CO2 field experiment likely to cause do-over for climate models
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I have two press releases here, one via EurekAlert, and one from Max Planck. Plus at the end a summary of points via WUWT regular Pierre Gosselin. First, a key point. You can see the CO2 respiration of the biosphere in the Mauna Loa CO2 record below:
Breath of the Earth: Cycling carbon through terrestrial ecosystems
New data on photosynthesis and respiration will improve models, researchers say
This release is available in Italian, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese.
Two recent international studies are poised to change the way scientists view the crucial relationship between Earths climate and the carbon cycle. These reports explore the global photosynthesis and respiration ratesthe planets deep breaths of carbon dioxide, in and outand researchers say that the new findings will be used to update and improve upon traditional models that couple together climate and carbon.
The two reports will be published online by the journal Science at the Science Express Web site at 6 p.m., US ET, Monday, 5 July. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.
Christian Beer from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, along with colleagues from 10 other countries around the world, first take a look at Earths Gross Primary Production, or GPP, which represents the total amount of carbon dioxide that terrestrial plants breathe in through photosynthesis each year. With a novel combination of observations and modeling, they estimate the total amount of carbon that the worlds plant life inhales annually is 123 billion metric tons.
Then, Miguel Mahecha, also from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, and another international team of researchers settle a long-standing debate over the effects of short-term variations in air temperature on ecosystem respiration, or the Earths exhalation of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. They show that the sensitivity of ecosystem respiration to short-term variations in temperature is similar around the world. The researchers also suggest that factors other than temperature, such as the slow, ongoing transformations of carbon in the soil and water availability, appear to play crucial roles in long-term ecosystem carbon balances.
Together, these findings shed more light on the global cycle of carbon into and out of the atmosphere and how those processes are coupled with Earths ever-changing climate. The researchers analyzed vast amounts of climate and carbon data from around the world, and they say their results should help to improve the validity of predictive models and help resolve how climate change might affect the carbon cycleand our worldin the future.
An understanding of the factors that control the GPP of various terrestrial ecosystems is important because we humans make use of many ecosystem services, such as wood, fiber, and food, said Beer. Additionally, such an understanding is important in the context of climate change as a consequence of carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels because vegetation greatly modulates the land-atmosphere exchanges of greenhouse gases, water, and carbon dioxide
In their report, Beer and his colleagues pooled large amounts of data from FLUXNET, an international initiative established more than 10 years ago to monitor exchanges of carbon dioxide between Earths ecosystems and the atmosphere, with remote sensing and climate data from around the world to calculate the spatial distribution of mean annual GPP between 1998 and 2006.
The researchers highlight the fact that uptake of carbon dioxide is most pronounced in the planets tropical forests, which are responsible for a full 34 percent of the inhalation of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Savannas then account for 26 percent of the global uptake, although the researchers note that savannas also occupy about twice as much surface area as tropical forests.
Precipitation also plays a significant role in determining the gross global carbon dioxide uptake, the researchers found. They suggest that rainfall has a significant influence on the amount of carbon that plants utilize for photosynthesis on more than 40 percent of vegetated lands, a discovery that stresses the importance of water availability for food security. According to the study, climate models often show great variation, and some of them overestimate the influence of rainfall on global carbon dioxide uptake.
We reached a milestone with this paper by using plenty of data from FLUXNET in addition to remote sensing and climate reanalysis, Beer said. With our estimation of global GPP, we can do two thingscompare our results with [Earth system] process models and further analyze the correlation between GPP and climate.
In the second study, Mahecha and his team of researchers also relied on the global collaboration within the FLUXNET network during their investigation of ecosystems sensitivity to air temperature. Compiling and analyzing data from 60 different FLUXNET sites, these researchers found that the respiratory sensitivity to temperature of the worlds ecosystems, commonly referred to as Q10, is actually quite set in stoneand that the Q10 value is independent of the average local temperature and of the specific ecosystem conditions.
For years, experts have debated the effect that air temperature has on global respiration, or the collective metabolic processes of organisms that return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from Earths surface. Most empirical studies suggest that such ecosystem respiration around the world is highly sensitive to increasing temperatures, while the majority of predictive models suggest otherwise. Scientists say that global air temperatures may rise due to the presence of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. But, this new result suggests that the temperature sensitivity of the natural exhalation of carbon dioxide from ecosystems has been overestimated and should be reevaluated.
This latest study, in settling the controversy, suggests that previous field studies failed to disentangle processes acting on different time-scales. Mahecha and his team considered the processes of the 60 different ecosystems on the exact same time-scale in order to nail the global mean Q10 down to a value of 1.4. Their new, standard value for various ecosystems sensitivity to air temperature suggests a less pronounced short-term climate-carbon feedback compared to previous estimates.
Our key finding is that the short-term temperature sensitivity of ecosystem respiration to air temperature is converging to a single, global value, Mahecha said. Contrary to previous studies, we show that the sensitivity of ecosystem respiration to temperature variations seems to be independent from external factors and constant across ecosystems. In other words, we found a general relationship between variation in temperature and ecosystem respiration Our findings reconcile the apparent contradictions of modeling and field studies.
In the future, these two separate studies should allow for more precise predictions of how Earths warming climate will affect the exchange of carbon between our ecosystems and the atmosphereand vice versa. They provide scientists with important tools for better understanding the worlds ecosystems and how the human race continues to influence and alter them.
The report by Beer et al. was funded by CarboEuropeIP, FAO-GTOS-TCO, iLEAPS, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, National Science Foundation, University of Tuscia, Université Laval, Environment Canada, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
The report by Mahecha et al. was funded by CarboEuropeIP, FAO-GTOS-TCO, iLEAPS, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, National Science Foundation, University of Tuscia, the U.S. Department of Energy, and grants from the European Research Council, the European Commission project CARBO-Extreme, and the Max Planck Society.
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Heres the Press Release from the Max Planck Institute:
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This thread started with the article.....
Let me remind readers that Carbon Dioxide was four or five times more concentrated in our atmosphere (1400 ppm) than today during the Silurian or later when highly developed vertebrates prowled the Earth, and terrestrial photosynthesis was rampant. Damn few SUV's around then (and of course NO "climate" scientists or George Soros').
Johnny Suntrade
You know, these climat change global warming buts do not like to examine geological history.During the cretaceous period, it has been proven that the soluable CO2 was radically higher in the oceans’ sea water, beause its measurable from the chalky deposits from shallow oceans that covered 1/3 of the earth. The fossil records show
that the earth was teaming with life, and that plants grew
richly , very thuck vegetation from pole to pole.
In fact life would thrive vociferacely if we had more CO2, the planet would warm but live would go on to thrive more
so than now.The paleontologists know waht the temperature gradients were of the atmosphere and the oceans.
The Cretaceous is thiought to have ended with extinction of many animals, not from global warming, but from an asteroid impact with the earth , the asteroid was about 6.2 miles wide, which caused several years of cooling due to blockage of the sun by dust clouds causd by the impact.
WHATS THE BIG DEAL? Its all about pseudo science, political correctness, and grant money. Another Ponzi scheme among many that governments have.All of this research is a laugh. The geological record of the earth tells us all that this CO2 boondoggle is a myth of vast proportions.
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After the end of the Berriasian, however, temperatures increased again, and these conditions were almost constant until the end of the period.[10] This trend was due to intense volcanic activity which produced large quantities of carbon dioxide. The development of a number of mantle plumes across the widening mid-ocean ridges further pushed sea levels up, so that large areas of the continental crust were covered with shallow seas. The Tethys Sea connecting the tropical oceans east to west also helped in warming the global climate. Warm-adapted plant fossils are known from localities as far north as Alaska and Greenland, while dinosaur fossils have been found within 15 degrees of the Cretaceous south pole.[11]
A very gentle temperature gradient from the equator to the poles meant weaker global winds, contributing to less upwelling and more stagnant oceans than today. This is evidenced by widespread black shale deposition and frequent anoxic events.[12] Sediment cores show that tropical sea surface temperatures may have briefly been as warm as 42 °C (107 °F), 17 °C (31 °F) warmer than at present, and that they averaged around 37 °C (99 °F). Meanwhile deep ocean temperatures were as much as 15 to 20 °C (27 to 36 °F) higher than today’s.[13][14]
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous
Oh please. Everyone knows the only real CO2 studies are based on computer models. There’s no place for actual observed results in “real” science.