From the “trees aren’t linear instruments and the Liebigs Law department” and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, comes this story that suggests the older trees are, the less linear their tree ring growth might be, which has implications for “paleoclimatology” and Mann’s hockey stick temperature reconstructions from tree rings.
Trees grow faster and store more carbon as they age
Trees put on weight faster and faster as they grow older, according to a new study in the journal Nature. The finding that most trees’ growth accelerates as they age suggests that large, old trees may play an unexpectedly dynamic role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Richard Condit, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, devised the analysis to interpret measurements from more than 600,000 trees belonging to 403 species. “Rather than slowing down or ceasing growth and carbon uptake, as we previously assumed, most of the oldest trees in forests around the world actually grow faster, taking up more carbon,” Condit said. “A large tree may put on weight equivalent to an entire small tree in a year.”
“If human growth would accelerate at the same rate, we would weigh half a ton by middle age and well over a ton at retirement,” said Nate Stephenson, lead author and forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Whether accelerated growth of individual trees translates into greater carbon storage by aging forests remains to be seen. Programs like the United Nations REDD+ are based on the idea that forest conservation and reforestation mitigate global warming by reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In 1980, the first large-scale tree plot was established in Panama in an effort to understand why tropical forests were so diverse. More than 250,000 trees with trunk diameters greater than 1 centimeter were identified and measured within a 50-hectare area.
“ForestGEO is now the foremost forest observatory system in the world with 53 plots in 23 countries and more than 80 partner institutions,” said Stuart Davies, ForestGEO director. “We hope that researchers continue to work with our data and our staff as they ask new questions about how forests respond to global change.”
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems.
Website:
http://www.stri.si.edu/english/research/features/forestgeo.php
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I wonder if they have considered the possibility that tree growth may also be accelerating due to increases in CO2 levels?
“A large tree may put on weight equivalent to an entire small tree in a year.”
While I agree with the idea that trees make lousy Paleo-climato-makeitupaswego thermometers, I think statements like this could be made a tad more scientific. Perhaps “large”, “small”, and “may are defined in his work. If so my apologies.
That will have to be filled under the category” Oh Mann” with all the rest.
Timber!!!
P.S Dr M. Mann
If you read my post, Just want to know if you are seeing signs of the sun freezing your hockey stick in the ice yet? Remember my first tweet to you when you blocked me 2 years ago. Yup this is I, so many blocked how could you remember me?
The biggest mstery is why anyone who claims intelligence in these matters would ever buy into the idea that temperature determines tree growth. I would think that any farmer would consider Mann a city-bred fool.
Not too hard to believe, a lot of us have rapid weight gain round the mid section as we grow older! 🙂
I am forever regretting not bookmarking an article in a well-known popular science magazine by a historian which basically said that he didn’t want to tell the truth about tree-rings (i.e, they are only accurate to within 2 degrees F) because that would give “ammunition” to skeptics…
I really do not see a problem for the alarmists. If the public finally realizes that the increased carbon dioxide increases the rate of growth, they can always claim that increasing temperatures cause increasing carbon dioxide. This not only wraps things up in a nice circular argument, but certainly would not affect their credibility in my estimation.
We have to cut CO2 concentrations to 350ppm or all of us will be crushed to death by expanding trees.
Wow! This story has made it to The Guardian.
Trees accelerate growth as they get older and bigger, study finds
Findings contradict assumption that old trees are less productive and could have important implications for carbon absorption
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/15/trees-grow-more-older-carbon
Guardian provides this link.
Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12914.html
Donald Mitchell says:
January 15, 2014 at 12:14 pm
I really do not see a problem for the alarmists. If the public finally realizes that the increased carbon dioxide increases the rate of growth, they can always claim that increasing temperatures cause increasing carbon dioxide. This not only wraps things up in a nice circular argument, but certainly would not affect their credibility in my estimation.
________
You have that bass ackwards: “they can always claim that increasing temperatures cause increasing carbon dioxide.” That’s the dirty little secret that the warmunists work so hard to suppress. True, it’s just a matter of time before they try to rationalize that fact into their propaganda. Their spiel right now is that rising CO2 causes rising temperatures and mankind makes CO2 rise. Obviously, You aren’t feeling appropriately guilty… pay up.
oops
When a tree is younger, it is trying hard to grow up, up towards the light and clear of the undergrowth and the madding crowd.
When a tree is older, and established, it stands up in the light, and no longer needs to work
so hard, so begins the middle age spread.
Is that more or less the substance of this Smithsoniac discovery, or do I bark up the wrong tree?
I don’t see anything about annual carbon cycling versus standing crop numbers. Tropical forests drop leaves more or less continually but there is minimal organic litter because the ground-litter is cycled so rapidly in tropical forests. That number tends to be quite LARGE from what little has been revealed in studies. Much more remains unknown, just as is the case in most of this bullcrap.
I also don’t see anything about species variability in these numbers but it is certain that there is a large range of numbers involved here as well.
The take-away should be the amount we don’t know about ecosystem and species carbon cycling / growth dwarfs the amount we do know.
Finally, someone is doing empirical research on treemometry. It comes only seventeen years after The Team ignored the obligation to do it. Once this work gets rolling, prepare to be amazed. Science will replace wishful thinking. Should be broadcast to all secondary school students.
Oscar Bajner says:
January 15, 2014 at 12:32 pm
The takeaway is that paleoclimatologists have ignored this fact and many similar facts.
‘Trees put on weight faster and faster as they grow older, according to a new study in the journal Nature.’
Just like the rest of us.
Hey, we have just found the way to maximise CO2 absorption..
Plant old trees.
Cam_S says:
January 15, 2014 at 12:20 pm
“Wow! This story has made it to The Guardian.”
I bet it gets disappeared. They do not yet understand its implications.
Having read Montgomery’s book “Dirt” (listened to the audiobook actually) twice, pdf here, I think of trees differently…
Trees are not ‘carbon stores’ although they do contain lots of carbon of course, but are really just vehicles that transport CO2 and put it into the ground.
Over their lifetime, trees drop lots of litter (dead leaves, twigs and branches) onto the forest floor and eventually themselves. Certainly, probably 99% of that becomes CO2 again, BUT, the remaining 1%, pulled down by ‘critters’ and buried gradually builds up to make fine quality topsoil.(Very unfortunately ‘dirt’ being the US word apparently.)
Its slow a process, 1″ per century if you’re lucky, down to 1″ per millennium if you’re not. Heather moors like in Scotland ‘do’ about 1″ every 160 years, the best the UK can offer.
It does however amount to a lot of carbon.
Farming, always being forced into the cheapest option, uses this innate fertility without replacing it, effectively oxidizing the buried carbon. Nitrate fertilizer actually carries the warning “Oxidizing Agent” although that’s not the mechanism, bacteria, always starved of nitrogen do the job.
If you accept that mechanism of trees burying carbon, then you’ll see the utter stupidity of burning them in power stations and the whole thinking behind bio-fuels. Every crop cycle, annual for corn and maybe 20 years for trees, removes ever more carbon from the soil, putting it into the atmosphere and reducing the soil’s ability to grow the next crop.
As always it seems in Climate Science, they’ve got all back asswards….
I can only imagine Mann’s bluster. ” 600,000 trees? Preposterous! 12 trees in one field would have been plenty of samples for me!”
Wait a minute, tree growth has to be asymptotic to zero at some point in their lifetime. Otherwise, you know, 2000-foot trees.
I did a quick survey, and 97% of trees support the use of fossil fuels as an energy source. They love the additional CO2, and would like it a bit warmer in the winter, if we can manage that. 100% opposed the use of firewood, under any circumstances.
@Eustace Cranch – where some see a problem, others see an opportunity.
I envision a ‘crawling’ CNC mill that’d carve an entire cruise ship out of one log.
“Hi, yes, national forest? I understand you’re harvesting. Yes, I’d like an offcut. 3400 square feet, two stories. I’d like it fairly soon, I’ve already leased the spider-bots to carve it.”
Well…..
This may be a case of forgetting that trees also get thicker and thicker thus the weight of any tree- ring will grow right proportional to its diameter. Further forgetting the volume or the approximate surface at least of the tree- crown, and sum of the surfaces of all the leave areas.
Provided that anything else is kept constant.
Digging into things like this is allways a bit risky if one is not toooo aquainted to science and to studies of nature.
I allways learnt in school that dendro- chronology is possible because the tree- rings are wider in warm years and narrower in cold years. But trying for myself one day on a heap of lumbers I actually found the opposite on Picea abies. Wide rings in the nasty cool and rainy summers, and narrow to very narrow rings in the fameous summers of drought and of superne bathing conditions.
A relation that is quite easily explained by the fameous premises of photosynthesis, and from the fact that Picea abies rather preferre a bit cooler climate, actually relating to the Taiga- vegetation and mostly standing rather in the shadows on the northeast sides of the hills.
I would be very careful not to make a fool of myself by looking into this in order to discuss world and party politics without being a bit enlighted and experienced about forests and tree- rings and archaeology and dendrochronology.
No matter, the implications for preserving old growth forests will dwarf any implications for research quality issues in climate science. It will serve to get the item attention though.