From a long line of missing things in climate models and the University of Texas at Austin:
Symbiotic fungi inhabiting plant roots have major impact on atmospheric carbon, scientists say
AUSTIN, Texas — Microscopic fungi that live in plants’ roots play a major role in the storage and release of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, according to a University of Texas at Austin researcher and his colleagues at Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The role of these fungi is currently unaccounted for in global climate models.
Some types of symbiotic fungi can lead to 70 percent more carbon stored in the soil.
“Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth’s climate,” said Colin Averill, lead author on the study and graduate student in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. “This analysis clearly establishes that the different types of symbiotic fungi that colonize plant roots exert major control on the global carbon cycle, which has not been fully appreciated or demonstrated until now.”
“This research is not only relevant to models and predictions of future concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, but also challenges the core foundation in modern biogeochemistry that climate exerts major control over soil carbon pools,” added Adrien Finzi, co-investigator and professor of biology at Boston University.
Averill, Finzi and Benjamin Turner, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, published their research this week in Nature.
Soil contains more carbon than both the atmosphere and vegetation combined, so predictions about future climate depend on a solid understanding of how carbon cycles between the land and air.
Plants remove carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis in the form of carbon dioxide. Eventually the plant dies, sheds leaves, or loses a branch or two, and that carbon is added to the soil. The carbon remains locked away in the soil until the remains of the plant decompose, when soil-dwelling microbes feast on the dead plant matter and other organic detritus. That releases carbon back into the air.
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  IMAGE: This Eastern Hemlock stands at Harvard Forest.
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One of the limits that both the plants and the soil-dwelling microbes share is the availability of nitrogen, an essential nutrient for all life. Most plants have a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi, which help extract nitrogen and nutrients from the soil and make that nitrogen available for the plants to use. Recent studies have suggested that plants and their fungi compete with the soil microbes for the nitrogen available in the soil and that this competition reduces decomposition in the soil.
There are two major types of the symbiotic fungi, ecto- and ericoid mycorrhizal (EEM) fungi and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. EEM fungi produce nitrogen-degrading enzymes, which allows them to extract more nitrogen from the soil than the AM fungi extract.
Examining data from across the globe, Averill and his colleagues found that where plants partner with EEM fungi, the soil contains 70 percent more carbon per unit of nitrogen than in locales where AM fungi are the norm.
The EEM fungi allow the plants to compete with the microbes for available nitrogen, thus reducing the amount of decomposition and lowering the amount of carbon released back into the atmosphere.
“This study is showing that trees and decomposers are really connected via these mycorrhizal fungi, and you can’t make accurate predictions about future carbon cycling without thinking about how the two groups interact. We need to think of these systems holistically,” said Averill.
The researchers found that this difference in carbon storage was independent of and had a much greater effect than other factors, including the amount of plant growth, temperature and rainfall.
Averill is a student in the ecology, evolution and behavior graduate program in the lab of Christine Hawkes, associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology.
Additional contact: Lee Clippard, media relations, University of Texas at Austin, 512-232-0675, clippard@austin.utexas.edu
SO we can grow fungus at the feet of the wind turbine and get a make wind energy commercially viable. But wait, what will happen when those turbines fall and kill the poor fungus, or kill poor birds and they fall and kill the poor fungus. That would definitely be a positive feedback increasing climate sensitivity.
The obvious question is, as I cannot see it in this text about this study, was this study based on models for models?
Anth0ny:
The article reports
So, we have to think of the carbon system “holistically”
and
we are only starting to understand carbon exchange mechanisms in the carbon cycle
and
it is not possible to make accurate predictions about future carbon cycling in the absence of the knowledge we are now only starting to obtain.
Well, I am gobsmacked! NOT!
See
Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005)
Richard
Fungi must in denial. The science is settled.
““Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth’s climate,” said Colin Averill, lead author on the study and graduate student in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin.”
Here, Averill hands out conjecture for truth; as he silently implies that the CO2AGW theory is fact – a conclusion at which he can only have arrived by assuming that GCM’s work – but they have already been falsified by the last 17 years of non-warming.
I’d give him an A for gullibility and an A for propaganda; slipping in untruths like that is masterful.
Don’t be too quick to mock this work. Climate models are all based upon the assumption declared by the IPCC that atmospheric CO2 is in an equilibrium state of zero Net Biome Production. That is Net Primary Production (atmospheric CO2 removal by photosynthetic activity) is perfectly balanced by Heterotrophic Respiration (respiration and decomposition of organic matter). CO2 levels are rising, it is claimed, because this balance is being skewed by the release of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. If it turns out that the assumption of a zero Net Biome Production is false, and that more CO2 is being stored in the land, then all bets are off concerning predicted future CO2 levels.
Its a Wonderfull World.
The hubris is that we understand it in an eye blink.
“From a long line of missing things in climate models”
It’s missing for a good reason. GCM’s don’t determine non-water GHG gas concentrations; they are supplied as forcings (scenarios). This would apply also to fungal respiration.
Nick Stokes
Wouldn’t it be an improvement if they did relate to the reality of non-water GHG gas concentrations instead of just being inputted?
If CO2 absorption is all lumped in as a black-box of “other processes” then aren’t you just wiggle-matching the past?
How can that have any meaning for the future?
David Coe:
As you say in your post at January 9, 2014 at 3:11 am, this paper is yet more evidence for something some of us have been saying for a long time.
I copy your post here for emphasis
Yes! Indeed so!
And the subsequent (in this thread) attempt at damage limitation from Nick Stokes is plain wrong.
Richard
As a retired farmer I say by all means study soil fungi as they are a vital component in every plant species and it’s survival and have a huge role to play in ensuring that the world’s food needs provided from plants of every description will be met in the decades ahead.
And thats where this total nonsense and outright scientific stupidity plus the full blown demonstration of abject ignorance by the whole of the climate activist powered scamming global warming industry about their so called and badly mis-named “Carbon”, should stop right there ..
Unfortunately once again this study is just another in an almost infinite array of never has so much of Other Peoples Money been spent by so many unqualified scientific “experts” for so little benefit or so little evidence of so little in actual results and so little in the way of beneficial and useful outcomes .
In short I am, along with I suspect a vast and increasing number other ordinary tax paying citizens, getting completely fed up to the back teeth with this mindless crap that now passes for so called science today.
Along with the fact that we, the common people are forced to pay for this scientific crap without ever being allowed to have any say in who and where and if the second and third rate so called scientists who are no more than overpaid parasites upon society are allowed to have any access to our taxes.
That great unwritten 200 year old contract between science and society was that science agreed to do everything in it’s power to improve our lives and in return we as a society agreed to finance science and give science an unfettered right to go where it liked to the limits of the human mind in it’s research, A right and a privilege that has been granted to very few others in our society.
And for 200 years both parties held to that contract to the immense benefit of us all as we can see around us.
Now just the opposite is occurring
So many of these parasitical climate science drones instead of finding ways to improve society, those so called [ climate ] scientists are instead demanding and advocating and using political influence to reduce and destroy so many of the advances we have achieved in the decades past such as totally reliable energy, advances that the science and scientists of the past in co-operation with all the other sectors that make up society have created over the last two centuries.
At the behest of climate science and so called climate scientists with an ad mixture of other third raters who call themselves climate scientists [ eg; Turney et al ] and based entirely on science biased unproven climate models only and with absolutely no perceivable proven, observed hard evidence whatsoever of mankind’s emissions of CO2, that misnamed “carbon” so called even by apparently ignorant climate scientists, is having any influence on the global climate let alone a deleterious effect. the science fraternity, nearly the whole damn lot of them are persisting and often vehemently demanding that we now destroy that incredible reliability of our energy systems of the past.
They are demanding that we forsake centuries old traditions on the use of resources of every type.
Some of them are demanding that we go back as a civilisation to the caves from where we have expended so much in blood and time and resources to drag our selves up the ladder of civilisation.
Instead those same scientists are advocating the creation of grossly expensive, totally unpredictable and therefore totally unreliable and increasingly unaffordable renewable energy systems that have done nothing whatsoever in any way to reduce that nefarious “carbon” .
Instead those numerous scientist backed and science advocated forced changes on our society have created great societal distress through the loss of jobs and industry, the creation of power generation that is no longer affordable, the creation of major economic problems, the shifting of money from then poor to the rich on an unprecedented scale, the destruction of wealth and resources on a global scale beyond comprehension ie; a billion dollars a day on climate change and the benefits, absolutely nothing, zilch and cannot be identified, Plus the creation of immense divisiveness and societal conflict and the list goes on and all for what?
These are the legacies of today’s increasingly corrupt and out of touch science who have negated their long held contract with society to always try to improve our lives, to a position where they, the scientists are now increasingly looked upon with scorn and with expectations that their next utterance will contain yet another nefarious prescription advocating even further strictures and further nefarious imposts and further financial and societal strictures on the citizens and society.
All to justify and satisfy their own personal agendas and ideologies and with nary a thought for the where their generous salaries and lavish perks are coming from and consequently who they are ultimately responsible too, the tax payers that they in the elitism believe they can patronizingly treat with total condescension.
I have been a science supporter all my life of 75 years but now I have had a gutsfull of what science has become, It is just another greedy grasping tax payer funded boondoggle for an elitist few that turns out total crap like the paper headlined above.
And they, those same scientists in their total arrogance then have the total gall to grab with their grasping greedy hands held right out demanding yet more of the the ordinary and humble citizen’s hard earned income to continue funding their own quite lavish well travelled life styles.
End of rant !!
It all has nothing to do with that 2E30 kg fusion fireball, 93 million miles away however.
Let’s send some fungi to Venus. It’ll be a paradise.
So much for the “Science is settled”
Seems they left out a big factor.
And Nick, if they got that big black box correct Lord Monckton and others wouldn’t be having so much fun mocking the models.
Isn’t it a shame that valid and interesting (in it’s own right) research like this has to hang itself off climate change? It sometimes seems that if it ain’t climate it ain’t science nowadays 🙁
I used to be a fun guy, got married had kids, now I’m more like fungi. What scares me is that someone will suggest spreading the ‘good’ fungi everywhere, and we’ll end up taking too much CO2 out of the atmosphere or some other unintended consequence.
Whatever the truth, you can be sure that when models are changed to incorporate this it will be portrayed as a positive forcing.
So the outcome seems to be that the programmers of said GCMs, DHAF clue? Excuse my French, please! May the Lord preserve us.
Richard Courtney you are far to polite – become an engineer! 😉
Magic Mushrooms now?
Or are they just clutching to straws?
@ROM amen brother.
There is no evidence of any description that CO2 causes any change in the real world atmosphere – none at all. If there was this evidence would be available and published.
Instead we have spin doctors changing CO2 to ‘carbon’ and global warming to ‘climate change’ and then to ‘climate’ with no science behind their demands for taxes. The academic departments wanting funding for research in any abstruse areas are directed that ‘carbon footprint’ has to be part of the research or no funding. So we see these research projects all the time with genuflections to ‘carbon’.
Yet there still is no evidence of any effect of anthropogenic or other CO2 causing any warming – which is the only way that it could have a climatic effect. Until such evidence is produced these studies based on the assumption that more CO2 is dangerous are just money laundering exercises.
I heard Sherwood Idso in the early 1990 and soil biology was one of the many items he mentioned that the climate models either skip or simplify beyond recognition. Oddly, in Climate Science, such identified errors seem to linger for decades.
Happy to hear more about CO2, but do not agree with the fanciful premise first postulated in the late 19th century by a geologist who pretty much everything else wrong – that it has anything of significance to do with climate change.
Still, for those who “do believe”, can someone explain how CO2 generated at ground level by the burning of fossil fuels, makes it s way to the upper atmosphere?
Will we now be asked to deduce that the ‘missing heat’ is stored in all this carbon (dioxide) within the fungi-ridden soils rather than hiding in the deeps with Captain Nemo?
Any impact this research may have on modern large- scale agriculture, will be far down the road. At this stage of our understanding, the lucrative farm’s web of life includes the implement dealer and the geneticist and the chemist. The soil is regarded primarily as a place for the desired crop to thrive, sterile to everything else.
I may be missing the point but it seems that CO2 concentrations are following the projected paths, it is the T response that is not following. While interesting, this study would need to explain an error in expected CO2 levels and to my knowledge the levels are at expected levels.
So is this saying that we can expect future CO2 levels to drop significantly due to the fungi interchange? What am I missing?