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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“Wait a minute, tree growth has to be asymptotic to zero at some point in their lifetime. Otherwise, you know, 2000-foot trees.:”
You’ve misread… they’re not talking height, they’re talking volume. Think of it this way, as a sapling you’ve got a straw’s worth of volume in a year… the outer skin. As the tree gets taller and wider, the volume of the additional skin increases in both circumference and height. What is implied by commenters, but not sure it was actually stated in the article, is that the thickness of the ring also increases. I don’t read that.
While humans do not put on weight at the rate trees do, they still seem to pick up the pace as they get older. 😉
Don`t orget either, tat Manns tree- ring studies and “hockey curve” result from this….
……..has been cross- examined by other kinds of methods carried out on other materials and by other institutes.
On stalactites and stalagmites, on choral reefs, on Clay sediments in the arctic ocean northwest of Spitzbergen, and on Chalk- algae northwest of Grønland.
All giving approximately the same result and principle of the temperature history in recent milleniæ.
This being a quite more enlighted way of cross- examining and criticizing Michael Manns results.
Paleo- climatic research is rather an old and quite traditional dicipline, dealing for instance with pollen analyses and moor- research.
Which is perhaps rather new to several of you, but I am not so shocked and surprized and politically commerciaqlly religiously upset at all by what Michael Mann could present, because I rather knew it from before . It thus does not form any kind of serious threats to my lifestyle and beliefs.
It is rather quite similar to things that we have found in the historical and the stone age museum for decades, thus we have learnt to live with such things rather than with Marx` and Lenins learnings of worlds history.
MM to execute “liar, liar” defense.
kcrucible says:
January 15, 2014 at 1:05 pm
“You’ve misread… they’re not talking height, they’re talking volume”
Same problem. Growth, in any direction, has to slow to zero at some point.
This is where I think one of the largest sources of the increase in CO2 is coming from – the destruction of one of the largest CO2 “sinks” – old growth (ie. large tree) forests in “growing” but still poor nations. (The largest “source” would be warming oceans outgassing CO2.) The loss of a very LARGE number of old growth trees in developing countries has to have had a major impact in the “source/sink” balance causing a slow gradual build up of CO2. IMHO the loss of a large old tree has a much more dramatic cumulative effect than the burning of a barrel of oil. One effects the active ongoing annual consumption of CO2, while the other simply adds a finite amount of CO2 back to the plant food “pool”. In the “source/sink” balance concept, a tree (sink) is much more like an engine (source) that lives, on average, a longer life and whose “sinking” activity is only governed by fuel (water and CO2), temperature and sunlight. Loss of an old tree forest, if this “larger provides greater CO2 sink capacity” theory holds up, is the equivalent of cumulatively adding greater and greater coal burning capacity at a power plant.
Of course, CO2 increase will ultimately be compensated for by further “greening” of the planet because of the extra “plant food” now available. I predict that the planet is going to get ever greener and that all this beneficial CO2 is going to have a miniscule – maybe even undetectable – effect on climate and/or global average temperature (short term AND long term). IMHO. Why? Again, my basic reason has to do with orders of magnitude. CO2 never changes phase. Conduction and convection of heat-absorbing and heat-radiating WATER provides orders of magnitude greater and faster heat/temperature modulation. Water changes phase regularly on our planet in direct response to added, or loss of, heat. CO2 does not.
Again, since the data now shows that for the last 12? 15? 17? years CO2 has continued its inexorable climb, while global average temperatures have bounced around but had no average steady increase, the cause-effect linkage has been proven inconsequential for the “increasing-CO2-causes-increasing-temp theory”. (It might still have a reasonably measurable linkage in the opposite “increasing-temp-causes-increasing-CO2 theory”.) So, IMHO, in spite of Ira G’s recent painstaking “theoretical” explanation of the way “green house gases” are supposed to work, that cause/effect relationship (though it is real) has dwindled to inconsequential at current CO2 levels. Meanwhile the much, much, much, more powerful short term stimulus-response governor, water, in all its latent heat transporting physical forms, ice/water/vapor, continues to provide the vast majority of the climate moderation on planet earth just as it always has. Worried about CO2 doubling? Why? Water content regularly doubles, triples . . . awe shucks! increases up to 60 fold and even becomes liquid and ice! in our atmosphere, and can in some places drop to near zero, . . . all of it NATURALLY in direct response to incoming radiant heat. With this significant an effect, you have to appreciate the “orders of magnitude”. If ‘green house gases” provide a heat flow resisting “blanket” to the planet – then water is the “down comforter”, while CO2 is a “mosquito net”.
IMHO.
??? They think this is new? I’m a layman but logged wood in Maine in my youth AND know the equation for the volume of a cylinder … I thought everyone knew tree faster and faster as they grow
This may be true for tropical rain forest trees in unmanaged forests, where old growth canopy may ‘starve’ saplings. But is is surely not for southern yellow pine. In those managed forests, when harvested for pulp they are harvested just after maximum biomass production per year is reached, usually about 20-25 years. If harvested for plywood peeler blocks and lumber (2x4s) they are harvested at 35-44 years. The lost monetary time value of slower rate of biomass production is more than offset by the higher per cubit value of the end resulting wood. Same is true on much longer time scales formthe various western coniferous species.It is also not true for managed (but not plantation) northern hardwoods, where older larger trees are selectively harvested every few years to promote faster growth of younger trees.
Any professional forester knows this. It is how companies like Boise Cascade and Weyerhauser maximize yields. Check any managed forest text. Check the managed forests on my Wisconsin farm.
The blanket conclusion simply is not universally true.
Tree height is limited by the weight of water needed to be raised to the tops for the leaves to use.
When I saw this post I was immediately reminded about claims about trees reaching their co2 uptake saturation point.
Romm & Co. really does need to look at the totally contradictory paleo evidence from the literature.
Just last year we had the BBC on the case.
Could it be due to the colder winters of late?
Another way to see that this is not universally true is simply to look at growth rings of a boll cross section. My wife and I just harvested two, a white pine and an oak, for proposes of making furniture at the cabin in Georgia. For both the hardwood and the softwood, the annual ring spacing starts large, and shrinks as the tree matures. Inner rings are more widely spaced, outer rings are quite narrow. One can measure this differential over time, and using the change over time in pi* delta r^2 (since volume is just times height, and trees reach their species typical maximum height long before maximum mass (explained by the hydraulic limitation hypothesis) can actually use calculus to work out optimum harvesting times depending on the wood sought-sawtimber or pulpwood (or, in the case of hardwood with extensive crowns, both).
Could this paper mean that Warmists should focus on deforestation as opposed to trying to curb this vital PLANT FERTILIZER. Ye, that’s right I called in a plant fertilizer. Any Warmists who wish to doubt this just click the link and read about papers actually calling the process co2 fertilization.
.
A little arithmetic would have saved the researchers all that trouble:
(Circumference of year 20 ring / Circumference of year 10 ring) >2
given, on average, rings are similar in thickness plus there is growth upwards and outwards of the canopy. Certainly if you measured 100 trees the relation would be pretty firm. Sheesh what are they teaching in botany and forestry these days that this is a new discovery.
And:
“…growth accelerates as they age suggests that large, old trees may play an unexpectedly dynamic role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.” Suggests? It is a certainty! Sheesh, what arithmetic are they teaching botanists and foresters these days. No 95% certainty among these folks.
How long before Mann sues a sequoia?
One thing for me that stood out was in ‘the team’ there was not one person who was well qualified in consider what actual effects tree growth, considering how important was to their claims . But then one thing climate ‘scientists’ have never been short of its ego and a extreme belief, against all evidenced, if their own intelligence. So perhaps they felt they did not need one.
(Area = pi * r^2) implies that as r increases by one unit, the additional area (volume) increases by over 6 times. Of course more wood is created if the same thickness is added each year.
Does the article say that the thickness of each year’s growth also increases? Or is the increase due to geometry?
Along another line of thinking. I would think that CO2 consumption by a small tree vs a large tree is more directly related to a) the number and surface area coverage of leaves, or needles, or whatever structure contains the chlorophyll, ie. the areal density of LEAVES, b) the packing density inside those leaves, and efficiency with which that particular species of tree leaf use blue and red light to convert water and CO2 to longer chain carbon compounds, and c) the number and areal density of LEAVES . . . its the leaves not the rings.
Tree rings measure the efficiency with which a particular species of tree’s leaves are capable of converting CO2 to the carbohydrate that makes up that tree’s biomass. Stating the obvious, temperature is only one of many variables that affect the continuous photosynthesis reaction that ultimately creates a tree’s rings. Don’t local CO2 concentration, light, water, chlorophyll concentration (ie. availability of magnesium) play a much larger role?
Err, sorry to be a wet blanket but on this occasion the second conclusion is invalid. Think of cancer cells or embryos. They double to grow, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc but then the rate starts to slow down , probably due to Liebigs law, and the cancer or embryo, which seems to be increasing in size and weight at a massive clip is actually slowing down as it grows (fact though counter intuitive).
The second part of the contrariness is that there are a lot more small tres than big trees out there, many times more, all growing at a faster rate as earlier along the curve. Hence a lot more CO2 storage in the masses of far more abundabpnt growing smaller trees.
Tree rings are obviously prone to error, run with it, tease the warmists if you can with the storage issue, but …
“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,”
Do a lot of assuming in science do we Mr Condit?
@ur momisugly Rud Istvan at 1:25 pm
Exactly right. Well-said.
@ur momisugly mkelly at 1:25 pm,
I disagree. Tree height is determined by genetics, given equally favorable growing conditions.
When talking of volume growth it is worth remembering that trees are fractal.
The growth in tree volume can be a twig from a branch. An increase in the external sixe of the tree may not be necessary.
So the limits of growth may not be reached on the lifetime of a tree.
Reminds me of interesting problem. If earth was a perfect sphere and a rope was wrapped around the equator one meter above the ground how much longer would rope be compared to length of equator ?
stevek on January 15, 2014 at 3:44 pm
Reminds me of interesting problem. If earth was a perfect sphere and a rope was wrapped around the equator one meter above the ground how much longer would rope be compared to length of equator ?
—————-
2pi longer
@Rud Istvan: Exactly right. This may change now with a CO2 over 400ppm, but I don’t expect a sudden change. Anyway, I would take a core sample at several year intervals. Even a tree height may depend on a CO2 concentration.
“””””……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……..”””””””
Golly; how can that be ? I would have thought that my office desk aspidistra, would put the pounds on so much faster, than that big redwood, growing outside my window.
I wonder if it could somehow be related to the fact that older bigger trees, and plants, have more surface area exposed to the solar energy, and the atmospheric carbon source; not to mention that old big trees have much bigger root systems to grab soil nutrients much faster than my deskpot brat. Couldn’t be that easy, could it ??
Gee, I learn something new every day !
My first thought is older trees are taller and therefore shade out nearby smaller/younger trees. They also have a larger “Rain shadow” (more branches and leaves)
Also note he is talking about the WEIGHT of the tree and not the diameter or the height. I would imagine the weight would equal the diameter at 1/2 the height times the height at a rough guess.