 20, 2013. To access the abstract or full text (subscribers only) of the article after the embargo lifts, use the digital object identifier (DOI) number 10.1038/NCLIMATE1796 at this link: http://dx.doi.org/.
This work was supported by an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, the NSF Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, a DOE National Institute for Climatic Change Research (NICCR) grant, and a Harvard Forest Bullard Fellowship to Frey.
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“University of New Hampshire invertedly overheats soil, and pronounces a climate change result”
Inadvertently?
Makes me wonder; how warm would the air have to be to heat the coils in my oven to glowing red? And how long would the air have to stay that warm before it happened?
Think I can get a grant?
How is climate change going to make soil warmer while leaving everything else unchanged?
It shows that there is still good money to be made from conducting nonsense experiments, if you can link the results to Climate Alarmism and CO2. A lack of intelligence is even a positive qualification in this field.
inadvertently?
spell checkers are only kinda good
heating from below with electric cables seems appropriate as a model for plant growth above a geo thermal site…..How about a calibrated sun lamp?… scientists?
invertedly…..hmmmm ok……heating from below…AND overheating….OK nevermind.
@Mr.. Kutz, traditionally, incandescent soot/gasses is used.
Plants are made directly from the CO2 in the atmosphere especially close to the plant. The plant converts the CO2 in the atmosphere to plant material (carbon) and oxygen in a process called photosynthesis that utilizes that thing that glows in the sky. Studies show that CO2 levels near farms and forests is dramatically lower than it is over cities. I don’t know if the net result of warmer temps will produce more net co2 after the plants closeby consume it or if they will saturate but simply measuring what the microbes in the soil do is clearly not going to lead to a result anyone can bank on without considering the totality of the system.
In any case it all seems like angels dancing on the heads of pins. It is clear that extra co2 is not having nearly the effect the original IPCC and Hansen predicted. So what if soil might produce another bit of co2. They all thought this whole global warming thing would be obvious by now. They thought that it would be broiling and several degrees warmer and obvious to everyone that this was a problem not 40th on a list of 40 top problems in the world. They were banging the drum saying that natural variability was inconsequential and totally dominated by co2 based on what they saw from 1979-1998. Instead they are forced to argue in 2013 fully 30 years after Hansen called the alarm why there is a 16 year haitus in temperatures and where the energy went from this missing 16 year rise they thought was impossible and drowned out by the forcing of co2. They are forced to obfuscate their arguments by pointing out that the US was hot this summer while ignoring that the whole globe was actually nothing special. They are forced to obfuscate and try to argue that a storm this summer was evidence of global warming. This is precisely the kind of argument they said was bogus. They said pointing to regions or pointing to individual events was weather and only long term trends were important but now the long term trend for 16 years is 0.000 and the 60 year trend is 0.07C/decade or 1/5-1/10thth what they predicted it would be. They told us repeatedly and with hubris and disdain, condescension that looking at individual countries or years or storms was stupid. They are forced to explain why sea temperatures haven’t moved significantly in 10 years or sea levels are decelerating not accelerating and not moving any faster than they were before humans ever freed co2, not a 10th of a millimeter faster than 200 years ago, why antarctica is gaining ice extent and ice mass not losing it. Really we are supposed to believe a hocus pocus experiment like this is relevant on a fraction of a fraction of something that isn’t doing anything?
These studies are clearly only for the last remaining believers who cling to the idea that suddenly at some point there is going to be a discontinuous sudden and much more rapid acceleration in sea levels, sea temperatures, air temperatures than ever seen before. This is usually called hoping for a miracle but they call it science.
They could have run out to Yellowstone and sampled varying distances from some mud pots and not wasted 18 years of elecricity. Or possibly cut travel expenses checking near Arkansas’ hot baths. All natural soil warming.
The micro bugs ‘activity’ certainly must include increasing their numbers which uses up a lot of carbon! Also if top-down warming is going to heat the soil around the trees, leafing out goes with it and the trees wouldn’t be in winter mode – they’d be sucking up CO2 as well. A totally imbecilic experiment. Any microbiols and botanists out there?
As a Harvard grad, at first I was horrified. But it is only their research plot, not their research…
The recent journal Nature Climate Change has published a lot of other dodgy stuff in its short history. For example, a follow up to the grossly faulty PNAS article on US maize yields, guest posted here courtesy of Anthony last year, in its inaugural edition. The CYMMT data is real, but lacked adequately watered control plots. See my book Gaia’s Limits for details.
This study, as Anthony points out, is even worse methodologically. Huh?
Ok, so does this mean that we now have to label underground lava chamber, and fumaroles as zones of global warming ??? Should they then be removed for the sake of humanity? Must we then pump cold water in to the earth to “cool” its temperature? Soothe its fever?
So does warm beer. Can I have some funding to further
drinkstudy this effect please?Does this mean we must now pump cold water down in to lava chambers and fumaroles in order to cool earth’s “fever”?
The Wikipedia entry for “alchemy” says “Western alchemy is recognized as a protoscience that contributed to the development of modern chemistry and medicine.” Once again the world is developing an amazing amount of proto-XYZ and as soon as folks figure out what use is to be made of it they will get back to us.
A funny thing is that the local university has utility tunnels carrying within them sufficient energy to melt the snow above, whether that be on grass or concrete. Prof. Frey could expand the research for very little money by funding a local student worker.
I sincerely hope that their heating coils were powered by windmills, or I will be demanding my money back, or maybe I will sue them for adding “poisonous” carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, forcing me to breath the results of their “experiment”.
We’ve been to this patch of woods before, with Jerry Melillo too. We weren’t too bent out of shape over the buried wire heating system before. A lot of science is done by changing a single variable and seeing how the systems responds. Certainly there are major seasonal effects, but some of this is worth doing. The alternative is to compare two patches of woods with very similar soils and maybe species that are separated by 5C° of climatology. That’s about 500m vertically, not sure how far north-south.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/28/warmer-temperatures-stimulate-the-gain-of-carbon-stored-in-trees/ sys:
(TIC mode: On)So that’s what happens when soil is heated from beneath by electric cables. I never knew that global warming was due to overheating of buried transmission cables.(TIC mode: Off)
OK, I have had enough. I nominate this piece of cutting edge research for an
IgNobel Prize Improbable Research
http://www.improbable.com/ig/
We don’t get many volcanoes ’round these parts, but if we evah do, we can use this here study to surmise what’s going to happen as the heat comes up from below.
(There’s various rude jokes, crude puns, and lewd suggestions that can use “heat from below” as a springboard, but I’d better not go there.)
You have to understand how this occurs.
Professor (or more often assistant professor looking for tenure) calls Grant Office and asks if there is any research funding available for Grad Students/Doctoral Theses/Post Doc. Grant office says some funds may be available for research into Global Warming/Climate Change, but from talking to funding agency the research must have result showing positive feedback, death of species that kind of thing or it won’t be considered in this years tranche.
Professor goes and talks ideas through with potential researchers comes up with idea that will definitely produce more carbon dioxide. Puts in proposal to Grant Office who format the 21 hard copy proposals and Fedex them to the funder.
The research awarded is primitive and everyone knows the result that is needed. Difficulty in the exercise is dressing up the final report so funder won’t notice how simplistic the ‘research’ is.
Been there seen that.
So if you think THIS research was poor – remember there were many other proposals that were worse and turned down.
Well I’ve been told that I Am “low on the charisma scale” so does that mean that I am “critically important to the carbon balance of the atmosphere”?
;-D
I don’t think it has any bearing on soil heating in my neck of the woods (250km north east of Edmonton, Alberta). As I have no geothermal activity present, it takes time to warm the soil from the surface, while using only sunshine to warm it. As noted last year when we were digging holes over a foot in depth, (to plant heritage tomatoes), it was noticeably colder the deeper we went.
I work with the soil every day, digging down to a foot or more, in other words, the topmost layer with the most microbial activity. When the temperature drops below freezing (I’m at 50 degrees North), the soil follows suit and freezes to as much as 6 inches down. As the temperature rises through the year, so does the temperature of the soil until in July and August it comes up warm and powdery for the top four inches and reasonably warm down to a foot. By reasonably warm, I mean not cold or even very cool, just pleasantly neutral like any commodity you would handle at room temperature (20C) such as dried beans from a kitchen container.
The only heating source for the soil is radiant and ambient heat. It’s abundantly clear to me that this is responsible for the soil temperature varying from sub-zero in winter to 20C plus in summer. Therefore, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to theorise that a sustained rise of 5C in the ambient temperature won’t lead to a sustained rise in soil temperature of the same amount. If the 5C rise in ambient temperature is applied throughout the year then the 5C rise in the soil will ride up and down with it.
This like for like rise would be not be diminished or otherwise affected by the lag of the soil temperature behind ambient temperature. The only reason the soil temperature never reaches the ambient temperature (summer highs or winter lows) is because the ambient temperature turns back the other way before the soil temperature has a chance to reach equilibrium. If you added a permanent 5C to the annual temperature graph of Pertersham, Massachusetts (ie 5C to each and every month above the historical averages) then the soil temperature would lag by roughly the same degree as before but at 5C higher at any point in time.
If the researchers are seeking to mimic the effects on the soil and its microbes, of a 5C rise in temps, in line with the worst predictions for this century (which I don’t for a moment think will happen) then heating patches of soil by 5C is a perfectly sound way of doing it. It doesn’t matter how they do it, so long as the thermometers they stick in the ground at relevant depths read 5C higher than usual. That may be difficult; there may be an ugly reverse temperature gradient but I doubt it. She said its like a heating blanket under the soil. Heating blankets and for that matter, floor coils, don’t blaze bright orange like a room heater. Their effects are subtle and in this case I’m sure it’s easy enough to lay the coils just below the test depth and keep them at 5C above the usual soil temperature for that time of year (or 5C above the surrounding unheated soil if that’s how they do it). I doubt if it needs to be more than 6C or so above normal once steady state has been achieved (by steady state I mean a one-off rise to a steady 5C above and then shadowing the ‘correct’ temperature thereafter at a ‘steady 5C above’ which is itself a steady state for the purposes of the experiment.
I don’t see any problem with this experiment if it is carried out with the few precautions described above. I think it is a good first step to seeing what happens to microbes in the soil in a world that is 5C warmer. If it shows significant results (and it seems to be doing so) then that might shed light on what would happen to these microbes after a long drawn out 1C rise- which actually is a scenario worth entertaining for some of us on WUWT.