From the UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES and the “temperatures are always hotter no matter what” department comes this study that makes very little sense on the face of it, especially when we have articles like this one: Hot in the City? How plants can help lower the temperature in towns.
. Of course, you have to consider the source of the claim, the same University that launched the “ship of fools” expedition to Antarctica.
Improved plant types in climate model show significant impact on temperatures resulting from earlier spring greening
Heatwaves from Europe to China are likely to be more intense and result in maximum temperatures that are 3°C to 5°C warmer than previously estimated by the middle of the century – all because of the way plants on the ground respond to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This projected temperature increase found by Australian researchers and published in Nature Scientific Reports is more than half the change forecast by the IPCC under the business-as-usual model. The biggest temperature changes were projected to occur over needleleaf forests, tundra and agricultural land used to grow crops.
“We often underestimate the role of vegetation in extreme temperature events as it has not been included in enough detail in climate models up until this point,” said lead author Dr Jatin Kala from Murdoch University.
“These more detailed results are confronting but they help explain why many climate models have consistently underestimated the increase in the intensity of heatwaves and the rise in maximum temperatures when compared to observations.”
To get their results the researchers looked at data from 314 plant species across 56 field sites. In particular, they investigated stomata, small pores on plant leaves that take in carbon dioxide and lose water to the atmosphere.
Previously, most climate models assumed all plants trade water for carbon in the exactly same way, ignoring experimental evidence showing considerable variation among plant types. By not accounting for these differences, models have likely over-estimated the amount of water lost to the atmosphere in some regions.
If plants release less water there is more warming and a consequent increase in heat wave intensity.
The study is unique because, for the first time, it used the best available observations to characterise different plants water-use strategies within a global climate model.
“These world-first results will have significant impact on the development of climate models around the world,” said one of the study’s authors, Prof Andy Pitman, Director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science at UNSW.
“However, it is the bringing together of observations by ecologists, theory from biologists, physics from land surface modellers and climate science in the global modeling, that is revolutionary.”
The work that led to the study required investment in detailed observations, model development, and high performance computing.
“This is a fantastic example of STEM-based science bringing together the ecological and climate modeling communities; two sectors which rarely work hand-in-hand,” said Prof Pitman.
It was also a great example of public-good science, said Professor Belinda Medlyn, theoretical biologist at Western Sydney University and co-author of the study.
“Our study of stomata was originally intended just to learn more about how plants work,” said Prof Medlyn.
“We were really not expecting to find these important implications for heatwaves.”
According to Dr Kala public good research of this magnitude can only be achieved through the strong institutions Australia has built up over time.
“These institutions have enabled us to develop a world-leading climate model, unique observation systems and computational infrastructure that has far reaching benefits,” said Dr Kala.
CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science developed the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) model used in this study in partnership.
ARC Discovery funding enabled ecological researchers at Macquarie and Western Sydney Universities to put together the plant observations from around the world to develop the new vegetation model.
At the same time the National eResearch and Collaboration Tools and Research Project (NECTAR) was key to managing the data produced by the ACCESS model. The model itself used National Computational Infrastructure supported and resourced by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.
“This long term investment in key infrastructure is why Australian science continues to punch above its weight,” said Prof Pitman.
“It’s an investment with many public benefits for us and the rest of the world, that every Australian can be proud of.”
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On 2nd thought, maybe they are right, and you are wrong. Ah, “Claim” included in the header. Learn to argue instead of riling up your fans. It’s so boring.
Earth is warming.
No, it’s not.
Depends on only the time scale you based your statement onto.
However I would welcome one degree K. They promised 4 to 10, so I’m gonna complain if I don’t get my extra degree.
Meaningless comment of the day Wagen. Brown Star for you pal
I am quite sure it doesn’t really register between all other meaningless comments here 😀
That’s a bold claim given ~70% of the earth’s surface is covered with water and has only been measured with any accuracy since 1979.
What do they make their models with….Balsa wood & glue ??? Have they been sniffing the glue ??
Message – chop all plant life down and bury it, creating vast deserts. This will cool the planet and take carbon out of circulation. That will remove all animal life, remember animals eat plants and reduce them to CO2.
Sorry. There doesn’t seem to be much commonsense here.
Back in 2007 Richard Branson offered a $25 million dollar prize for the best CO2 removal process. I think it has not yet been awarded. I tried to register my scheme but it turned out you had to be recommend by “leading climate scientist” or something like that. James Hanson and Al Gore two of the official judges (haha). My plan was to selectively cut down the rain-forests of the world, convert the lumber to furniture, then regrow new trees that would suck CO2 from the air as they grow. I bet it’s the least expensive plan. ; )
A tree is one of the best plans we have. But it’s not good enough.
Even granting that there was a problem, sequestering timber in the form of furniture and what-not isn’t a good scheme. The fecundity of tropical rain forests is due to the extremely high cycle rate of nutrients through the ecosystem. Rain forest soils are surprisingly infertile, in and of themselves. Hauling timber out without replacing the minerals and nitrogen would quickly exhaust the soil.
I think it has become evident that the models are built to produce hot results no matter what input you test for. I would bet that they show heating from a cooling sun…
What is truly amazing is that this piece actually got published. In a real publication! The pandering plea for more research funds is sickening.
What are the specific scientific shortcomings in the paper?
So the irrigation isn’t causing cooling by a net increase of water over vast areas of land?
How about the headline “Plants not as susceptible to heatwaves as previously thought”?
Talk about finding the negative spin…
One wonders what they are getting at. The hottest surfaces in sunlight have low reflectance, low transmittance, and low thermal conductivity. Vegetation hardly compares with say bare rock. On the other hand, if you are out thermalling, always go for the pine forests on sunlit slopes as opposed to broad leaf vegetation.
In any case in a warming world this effect should be self correcting. There would be more needle-leaf plants at higher latitudes, but the broad leafs would out-compete them at the lower latitudes which are larger in area and receive more sunlight.
Now they can add this truth to their models since the models are under reporting the actual global warming. They were really patting themselves on the back for this research. It’s going to take a while for the welts to subside.
From a “Centre of Excellence” it is reasonable to expect “fantastic” stuff. It’s a little disappointing that we have to wait several days between announcements of fantastic, world-changing discoveries.
This little gem of sublime silliness highlights the quirkiness of “global temperature” assessment. The melding of sub-surface sea-water temperature with the oddly named land surface temperature is bizarre enough, but the profs have bin Medlyn with measurements in the betwixt and between zone; the bottom metre and a half of the atmosphere, which they dub “the surface”.
When leaves transpire, they cool. When they cool, they pass the heat to the water vapour. Which becomes a constituent of the lower atmosphere.
As leaves cool, the air warms; but only at the altitude of condensation. If less evaporation occurs, less water is transferred to the air and less heat, also.
I skimmed the paper, which is here:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23418
It wasn’t the total piece of junk I was expecting. A number of things jumped out at me, like the results being accurate for Eurasia, but not North America. But the big flaw is probably this one:
First, the data behind this parameterisation are measured at leaf scale; it has not been confirmed that the differences among PFTs observed at this scale also emerge at canopy/ecosystem scale.
In other words, they measured one variable at the leaf level, and simply extrapolated to the entire ecosystem. Not kosher. But here’s the other thing. If the effect was as large as they claim, we’d have noticed a major uptick in heatwave intensity in the present and recent past.
I wonder how these researchers view themselves?
Saving the World, for sure.
There seems to be a direct correlation between increases in computer power and the ridiculousness of their results. I blame Gates/Jobs/Wang/Babbage etc!
“CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science developed the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) model used in this study in partnership.”
Total garbage! Anyway folks, we will likely see many more “studies” like this in the coming months from agencies like CSIRO etc. It’s election year here in Australia and is likely to be a double dissolution election which may return a Labor lead coalition. We’re certainly on the path to ruin.
“These world-first results will have significant impact on the development of climate models around the world,” said one of the study’s authors …”
And this will no doubt supply the missing ingredient that has hitherto prevented any climate model from working in any acceptable, representative or useful predictive manner … well, … other than for supporting political distortions and creating absurd economically scandalous tax-wasting white-elephants … which infuriates voters and discredits the whole legitimacy of the project/process called ‘government’.
Other than that, pouring money down the toilet based on climate models is terrific.
Nevertheless, pseudo-‘climate’ modeling has now been perfected, and will henceforth project a rigorous future imaginative horror script, that powers grotesque and fantastic unproven narratives, that run counter to all we know, and also bears no resemblance to world that will actually be at the predicted junctures.
However, we must resolutely turn a blind-eye to minor quibbles, as they do not comport the correct color and flourish to the global GIGO complex and its narrative which stalks pseudo-journal column-inches, desirous to creating a stand-up pseudo-‘man’, out of any grandiosely-petty free standing straw that finds.
And thus did the ‘researchers’ did tout, as the $2 ladies-of-the-night.
“Roxanne! … you don’t have to put out your red-light.” – Sting
Just curious about the term ‘heatwave intensity’. What does that mean? First, how is a heatwave defined, is it more than X days of maximum temperatures above an arbitrary temperature derived from ‘average’ temperatures? Then how does one heatwave become ‘more intense’ than another? High maximum temperatures? More days in the heatwave? And where are the statistics that show conclusively that we are having more heatwaves and that the heatwaves are ‘more intense’? What about cool waves? Just asking…
The definitions are all in the paper. I do wish people would read it before denigrating it.
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23418
I guess this team hasn’t heard of the cooling effects of plants, especially trees.
Just asking, not denigrating, thank you very much. Sorry I didn’t read the link… Now I did and looked at reference 6 to find:
‘Results from the daily temperature homogeneity analysis suggest that many instrumental measurements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were warm-biased. Correcting for these biases, over the period 1880 to 2005 the length of summer heat waves over western Europe has doubled and the frequency of hot days has almost tripled.’
So the ‘increase’ comes from the ‘adjusted’ temperatures not the actual instrumental record.
Patrick MJD
March 21, 2016 at 8:17 pm
They have, the article states this:
“… If plants release less water there is more warming and a consequent increase in heat wave intensity. …”
Basically, if it’s a dry period, and plant turgidity is high, there’s less evapo-transpiration, so less cooling occurs. Their main point seems to be that not all plants transpire the same amounts, at the same rates, for the same time. Well, duh!
And rainfall rates, geography country rocks and soil type and porosity, storage runoff and evaporation rates aren’t similar either.
So why wouldn’t plants follow suit, given their geography, species and migration patterns are a palimpsest of prevailing and recent precipitation, drought and/or fire? The paper reads like one big no-sh_t Sherlock moment.
Well the claim is MORE CO2 = changes how plants respond (Yes we know this) = LIKELY MORE EXTREME HEAT WAVES (Only in a computer simulation). This is my takeaway view from the study.
that makes very little sense on the face of it, especially when we have articles like this one: Hot in the City? How plants can help lower the temperature in towns.
The boost in temperature in compared to previous estimates, not compared to no plants.
Let’s see, needle leafed forest and tundra. Talking boreal and mountain belts. Now, the boreal zone gets a lot of summer sun, but hardly any winter sun. They are saying extra CO2 makes these guys transpire less. Ok, but what provides the energy of vaporization, the leaf tissue or the atmosphere? Methinks the leaf.
The leaves [needles] get their CO2 faster, close up shop, save themselves a lot of energy of vaporization, and stay warmer.
This saved energy they can radiate off at night, but there is less water vapor in the atmosphere to slow its exit to space…
Internationally, Australia punches well above its weight in the production of Nutty Professors and Professor Andy Pitman is set to rival Professor Turkey and Tim Flannery in the ratings for Nutty Professor of the Year. He must never have stepped outside the air-conditioning in his office, yet, on a hot day to stand under the cool shade of the nearby trees, and note temperature differences that the trees and grass make..
He must never have stepped outside the air-conditioning in his office, yet, on a hot day to stand under the cool shade of the nearby trees, and note temperature differences that the trees and grass make..
You must not have read the paper or you would know that isn’t the claim being made. The claim is that the trees and grass cool LESS in high CO2 environs than in low ones. It is a comparison of trees and grass at different CO2 levels, it is NOT a comparison of trees and grass to no trees and no grass.
I weep for my country and the fruit cakes we seem to churn out ,once I see the word (model) in a climate paper I see fields of flowers covered in bovine faeces and then the stench hits .
350 culled from the herd just need a couple of thousand more .
Models are the only way to investigate a chaotic system. If the word gives you unpleasant olfactory hallucinations, perhaps you should develop an interest in other fields of investigation. Does archaeology interest you? I think there’s less modelling there.
Models are the worst way to investigate a chaotic system. How, exactly, do you capture the chaos and model it? Once you drift off into paramaterization, you don’t have a model anymore, you’ve simply stuffed the computer full of your own biases.
Wrong answer. Observations are the only way to investigate a chaotic system properly; it’s why models are always regarded as nothing but imagination tests in real science, and direct observations are preferred.
Particularly the atrocious physics of your church’s falsehood riddled computer programs are the objects of outright laughs in peoples’ faces. James Hansen’s old boss used to tell him to his face he was nothing but a pseudo-scientific faker.
Hansen’s fellow employees at N.A.S.A. regarded him as nothing but a charlatan precisely because he argued against solid instrumental data using models he said proved there was a runaway green house gas effect on Venus.
He used his awful modeling – as have many many pseudo scientists through history – to persuade people to simply ignore what their instruments were telling them. Most of the time of course it doesn’t work for long, and this time it won’t work forever – but fake models, and other imagination experiments are long the bread and butter of scientific falsification, and ALWAYS
real instrument records
and
real thermodynamic principles proven before, are preferred.
Your religion is falsified by both: the instruments say clearly your leadership’s models show runaway greenhouse gas effect that IS not THERE.
END of that story except for the alarmism profiteering.
Anthony – may I suggest that you include a link to the original paper in posts like this.
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23418
It is depressing to observe how scientists seem loose the grip and use the same terminology for a model experiment as for a real world experiment. Their reservations are very moderate. It would have been more appropriate to refer to their work as virtual reality. What we could have been predicted with certainty, however is the call for more money to play for.
From the paper:
“Five ensembles were run; each initialised a year apart, with the default gs scheme (i.e., the control), and the new scheme (i.e., the experiment). All results shown are for the ensemble mean. We performed statistical significance testing of the differences between the experiment and the control using the student’s- t-test at 95% confidence interval, and tested for field significance using the false discovery rate method. ”
“Nevertheless, some uncertainties remain. First, the data behind this parameterisation are measured at leaf scale; it has not been confirmed that the differences among PFTs observed at this scale also emerge at canopy/ecosystem scale. In light of our results, there is an urgent need for future work which tests how the stomatal parameterisation … scales from the leaf to the canopy/ecosystem.”
Science or Fiction wrote: It is depressing to observe how scientists seem loose the grip and use the same terminology for a model experiment as for a real world experiment.
What is the terminology that you feel makes it unclear?
Science or Fiction wrote: IWhat we could have been predicted with certainty, however is the call for more money to play for.
Almost every paper that reports a possible new finding will say “more research is needed”. It’s not a play for money, it’s an encouragement to other research groups.
This annoyed me during my PhD, well before I became a sceptic. Model runs being called experiments.
I found that reality is nothing like the models if you purify the starting material thoroughly but got called a fraud for my insight. As far as I know, nobody else has noticed 15 years later.
Kala and his modelling friends are happy to cite this reference….
Huang, J., Yu, H., Guan, X., Wang, G. & Guo, R. Accelerated dryland expansion under climate change. Nature Clim Change 6, 166–171 (2016).
But ignore these….
http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2013/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2
https://blogs.csiro.au/ecos/despite-decades-of-deforestation-the-earth-is-getting-greener/
A bit inconvenient
Uh oh. Plants cause global warming.
‘According to Dr Kala public good research of this magnitude can only be achieved through the strong institutions Australia has built up over time.’
“These world-first results will have significant impact on the development of climate models around the world…”
“This long term investment in key infrastructure is why Australian science continues to punch above its weight…”
“It’s an investment with many public benefits for us and the rest of the world, that every Australian can be proud of…”
This smells like a desperate job-justification attempt by Australian climastrologists who are nervous about their public sector jobs becoming untenable now that the science is settled and Paris lead to such a ‘strong’ agreement between the world’s policy makers.
I’m curious though; since it’s clear from actual data that there has been no increase in extreme weather (which includes heatwaves) in the last 50 years, I wonder what kinds of plants are they smoking in UNSW before coming up with an utterance such as;
“…these results…help explain why many climate models have consistently underestimated the increase in the intensity of heatwaves…’
Perhaps UNSW has a satellite campus for its school of Biology in Nimbin?
Well, we can’t have all those nasty plants polluting the air, now, can we? So, let’s increase the number of cows and sheep to eat that nasty grass. We will all eat meat and totally decry those nasty wheat, oats, barley, corn and other grains, as vociferously as we now do with that evil villain: FAT! The number of wild claims popping up is like playing a game of whack a mole – with really stupid moles, IMO.