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To: koan who wrote (42494)	8/26/2013 8:00:16 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 86355

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." ___ necn.com

To: koan who wrote (42494)	8/26/2013 8:01:09 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

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. fondriest.com

To: koan who wrote (42494)	8/26/2013 8:04:41 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

Whoops. Looks like your SIL is going to have to debunk Oxford, Yale, and Bristol Universities. Actually, a lot more. Also termites who eat dead wood are big methane producers too.

To: koan who wrote (42494)	8/26/2013 8:05:35 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 86355

Trees spit out gas from soil microbesTrunks 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. References Keppler, 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 \| PubMed http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100216/full/463861a.html

To: koan who wrote (42494)	8/27/2013 11:24:58 AM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86355

Well it means that all "top atmospheric scientists" do not have a clue about superposition. Simply put the whole is a sum of it's parts. You and they deny the meaning of the non disputed. toms.homeip.net Where is the list of these "top atmospheric scientists" Is that list 100 million long or 2 long? What is the latest on Ice Cores. “The ice cores show a nearly synchronous relationship between the temperature in Antarctica and the atmospheric content of CO2, and this suggests that it is the processes in the deep-sea around Antarctica that play an important role in the CO2 increase,” explains Sune Olander Rasmussen. Associate Professor and centre coordinator at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. New research in Antarctica shows CO2 follows temperature “by a few hundred years at most” Posted on July 23, 2012 by Anthony Watts The question of “which comes first, the temperature or the CO2 rise?” has been much like the proverbial “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” question. This seems to settle it – temperature came first, followed by an increase in CO2 outgassing from the ocean surrounding Antarctica. “Our analyses of ice cores from the ice sheet in Antarctica shows that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere follows the rise in Antarctic temperatures very closely and is staggered by a few hundred years at most,” - Sune Olander Rasmussen Fig. 2. Lag histograms for the two methods of determining the lag of atmospheric CO2 after regional Antarctic temperature changes (direct correlation and correlation of derivatives), using each of the two CO2 data sets (Byrd and Siple Dome). The gray background histograms are based on the complete Tproxy composite, the same as in Fig. 1b. The superimposed curves show the corresponding lag histograms when excluding in turn each of the 5 records from the Tproxy composite (jack-knifing): excluding Siple (red), excluding Law Dome (green), excluding Byrd (blue), excluding EDML (cyan), and excluding Talos Dome (magenta). From the University of Copenhagen - Rise in temperatures and CO2 follow each other closely in climate change The greatest climate change the world has seen in the last 100,000 years was the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period. New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen indicates that, contrary to previous opinion, the rise in temperature and the rise in the atmospheric CO2 follow each other closely in terms of time. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Climate of the Past. The Australian ice core drilling camp at Law Dome in Antarctica. In the warmer climate the atmospheric content of CO2 is naturally higher. The gas CO2 (carbon dioxide) is a green-house gas that absorbs heat radiation from the Earth and thus keeps the Earth warm. In the shift between ice ages and interglacial periods the atmospheric content of CO2 helps to intensify the natural climate variations. It had previously been thought that as the temperature began to rise at the end of the ice age approximately 19,000 years ago, an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere followed with a delay of up to 1,000 years. “Our analyses of ice cores from the ice sheet in Antarctica shows that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere follows the rise in Antarctic temperatures very closely and is staggered by a few hundred years at most,” explains Sune Olander Rasmussen, Associate Professor and centre coordinator at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. An ice core from the deep drilling through the ice sheet at Law Dome in Antarctica. Deep-sea’s important role The research, which was carried out in collaboration with researchers from the University of Tasmania in Australia, is based on measurements of ice cores from five boreholes through the ice sheet in Antarctica. The ice sheet is formed by snow that doesn’t melt, but remains year after year and is gradually compressed into kilometers thick ice. During the compression, air is trapped between the snowflakes and as a result the ice contains tiny samples of ancient atmospheres. The composition of the ice also shows what the temperature was when the snow fell, so the ice is an archive of past climate and atmospheric composition. “The ice cores show a nearly synchronous relationship between the temperature in Antarctica and the atmospheric content of CO2, and this suggests that it is the processes in the deep-sea around Antarctica that play an important role in the CO2 increase,” explains Sune Olander Rasmussen.