Sounds like a conman. We already know he got a grant to do a study aimed at debunking a study that found that trees can release methane AND he failed because the study showed they can indeed release methane. The methane can be produced in damp soils with the tree acting as a chimney or it can be produced by diseased trees directly in the trees.
led a group that debunked a climate denier who claimed trees produce methane.
Message 29077787
"The team responsible for the latest work, led by atmospheric scientist Andrew Rice of Portland State University in Oregon, measured methane flow in three tree species, which were flooded to create conditions ripe for anaerobic microbes to start churning out methane."
In fact, your SIL's study showed that tree trunks in swampy areas act as methane chimneys transmitting methane produced from soil microbes into the atmosphere.
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Trees spit out gas from soil microbes Trunks act as giant methane chimneys.
Amanda Mascarelli
 Waterlogged soils provide the perfect environment for methane-producing soil bacteria.J. E. Roche/naturepl.com
The atmospheric concentration of methane, a greenhouse gas with 25 times the heating power of carbon dioxide, has more than doubled over the past 200 years. Researchers have long known that methane comes from anaerobic processes in waterlogged soils such as swamps, wetlands and rice fields, as well as in the guts of termites and ruminant animals such as cows and sheep. But in 2006, a team proposed the surprising idea 1 that plants, too, produce methane — as much as 10–30% of the world's total methane emissions. If true, that would require a major overhaul of global carbon budgets.
Now a study suggests that trees can act like chimneys, moving methane gas produced by soil microbes up through roots, stems and leaves before releasing it into the atmosphere. This effect could account for as much as 10% of methane emissions globally 2. It could also help to explain why methane fluxes are higher than expected in wet tropical regions.
Ellen Nisbet, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, previously reported that plants do not have the biochemical pathways needed to generate methane 3. "I'm pretty sure from our studies that [plants] aren't making methane themselves," she says. "This paper is really showing that methane is moving around the plants, that it's being transported up and out."
The team responsible for the latest work, led by atmospheric scientist Andrew Rice of Portland State University in Oregon, measured methane flow in three tree species, which were flooded to create conditions ripe for anaerobic microbes to start churning out methane.
Rice says that the work does not rule out the possibility that plants themselves can produce methane aerobically; for instance, light at a certain intensity and wavelength could create a photolytic reaction that produces methane, as the 2006 work suggested. "The question is the magnitude of that source," says Rice.
The latest study also found that the isotopic composition of the microbial methane transported through the trees was almost identical to that of the methane emissions observed in the 2006 study. This means that it could be tough to distinguish in the field between methane produced anaerobically and that produced aerobically.
The idea of aerobic methane production "is still a hard pill for a lot of scientists to swallow", says Patrick Megonigal, a biogeochemist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Washington DC. "This paper shows that there are other mechanisms that we understand a little better, which could give you the same isotopic ratio and fit into the budget nicely."
The team leader of the original paper says he remains confident that plants are making their own methane, although soils clearly also contribute. "It's getting clearer that living vegetation is maybe playing a more active role in emitting methane to the atmosphere than we previously thought," says Frank Keppler, a geochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
ReferencesKeppler, F., Hamilton, J. T. G., Braß, M. & Röckmann, T. Nature 439, 187-191 (2006). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |Rice, A. L. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. doi:10.1029/2009GL041565 (2010).Nisbet, R. E. R. et al. Proc. R. Soc. B 276, 1347-1354 (2009). | Article | PubMednature.com..................
Wetland trees produce more methane than expected
By Adam Redling on February 17, 2013
Researchers at The Open University and the Universities of Bristol and Oxford have discovered that wetland trees are a more significant source of atmospheric methane than previously thought, according to a University of Bristol press release.
Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is potentially harmful to humans because of its propensity to trap heat in the atmosphere.
Researchers worked in a Borneo swamp to monitor the sources of the gas by placing detection chambers on the ground and by enclosing tree stems in the chambers.
It was previously believed that ground-released methane was responsible for the majority of wetland emissions; however, the resulting data showed that about 80 percent of methane emissions stemmed from trees.
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Yale study: Trees found to be emitting methane gas
August 19, 2012, 4:00 am
He also ..... led a group that debunked a climate denier who claimed trees produce methane.
JIM SHELTON
UNION, Conn. (AP) — It's time to add gassy trees to the list of climate concerns.
According to a new study by Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, diseased trees may be releasing unusually large amounts of methane gas into the air. If the data holds up, it could alter forest management strategies around the world and change the calculations for how much trees are able to offset carbon emissions.
"If we're using forests as a climate mitigation tool, we have to know what we're getting," said Kristofer Covey, a Ph.D. candidate who worked on the study. "Carbon offsets could be changed somewhat by this."
To be sure, the new findings don't negate the beneficial aspects of trees, which absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. But it may give foresters some pause in thinking about what mix of age and species of trees is ideal for the environment.
"There's methane sneaking out the back door," Covey said, ushering visitors along a hiking trail at the 7,800-acre Yale-Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut. "This is a very preliminary study, but there's a potential for this to be widespread. What we'd like to do is put together a global assessment, looking at a bunch of questions."
As with many scientific endeavors, the methane discovery happened by accident. Robert Warren, a former postdoctoral researcher at Yale, was showing some students at the forest how to take tree core samples. Suddenly, one of the trees began to spit out gas.
One of Warren's students decided to see if the gas was flammable by lighting it, and a moment later, "there was this flame coming out of the tree," said Mark Bradford, an assistant professor of terrestrial ecosystem ecology at Yale. "Robert called me up and asked what the heck was going on."
It prompted Yale researchers to study 60 trees at the forest, including common trees such as red maples, red oaks, hemlocks, pines and birches. Some of the trees were located in an upland area of the forest and others came from a wetland area.
Scientists drilled into the trees, plugged the holes with rubber stoppers and used special syringes to extract gas samples. The samples went back to New Haven for analysis.
What scientists found was startling: methane concentrations in some cases that were 80,000 times the normal level. Red maples had the highest methane emissions. Also, the rate of emission tripled in the summer when temperatures were warmest.
Other big factors were disease and age. The trees that produced methane were between 80 and 100 years old, and had a common fungal disease known as heart rot.
Assuming the methane levels in the Yale study are consistent elsewhere, they would reduce a forest's overall carbon sequestration benefit by 18 percent. ("Sequestration" is simply the intake and storage of the element carbon.)
"This doesn't tell us yet about what's going on in other places," Covey said. "People don't realize that trees and forests are increasingly dynamic."
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