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.
So, this got funding dollars, but NOAA had to skimp and save pennies to conduct their rudimentary UHI experiment. Call me unimpressed and baffled.
So they demonstrated that temperature drives atmospheric CO2. Natural biological CO2 sources dwarfs mans puny contribution.
captainfish says:
“Does this mean we must now pump cold water down in to lava chambers and fumaroles in order to cool earth’s “fever”?”
Well , in 1973 a volcanic eruption in the Westmann Islands in Iceland at in a meadow at the fringe of a town with 5000 inhabitants, so they had to evacuate the town , and later when they could return the place sported a new 200 meter high volcano wit lot of warm lava at its base where the meadow had been previously. One of the first thing the returnees did , apart from digging most of their houses and streets out of the ash piles , and cleaning them up , was to sink simple heat exchangers and tanks into the base of the new mountain and connect it to pipes through which cold water was pumpted in and use the hot water that came out of the other end to heath their houses with and other activities for which hot water a required indigrent, thus eliminiating the use oil burners that where previously used for heating purposes. I have not cheched if they still use this resource in the same way or if it the lava has cooled down so much that it is no longer cost effective, as I expect they have since that time also connected pipes to the geothermal plants on the mainland, but I remember seeing news about this, then rather noel way, of generating hot water when the utilties installtions filled it’s second decade anniversary and it was still going full blast.
So I say no, no sense in pumping cold water into lava chamers to cool the down, unless you intend to put the hot water to som use, you have to take it back out anyway to if you want to get any cooling done.
I didn’t see where in the study they were confirming, via accurate long term measurement, any actual warming of the soil naturally… Just how deep does warming penetrate each year and exactly what temperature levels per strata are maintained
I mean, all the hot air these scientists believe is going to overheat that poor ground;
–in a woods,
–on shaded ground,
–excuse me, on shaded damp ground,
–or alternatively, on shaded dry as a bone ground,
–covered with leaves, in spite of the invasive European earthworm (Lumbricus rubellus ) attempts to munch most leaf litter every year. http://www.nativetreesociety.org/invasives/european_earthworms.htm
All that science effort and it makes one wonder why the foundation of their claim i.e., soil temperature, is not studied first before inventing new ways to compost soil. And using carbon based fuel, (coal?), to generate the electricity for their composting effort.
I repeat. Never underestimate the fungi.
And did they mention that fungal CO2 has the same isotopic signature (along with photosynthetic) as human?
The idea of ‘climate scientist’ is often a misnomer, and the correct term should be ‘climate propagandist’. Too much ‘research’ is not so much the search for truth but as a way to confirm their bias.
The question is, as with politicians, are they clever and know exactly what they are doing, or are they really that stupid!
Temperature gradients affect the distribution of many species of vertebrate animals and vascular plants. The ‘performance’ of vertebrate animals and vascular plants also varies with temperature gradients. Try growing potatoes in frost prone areas, for example.
It is a no brainer that the same would be true for soil fauna (which is where, after all, we find a large proportion of our biodiversity).
This experiment is a tiny but potentially useful step to start to get some sort of handle on what happens when we change the temperatures in one of hundreds (perhaps thousands, depending on your preferred typology) of different soil types and thousands of different soil faunal assemblages, globally.
One small step for mankind….?
I don’t see any reason to tar Tiljander with the Mannian reputation (with the Mannian-Tiljanderish label that you are using), as far as I have understood, she has been open about her results and by no means participated in the Mannian science.
It’s the way Mann used some of the Tiljander data that garnered the label, not the Tiljander data itself, nor the originator of the data.
gymnosperm
January 21, 2013 at 8:50 pm
I repeat. Never underestimate the fungi.
And did they mention that fungal CO2 has the same isotopic signature (along with photosynthetic) as human?
###
I never used CO2 injection in any of my planted fish tanks once I got the hang of organic production. Amazing what happens when you put a heater in the gravel. Like you said, never underestimate the fungi!
Serita D. Frey, Ph.D. (Ecology), Colorado State University.
She’s not even a Biologist.
A bs environmentalist writing for “Nature Climate Change journal” a bs environmentalists journal.
Another reality blithely denied is the fact the ground is freezing more deeply than usual this winter, rather than less. The depth of the freeze mostly involves the amount of snow cover. Snow acts as a blanket of insulation. Out in Chicago old water pipes that were put in decades ago are freezing and cracking.
During dry winters I have seen the ground freeze more than four feet down. The dry but very cold November-December of 1989 caused problems here in Southern New Hampshire, (not far north of the site of this study,) for a local road crew attempting to dig trenches for storm drains. The back-hoe had to pry under and lift plates of frozen soil which grew thicker and thicker as time passed. The frozen soil grew so thick, and so rock-like, that the scoop on the back-hoe could not break through from above, and had to work from the side of the trench. They barely finished the job, and the job wasn’t all that well done. The ground settled oddly, when the replaced chunks of soil thawed in the spring, and the uneven road required more work in the spring.
But why bother with reality when the money is aimed on the “Cause?”
The answer was seen in the uneven road, which was the result of attempting to do road-work despite the frozen reality. Ignoring reality has consequences.
Just as the alarmists think one storm, not a hurricane, in NJ is a sign of the end of the world and that the US climate is the whole world’s climate, a few square meters of forest floor is a good proxy for the rest of the planet. Cannot you extrapolate that, if one person gets fat, everybody will get fat? Come on! It’s so logical, a 2-year old would understand.
gymnosperm says:
January 21, 2013 at 8:50 pm
And did they mention that fungal CO2 has the same isotopic signature (along with photosynthetic) as human?
That’s interesting. Are there any estimates of how much carbon (C13?) fungai release into the atmosphere annually?
Another reminder that one thing that has not changed is that the AGW ‘research’ bucket is deep and well filled . Quality and scientific validity don’t matter a dam , the only real thing that matters is if the results support ‘the cause ‘
MartinGAtkins says:
January 22, 2013 at 12:10 am
Why the criticism? Ecologists study systems of life. Biologists study individual lifeforms.
I considered taking an Ecology course back in college. I concluded I didn’t have time, but I did look through a couple text books. There was as much systems math & PDEs in them as our EE textbooks.
To understand an ecosystem, you pretty much have to start with the soil (or water). Soil is where nutrients, fungi, bacteria, roots, worms, etc. all intermingle. A tree is a relative desert.
I don’t think soil temperature is as simple as some have implied. There is a net flow of heat from the earth’s core, tempered by a whole lot of inches of soil and rock insulation. There is also heating at the surface due to air temperature, and solar radiation, and cooling, as well. The top several hundred feet of surface are roughly at the average annual temperature, except for the top few feet. This leads to an interesting observation that well water temperature is often equal to the mean surface temperature, but that’s another story.
However, in the winter, many regions are covered by an insulating layer of snow. In my home of Northern Minnesota, the ground would often freeze in the fall, and later get covered by snow. Often, the ground would thaw so that there would be no frost in the ground in the spring when the snow melted. In these cases, the heating came from below. There would often be deep frost below the roads, where the snow was removed. This led to the troublesome “spring breakup” of the roads, even when the fields had no frost.
To me, most every experiment is worthwhile, particularly if you accurately record the data and report the results. This one seems to fit those criteria, and the results even temper the Global Warming religion.
Gavin Hetherington:
At January 22, 2013 at 5:35 am you ask
Moderator:
The formatting of my post went wrong so this is a -hopefully – corrected resubmission.
Richard
Gavin Hetherington:
At January 22, 2013 at 5:35 am you ask
No, none that are credible.
Indeed, when one considers the types and distributions of fungi it is hard the think of a way to make a credible estimate of the annual emission of CO2 from fungi and its annual variability.
This is one of several reasons why isotope studies provide no information of use to understanding the cause(s) of recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Richard
Wonder what their electric bill runs at?
Biological and ecological science is difficult to control in the open. This kind of “field” study has been done by many people from many places over many decades. Different people try to look at one parameter from many different angles to find out how “ecosystems” operate. Farmers experiment on crop yields, botanists study other parameters, microbiologists study others. Marine ecologists study life from another angle. Different people try different points of view over the decades and record what they see. Long term experiments are inherited from one generation to the next to see how ecosystems evolve, or recover from the last glaciation.
The Earth has been entirely transformed by a billion years of biology. The primordial atmosphere has been completely replaced by an atmosphere of biological origin. The atmosphere will evolve, just like biology evolves. There are global nitrogen cycles, carbon cycles, water cycles and energy cycles. None of this is novel, but it’s hard for just one person to put all of global biology into a full historical perspective because people are just starting to write everything down.
There are some quantitative guesses regarding totals. Global surface to atmosphere exhange is fast with carbon, about 20 percent per year. Nitrogen and oxygen exchange large amounts but is a lower percent than CO2. It’s impossible for CO2 to “accumulate” in the atmosphere, huge amounts are removed by global photosynthesis, and replaced by biological respiration.
Soil biology respires many times more CO2 than large animal life, and oceans exchange CO2 from biology and from deep geology. Tropical termites alone have far more biomass than humans and therefore exchange more CO2 than all human activity.
Simple accounting of fossil fuel burning shows that total has reached about 4 percent of the annual biological flux. That means that humans add barely 4 percent to the atmospheric CO2 exchange cycle. A hundred years ago it may have been about 1 percent of the annual flux. So, in 1910 when the CO2 was about 300 ppm, the amount of fossil fuel CO2 was about 1 percent of that 300 ppm, which is 3 ppm. As the decades pass, that 1 percent became 2 percent, then 3 percent somewhere in the 1980s. At that time, the CO2 was 340 ppm, so the anthropogenic portion was 3 percent of that, which is about 10 ppm. When the atmosphere reaches 400 ppm, the amount of human CO2 will still be about 4 percent of the biological flux, or about 16 ppm.
This is entirely beneficial to photosysnthesis, which has been evolving to improve itself at removing CO2 from the atmosphere for a billion years. Plants have been evolving in response to lower CO2 for millions of years. Fairly recently, about 10 to 20 million years ago, CO2 became so scarce that a completely new biocellular structures evolved, that we call CAM and C4 pathways, that have started to displace older C3 plants in areas with higher temps and lower moisture.
Anyone who thinks that increased CO2 is “bad” for the environment is sadly ignorant of the facts.
TFIFY
bw says:
January 22, 2013 at 5:51 pm
+1
The whole anti-CO2 meme is perverse.