Six-Year Smithsonian Study - Doubling Atmospheric CO2 Reduces Carbon Storage In Soil - AFP

[hatrack]

Researchers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center report the results of a six-year experiment in which doubling the atmospheric greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in a scrub oak ecosystem caused a reduction in carbon storage in the soil.

The scientists said these findings add a new perspective on the capacity of Earth's soils to store carbon, and a measure of caution suggesting that elevated CO2, by altering microbial communities, may turn the soil from a potential carbon sink into a carbon source. This could offset some of the gains in carbon storage in plant biomass due to increased growth at elevated CO2.

Previous studies (including the present study) have shown that plants will respond to higher CO2 by increasing growth and taking up much of the excess carbon. This has led some to speculate that plants may be able to mitigate increases in atmospheric CO2 and that soils, which represent the largest and most stable terrestrial carbon pool, also may serve as a sink for excess carbon.

During the course of their study, Smithsonian scientists found that the amount of carbon in the ecosystem as a whole increased. However, they also saw a consistent loss in soil carbon under high CO2 conditions. The CO2 loss from soils offset about 52 percent of the additional carbon that had accumulated in the plants above ground and in the roots. "We were surprised to find that these soils were losing soil carbon despite the fact that there was more plant growth," said Patrick Megonigal, a microbial ecologist at SERC and one of the study's authors. "We thought that higher plant growth at elevated CO2 would either add more carbon to soils, or at least leave it the same. We now need to consider a third possibility-the carbon already in soils will end up back in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas."

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Smithsonian_Scientists_Report_New_Carbon_Dioxide_Study_999.html

[kestrel91316]

1. These researchers are lying. Goorge Noory says global warming

is fake, and HE OUGHT TO KNOW.

:sarcasm:

[w4rma]

10. Exxon needs to get on the ball and hire more propagandists. If they don't then people might actually

work together and do something about this mess.

Oil Lobby Offers $10,000 Payments To Global Warming Deniers To Push Back On Climate Study
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/01/oil-lobby-payments/

[phantom power]

2. We really are profoundly screwed. Utterly ass-invaded.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. well and thoroughly but...

We must not simply throw up our hands in surrender. We need to do something. We need to make an effort in hopes of saving something.

A Canticle for Liebowitz http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp/0060892994 and The Sheep Look Up http://www.amazon.com/Sheep-Look-Up-John-Brunner/dp/1932100016 should be required reading in out schools.

[GliderGuider]

4. I just re-read Canticle. It's eerie how well it holds up.

The other thing that might be worth doing other than becoming bookleggers and memorizers is to promote reductions in complexity, efficiency and interconnectedness in everything from living and working arrangements to food and power production. This might promote pockets of higher resilience in the compolex adaptive system of our civilization. According to the big brains of The Resilience Alliance the more pockets like that we have the greater the probability of both a gentler downslope and an ability to rebuild later.

[phantom power]

5. I have a plan.

My plan is to construct 4,000 gigawatt nuclear reactors. And use them to provide electricity, generate synthetic motor fuel, and scrub CO2 from the atmosphere.

Nobody with the authority to mandate the construction of even one nuclear reactor cares about my plan.

I have a backup plan, which is to monitor the end of the world over the inter-tubes, via hatrack posts, from my fortress of solitude. And make wise-cracks, and occasionally run around in circles shouting "Oh fucking hell, we are all doomed!"

Maybe those aren't the best plans, but they're mine and I have a soft spot for them.

Do you have a plan?

[GliderGuider]

6. It's good to have a backup plan. I like yours - it sounds doable.

It beats mine, which is like yours up to the end of the first sentence. After that, though, it degenerates into a catatonic state brought on by severe clinical depression. I think the difference must lie in the wise-cracks...

[phantom power]

7. Did you ever read The Forge of God? (Greg Bear)

Because there's that one guy who finds himself at Yellowstone park, on earth's last day. As the planet is blown apart, he rides his little hunk of rock right up out of the atmosphere, with his end-of-the-world girlfriend. And rides it all the way back down again too.

They no longer lay on the ground, but fell. Edward saw walls of rock, great freshwhite revealed volumes on all sides -- thousands of feet wide -- and spinning trees and disintegrating clumps of dirt and even a small flying woman, yards away, face angelic, eyes closed, arms spread.

It seemed an eternity before the light vanished.

The granite volumes enclosed them all.

I wanna be like that guy. I'm going to ride it all the way to the end. And maybe there will be something beyond the end, after all.

[GliderGuider]

8. Yep. Loved that ending.

I think Hunter Thompson was trying for something like that when he had himself shot off in fireworks.

[Pangolin]

9. My plan is similiar.

I'm going to prune and weed my neighborhood and burn the results to biochar in my weber and bury them. The neighbors are supposed to notice the health of my tomatoes and spread the practice to the entire world.

If that doesn't work I have a hand-built boat in my back yard should the entire ice cap melt in the next year or so. Other than that I'm planning to drive my pick-up in futile circles so that the worst of climate change happens while I'm still young enough to deal with it.

I don't want to be an old man in a destroyed ecosystem.