From Kansas State University, dueling statements, which I’ve highlighted in bold. Its the same sort of nonsense argument we here for Carbon Dioxide, that while essential for all life on the planet, it is also a pollutant. I see a nitrogen tax in our future if this nutty idea takes hold. – Anthony
Global nitrogen availability consistent for past 500 years, linked to carbon levels
MANHATTAN — A Kansas State University research team has found that despite humans increasing nitrogen production through industrialization, nitrogen availability in many ecosystems has remained steady for the past 500 years. Their work appears in the journal Nature.
“People have been really interested in nitrogen in current times because it’s a major pollutant,” said Kendra McLauchlan, assistant professor of geography and director of the university’s Paleoenvironmental Laboratory. “Humans are producing a lot more nitrogen than in the past for use as crop fertilizer, and there is concern because excess levels can cause damage. The mystery, though, is whether the biosphere is able to soak up this extra nitrogen and what that means for the future.”
Nitrogen is a key component of the ecosystem and the largest regulator of plant growth. It determines how much food, fuel and fiber the land can produce. It also determines how much carbon dioxide plants remove from the atmosphere, and it interacts with several components of the climate system. Excessive amounts of nitrogen in ecosystems contribute to global warming and impairment of downstream ecosystems.
McLauchlan worked with Joseph Craine, research assistant professor in biology; Joseph Williams, postdoctoral research associate; and Elizabeth Jeffers, postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford. The team published their findings, “Change
s in global nitrogen cycling during the Holocene epoch,” in the current issue of Nature.
In the study the team also looked at how nitrogen availability changed thousands of years ago.
Roughly 15,000 years ago, the Earth began to warm, melting many glaciers and ice sheets that covered the landscape. Researchers found that Earth experienced an 8,000-yearlong decline in nitrogen availability as temperatures rose and carbon and nitrogen became locked up in soils. According to researchers, how the nitrogen cycle responded to these ancient global changes in carbon dioxide could be a glimpse into the future.
“What happened in the past might be a dry run for Earth’s future,” Craine said. “By looking at what happened millennia ago, we can see what controlled and prevented changes in nitrogen availability. This helps us understand and predict how things will change in the future.”
The team collected and analyzed data from the sediment records of 86 lakes scattered across six continents. The lakes were distributed between tropical and temperate zones. With the data, the team was able to compare past and present cycling in various regions.
Researchers found that once most of the glaciers and ice sheets had melted around 11,000 years ago, the Earth continued to experience a global decline in nitrogen that lasted another 4,000 years.
“That was one of the really surprising findings,” Craine said. “As the world was getting warmer and experiencing higher carbon dioxide levels than it had in the past, just like we are currently experiencing, the ecosystems were starting to lock carbon in the soils and in plants, also like we are seeing today. That created a long decline in nitrogen availability, and it scrubbed nitrogen out of the atmosphere.”
McLauchlan said the most surprising finding, however, was that although humans have nearly doubled the amount of nitrogen to the ecosystems, globally nitrogen levels have remained stable at most sites for the past 500 years.
One reason may be that plants are using more nitrogen than they previously have, keeping nitrogen levels consistent with those thousands of years ago even though humans continue to add carbon dioxide and nitrogen to the atmosphere, McLauchlan said.
“Our best idea is that the nitrogen and carbon cycles were linked tightly back then and they are linked tightly today,” McLauchlan said. “Humans are now manipulating both nitrogen and carbon at the same time, which means that there is no net effect on the biosphere.”
The balance may be only temporary, McLauchlan said.
“Based on what we learned from the past, if the response of plants to elevated carbon dioxide slows, nitrogen availability is likely to increase and ecosystems will begin to change profoundly,” McLauchlan said. “Now more than ever, it’s important to begin monitoring our grasslands and forests for early warning signs.”
The Nature study is an extension of McLauchlan’s National Science Foundation CAREER Award that examines the history of nitrogen cycling in forested and grassland environments, her research on nitrogen concentrations and grasslands at the Konza Prairie Biological Station, and Craine’s research on grasslands and climate change.
Looking at the accompanying photograph, they’ve followed the same route as the critics of fossil fuel power station use, hoping stupid Joe Public won’t know the difference between steam and smoke. In this case, what we see is nitrogen from liquified air going back into the air; net effect zero.
Is there a psychiatrist, or other practising brain doctor, among the commenters here? It would be fascinating to see a professional analysis of the bizarre thought patterns and world view exhibited in papers like this.
Oh well. This can’t be any more ridiculous than the NSF dropping $395,000 on Yale University to study male duck genitalia.
78.09% by volume of Earth’s atmosphere is a pollutant. [Nitrogen]
0.039 per cent by volume of Earth’s atmosphere is a pollutant. [Co2]
The EPA sees Co2 as a toxin and Al Gore sees it as pollution. The numbers above really makes one wonder about the sanity of these idiots.
Of course it is because co2 which is 0.039 per cent by volume of Earth’s atmosphere has been declared a pollutant and a toxin. According to Warmists co2 is not plant food but a Satanic gas. /sarc
Here is the co2 pollutant at work. See how it ravages greenery. There really is no hope left for humanity.
http://youtu.be/P2qVNK6zFgE
This whole charade is caused by a lack of Oxygen – flowing in the brains of those who propose this idiotic theory. Grant monies notwithstanding……..
Simples.
Seeing as we are now onto declaring co2 and nitrogen as pollutants whey the heck stop there?
Oxygen > free radicals > cell damage = toxic pollutant
Water vapour > biggest greenhouse gas = air pollution
Water > drink too much = water poisoning
As you can see we must act now and reduce these dangerous, life threatening toxins.
“Roughly 15,000 years ago, the Earth began to warm, melting many glaciers and ice sheets that covered the landscape. Researchers found that Earth experienced an 8,000-yearlong decline in nitrogen availability as temperatures rose and carbon and nitrogen became locked up in soils. According to researchers, how the nitrogen cycle responded to these ancient global changes in carbon dioxide could be a glimpse into the future.”
So let’s stop and think for a minute all you paleoclumsytoglyists at Potassium Sulfur Uranium (What else could KSU stand for. Sure couldn’t be a real university.) If the amount of atmospheric nitrogen decreased as atmospheric carbon dioxide increased it has to mean that CO2 is beneficial for maintaining a stable atmosphere. As long as we increase the CO2 along with the N2 all is well. In fact we probably need to massively increase CO2 in order to lower the N2 levels to an ideal level. Let’s get busy folks.
After all, humans were in control of setting the ratio of atmospheric gasses, were they not? Couldn’t have anything to do with the nitrogen fixing plants flourishing as the earth warmed out of an ice age. And that somehow as more plants grew in a warmer climate that more nitrogen was fixed in the soil and became available for non-nitrogen fixing plants to use. Couldn’t be that. Here is a partial list of native plants in California that fix nitrogen in the soil. Keep in mind that these plants love nitrogen and as a result hate the over educated nincompoops at Potassium Sulfur U who want to demonize it and take it away.
Acacia greggii- Cat Claw Acacia
Amorpha californica,Amorpha fruticosa False Indigo
Astragalus nuttallii Locoweed
Calliandra eriophylla- Fairy Duster
Cercidium floridum ,Cercidium microphyllum – Palo Verde
Cercis occidentalis – Redbud
Dalea- Indigo Bush
Hoita-(or Psoralea orbicularis) Leather Root
Lupinus (all), Lupine
Marina parryi- Marina
Olneya tesota- Ironwood
Pickeringia- Chaparral Pea
Prosopis(all)- Mesquite
Psorothamnus spinosus, Smoke Tree
Trifolium- Clover
Some California native non-legumes that fix nitrogen are:
Alnus rhombifolia,-Alnus rubra-Alder
Cercocarpus(all),- Mountain Mahogany
Ceanothus (all) California Lilac
Chamaebatia- Mountain Misery
Myrica- Bayberry
Purshia- Antelope Bush, Bitter Brush, or Cliffrose
Sheperdia- Buffaloberry
Yes! The past is a glimpse of the future. Mock the over educated and underthinking! Mock them until the abandon the stupid idea to reduce carbon dioxide and nitrogen to levels that are deleterious to the 3% of the plantlife on earth on which every animal depends for our very existence. Mock them over and over, without remorse and without pause until they go away to Walmart and get honest jobs within their abilities. Like greeters. Or cart boys and girls. But now I’ve gone to insulting Walmart folks. And that wasn’t my intent. Keep mocking. Keep exposing the ridiculous by using the absurd extension of stupid ideas and thinly disguised power and money grabs.
Cheers,
pbh
But I was told that co2 rise comes before temperature rise. Oh, never mind.
You skeptics are totally off base. When are you going to realize that nitrogen is LETHAL! Try breathing 100% nitrogen and see what that gets you. Crosses over your eyes. We need to ban nitrogen IMMEDIATELY! Wait, not ban it, TAX it! That’s the ticket.
Need I say it? sarc off
Hoiw is this Kendra McKaughlan qualified to teach in a university if she is stupid and ignorant and irrational and arrogant enough to think nitrogen is a pollutant? Is this the kind of education our kids are paying inflated rates of tuition to get? Next you know, water will be called a pollutant. When does this idiocy stop? Methinks only when the colleges and universities AND K-12 schools are purged of this sort of riffraff. They are the real pollutants, poisoning kids’ minds.
Here is co2 alarmism in a nutshell.
Dihydrogen Monoxide is water.
Gullibility is the key to the co2 hoax. The more people know the more skeptical they become.
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
http://youtu.be/jhfTzTc3XX0
The polluting nitrogen is, for example, excess fertilizer runoff into streams – not atmospheric nitrogen. All the authors are saying is that there is no increase in sedimentary nitrogen because the biosphere has used the increase in carbon dioxide to capture the excess reactive nitrogen. No big deal, really.
Simple:
Only 4 are acceptable on our planet by those:
1. Earth
2. Fire
3. Water
4. Air
Everything else is a chemical and therefore must be bad.
Remember, they want to re-create an essentially feudal system with themselves as overlords. Feudal systems and knowledgeable populations don’t work. Hence dumb down the masses.
“The Gulf of Mexico dead zone is an area of hypoxic (link to USGS definition) (less than 2 ppm dissolved oxygen) waters at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Its area varies in size, but can cover up to 6,000-7,000 square miles……The dead zone is caused by nutrient enrichment from the Mississippi River, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous….”
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/index.html
NOx from fossil burning is another form of nitrogen pollution.
W. W. Wygart . . . . If you are listening . . . . .
http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/ferouscranus.htm
Very funny & creative.
. And nobody ever knew,
From that dark day to the present,
Whoso had taken the Pobble’s toes,
In a manner so far from pleasant.
Whether the shrimps or crawfish gray,
Or crafty mermaids stole them away,
Nobody knew; and nobody knows
How the Pobble was robbed of his twice five toes!
Edward Lear
The team might have spent its funding no worse if it had attempted to research what happened to the Pobble’s toes.
Compost. The Answer is make more compost, lots more. After all, the key to good compost is the Carbon to Nitrogen ratio, aka the Paper to Poop ratio. We already know all that nasty carbon is killing us, and now we know nitrogen is out to get us too.
We can fix both problems at once by making more compost. And compost makes good plant food.
Reactive Nitrogen is the new CO2- it cycles through the environment in ways that are complex and poorly understood. EPA’s science advisory board is recommending a 25% cut in N loading for the continental US and a disastrous 45% for the Mississippi River basin.
It is an absolute myth that N was low on the prairies until recently. The combination of fire and hydric soils caused nitrogen fixation to run riot. Nitrogen fixation in water logged soils and 1% straw produces N fixation rates up to 150/kg/ha and 500-1000kg/ha when straw increases to 5 to 20%. Adding manure to the equation can bump fixation rates to over 1300kg/ha.
KNO3 salts on the prairie killed many of the first domestic cattle. N was so high on the freshly plowed praires that it tool until the 1920s for N to fall low enough to grow wheat.
N can cycle from inert Ngas to ammonia to nitrate and back again to N2 gas. Nitrate is pretty mobile so can be lost from a system and N retention in the soils is not straightforward.
The nitrate buildup is what made prairie fire so feared by early settlers.
An investigation by Mayo(1895) found that cornstalks contained 18.8% pottasium nitrate by dry weight! Mayo wrote, “Upon splitting a corn stalk, the crystals in the pith of the stalk could easily be seen with the unaided eye…. On lighting a bit of stalk with a match, it would deflagrate, burning rapidly like the fuse of a fire cracker.” Its why one person stayed awake at all times on the early prairies.
They don’t seem to a clue about the Nitrogen Cycle they write about. The vast majority of available (fixed) nitrogen is created by bacteria. On land, symbiotic bacteria in the soil feed on sugar from plant roots and fix N2 from the air. Available nitrogen increases along with plant growth. Where’s the problem?
OK, let’s make a variety of things clear here. Oxygen IS simultaneously good and bad, even in biology. It is good, as we basically “burn” carbon and hydrogen locked up in starches and proteins in the Krebs cycle. It is “bad” as oxygen also “burns” our DNA and causes oxidative damage that is associated with aging and cancer. Our bodies have all sorts of naturally produced anti-oxidants, and as you get older it is a generally good idea to supplement them as one of many ways we are evolutionarily programmed to die is that our natural antioxidant metabolic protection decreases with age. We could walk through the processes and places where sulfur compounds (“thiones”) like glutathione and alpha-lipoic acid both catalyze the Krebs cycle and act as heavy metal chelators and general antioxidants that protect the cells and in particular cellular DNA while facilitating mitochondrial function, but the point is that living in pure oxygen would probably kill us in fairly short order, even as living in an atmosphere with too little oxygen would. Oxygen is one of the many factors that helps kill you even as it helps keep you alive.
Nitrogen, too, is both essential and a pest. Straight N_2 is nearly inert and is a non-factor, useless to plant and animals and basically all it does is to ensure that we don’t breathe straight O_2 which is a generally good thing. However, nitrogen is also an essential biological building block, the amine in amino acid, the differentiating ingredient in proteins as opposed to carbohydrate starches. To get biologically accessible nitrogen, it has to be combined with something else, as N_2 straight up is inert and virtually impossible for biological entities to use given their molecular energy resources.
The nitrogen cycle thus begins with lightning. Lightning is hot enough that it splits N_2 and O_2 and actually burns the nitrogen, producing e.g. NO and NO_2 (and Ozone, O_3). These, in turn combine with water in the atmosphere to form H_2NO_2 (Nitrous Acid) and H_2NO_3 (Nitric Acid). The former is a weak acid, but an important factor in aerosol chemistry and the tropospheric ozone cycle (it grabs an O from O_3 to make Nitric Acid). Nitric Acid is a strong acid, but one that in a typically dilute form in thunderstorm rain is absolutely essential to life. It falls in rain, enters the soil, is fixed by friendly bacteria in the form of biologically accessible nitrates, and becomes “fertilizer”. A lot of plant growth IS nitrogen limited, especially in some species of food crops, and hence many/most fertilizers contain a strong nitrate component (in some cases high enough to permit the fertilizer to be used to make a class of nitrate compounds that form powerful explosives).
High concentrations of H2NO_3 are dangerous — a component of “acid rain”, although this is primarily sulphuric acid downrange of high-sulfur coal burning. Low concentrations are fertilizer and essential to life. Sulfur-bearing compounds are essential to life, but too much of them is bad. Oxygen is good, oxygen is bad. It’s all about balance.
So there is nothing wrong with the research, or even the conclusions. Don’t interpret everything as an attack on sanity. Balance is important, and the Earth doesn’t, in fact, balance things perfectly automatically. It fluctuates all over the place.
rgb
Nitrogen is also dangerous stuff. Ammonium Nitrate is a constituent in almost all industrial explosives. Trinitrotoluene is/was a major military explosive. Nitro-glycerine was a common industrial explosive; I could go on.
We have to be careful about this stuff.
/sarc
The commenters here seem to be rather reactionary, but as several people pointed out, the press release is so poorly written…
The actual paper looks interesting, from the abstract:
” We analysed published records of stable nitrogen isotopic values (δ15N) in sediments from 86 lakes on six continents. Here we show that the value of sedimentary δ15N declined from 15,000 years before present to 7,056 ± 597 years before present, a period of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and terrestrial carbon accumulation2.”
This is rather amazing in that it seems it took the biosphere about 8,000 years to recover from the ice age. This must be all the forests growing up from where there had only been ice before (there were glaciers in Quebec only 5,000 ybp IIRC) The CO2 increase must have been from the uncovered soils and the terrestrial carbon accumulation from the recovering biosphere. Amazing.
They also say that the nitrogen balance has been constant for the last 500 years. Everything else about the future impacts is just window dressing.
Climate change is a given. You can either get warmer or colder. Why anyone would choose colder is a mystery to me. This paper provides another perspective on why colder is not optimal for the biosphere.