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Plants Produce Methane
CelticCoder writes "With wide implications in the fight against global warming, Phyorg.com is reporting that plants naturally produce methane. Since methane is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat, are efforts to fight global warming by planting forests actually harming the environment?"
That is, even though methane is 20 times more potent at trapping heat, will enough of it be produced by the forests we plant to top the amount that carbon-dioxide is trapping?
Original Nature paper http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7073/fu ll/nature04420.html
Could plants be producing that much methane? It seems to me that if they needed to look that closely to prove that plant were producing methane at all, than the levels in question would not be that significant.
I don't mean to undervalue their research; it's actually quite fascinating that plants do this. However, I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion that plants cause global warming.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
So the add-on questions would have to be: how much methane is released by these plants, which plants are they, and how much could be cut down by removing them and planting others?
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
We have to be able to blame PEOPLE and their horrible new-fangled inventions like cars and stuff! Plants have been around even longer than people, so this will not do...not do at all!
First we had trees that make electricity and now on the same day we have another article about trees making methane. There has GOT to be some kind of evil conspiracy here...better put on my tinfoil hat until I figure it out!
Conspiracy Theorists Unite!
The summary neglects to mention that the plant studied had beans for dinner that night.
The biggest problem with plants is that they don't do much to get rid of CO2. They just store it for a few years and to a limited extent return it to the ground. While planting more plants is unlikely to hurt things (even if they release trace amounts of methan), they do not solve the core problem. The core problem is that we are taking massive quantities of old organic matter and burning it. When we burn organic matter that has not been in the ecosystem for millions of years, we add substantial amounts of CO2 (among other things) into the atmosphere. There are other things that add green house gases that we have absolutely no control over, like volcanoes. Throw in potential effects that the sun might be having, and plants really become only a tiny slice of the pie for good or for ill.
Honestly, I think the solution in the long term is technological in nature. 5 billion people are on their way to consuming as much as the 1 billion biggest consumers. In a utopia, we might be able to convince the big consumers to stop consuming that those who currently consume little to carry on not consuming. We don't live in that ideal world.
The solution is for the technologically advanced and rich nations of the world to work like hell to make the industrial revolution that the other 5 billion or so people are about to go through is cleaner then the one the Western world already had. There is no policy that can stop what is going to happen. The only hope that we have is to apply technology to mitigate and reverse the damage that has and will continue to be done.
I am not suggesting we blast pollution into the air because it is a lost cause. I am suggesting that in addition to taking restraint steps where we can, we work our hardest to find real solutions that are compatible with first world style living and environmental concerns. The sooner we recognize that as a species we WILL consume more as time goes on and recognize that the solution is two parts technology and one part restraint, the sooner we will find solution to these very real problems.
> ...thinking you know everything.
Much as I hate to feed the trolls...
Scientists don't think that they know everything. That's why they keep looking. How many of us could do the same thing? How many of us keep looking once we've found our car keys?
From TFA:
They had an answer, but they kept looking anyway.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
1) "Methane is the greenhouse gas which has the second greatest effect on climate, after carbon dioxide."
2) "Nowadays, methane in the atmosphere in fact is largely of biogenic origin."
For you subgeniuses out there, biogenic means (roughly) that it was made as a result of man, such as methane from crops and bovine farts.
It is quite unexpected that methane can be made in the presence of oxygen. However, politicians and corporate whores (some overlap there) will swiftly trumpet (as did the parent post): PLANTS MAKE GREENHOUSE GASES! NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING, BECAUSE THERE'S NO WAY TO STOP IT WITHOUT KILLING ALL THE PLANTS!
This is very similar to the Creationists, who, whenever there is a new hypothesis about how evolution works, take to the streets in great numbers to proclaim that science has decided evolution is a lie spread by the devil. Basically twisting any science headline to suit their agenda.
Global warming is real, is caused by humans, and most people who disagree are either in the pocket of those who profit from it, or misled by the same.
Bonus frantic "talking-point": Plants make carbon dioxide too. That means it's probably okay to dump as much of it as we can into the atmosphere.
Word.
No scientists I know of say FTL travel is impossible. Some of them may express their opinion that we'll never have FTL travel.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I just realized there's bacteria that produce methane... BACTERIA IS EVERYWHERE. Therefore, I declare bacteria the culprit of global warming. That, and farts, and bacteria make farts, so get your lysol ready.
making fun of us.
"Those silly humans, they treat global warming by fighting fire with fire"
heh. said like a true AC troll. *golf clap* well done.
As disturbing (and academically interesting) as it is that plants help contribute to potential global warming in one way even as they relieve it to a moderate degree in another... does this really change how we deal with the warming problem that much? Practically speaking this mostly just discredits the positive role of plants in controlling CO2 emissions. The heart of the problem with our rising methane, etc. levels in the atmosphere comes from human industry and ruminant agriculture. A 10-30% methane contribution is indeed substantial, but would be environmentally sound if it weren't for all the other methane emissions we have at the moment. Even so, what can you do about it? Start reducing vegetation? If we're to actually work towards reducing methane levels, we have to start controlling human-related emissions. It's what we actually have control over and what is still apparently the most sizeable methane contribution.
FTL travel is impossible...for tardyons...in anything resembling normal spacetime...through simply applying a conventional force to accelerate them past the speed of light. If the only thing you do is keep applying a finite force to an object at rest, you can never get it to the speed of light.
On the other hand, there's plenty of loopholes (pun intended) in spacetime that you can use to effectively reach somewhere before a beam of light traveling in normal spacetime could.
Sigh. If you are able to apply a constant acceleration to a body there's no reason why its velocity could not someday exceed the speed of light. The point of relativity is that you are not able to apply a constant acceleration as the amount of energy required to produce a constant acceleration is not a constant - it increases exponentially as you approach the speed of light. So if you were to develop a means of accelerating a body without expending energy the body would behave classically even as its velocity approaches the speed of light. Not that anyone knows how to do that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I think this is yet another nail in the coffin of the we-are-causing-global-warming-so-stop-driving-now crowd.
We understand so little about weather and the atmosphere and global warming and our sun that to think that we even have an idea of how to reverse the process if it is happening to a significant degree, or to think that we even understand what is really causing it, is absurd.
This is the old blind men and the elephant story. One person thinks it is a spear. Another, a snake. Another, a tree. Another, a whip. Except this elephant is so large and so complicated that even with all of our eyes open and all of our technology looking into it, we still can't figure it out. One group says the earth is cooling. Another, warming. Another, it was too cold now it is coming back to normal. One group says we should stop burning fossil fuels. Another says we should stop burning fossil fuels uncleanly. Still others say that it doesn't matter how much or little CO2 we put out in the atmosphere, the earth tends to absorb it. Others say that the US is the cleanest country in the world because we allow market forces to handle the management of the environment, so we shouldn't regulate it at all but let people choose what they want to do or not do to protect it.
The weather is something beyond our understanding, so it's best that for right now, we attribute it to an Act of God. When we can understand enough about it that we can get an accurate picture and draw conclusive---and correct---results, then we can start taking responsibility for it.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Kill all the plants! Burn the forests! Bulldoze greehouses! We have to destroy them before they kill us! Huh? What do you mean we need them to survive? Man, they're evil! Didn't you hear, they cause GLOBAL WARMING!!!1
We'll solve it technically? Riiiight - when the most significant contribution from the world's superpower is to change the name from 'global warming' to an innocous 'climate change' and then have lobbyists write scientific articles bashing the 99% of scientists who argee global warming is occuring. Not a snowball's chance in global warming hell shall we say.
Call me cynical, I just don't see the major polluters doing a thing as far as pollution, technological or otherwise. You do know the U.S., with a trifle of the world's population, yet 45% of it's waste, did not join the Kyoto Protocol. Yes there were reasons, but folks, we have to start somewhere. But nor do I see the Chinese, or other 3rd world (2nd world?) countries volunteering to reduce greenhouse gases. Too bad, because, as Bob Dylan said, the times they are a changing.
Nope, we'll leave it up to the Europeans and Japanese. What I do see is that companies that fail to lift a finger will go down like the Titanic - hey at least they have focus, and new companies/countries/individuals will emerge to take over the vaccuum, much like the forward thinking Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda, who have spent years *seriously* investing in alternative energies, while the Big 3 were counting their $10K profits on every Explorer sold.
The trick is to figure out who the blind folk are (Michael Crichton, famous science fiction author), any "scientific" reports written or edited by oil lobbyists, vs. the 99% of top scientists who *agree* on global warming.
I'm not sure if my vocabulary was wrong or we're just using different terms. You're saying "acceleration", which is just dv/dt, and yes, the integral to infinity of any positive function dv/dt gives v_final=infinity. I used "force", which has a factor of gamma, right? Or does Newton's Second stay even under relativity?
If you let one object (gravitationally or magnetically) attract another object, the classical force between them approaches infinity. But they don't reach FTL speeds, do they? Force contracts at relativistic speeds, right?
Whole globalism is not all rosy and great, one nice side effect of globalism is that the more liberal European laws become defacto American laws and vice versa.
One company I interviewed at made specialized batteries in the US. For years, their batteries contained lead and some other more nasty chemicals. The EU passed some laws that in effect banned this company from selling their batteries while they had these chemicals. They explained to me that one of the major projects they were working on was redesigning their batteries so that they could be sold in EU again. In fact, they anticipated more such laws in the EU and the US and so were making a big push to go green.
It might be a small consolation, but it shows that America is not the end all be all when it comes to environmental law.
Some other hopeful signs is that all Western nations have started pumping substantial amounts of money into nanotechnology and energy research in both the public and private sector. While I would like to see more money diverted to these fields, we have a pretty fair start.
I am not saying that the future is safe and secure. In fact, if we don't get our shit together quickly I think that the third world is going to suffer horribly for our slow response in finding solutions. A Katrina stings the US, but it absolutely destroys third world nations that are much more susceptible to natural disasters. While neither the tsunami nor the Pakistani earthquake were caused by human actions, they shows the absolute devastation that natural disasters wracked on third world nations. The Pakistan earthquake in particular shows how an event that would be an irritation for a western nation can kill hundreds of thousands of people in less developed nations. To this day Pakistan is still reeling from the effects of the quake as more people die from the ability to provide shelter for the hundreds of thousands of refugees that it created.
This sits well with anyone who has ever spent a winter in the Canadian prairies. Cloudy nights are "warm", say -5 degrees C, whereas clear nights are cold, like -25 degrees C.
So we have to ban that dihydrogen monoxide stuff.
It is still likely that a plant that emits methane more than compensates for the amount of methane it releases by sucking up twenty times as much carbon dioxide.
"Honey, it wasn't me! I swear it was the rotodendren!"
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
The Amazon rainforest, sometimes referred to as the Lungs of the Earth, uses more oxygen than it produces. Rotting trees and plant products requires a large amount of oxygen.
You are demonstrating why ad-hominem attacks are fundamentally weak. Whether I am male or female, black, white, red, or yellow, whether I am married or single, old or young, smart or stupid, and dare I say, Democrat or Republican, is completely irrelevant to the arguments I make. You are in the business, I assume, of trying to convince others of your point of view. Try to be more persuasive.
When you start your arguments with "My opponent is a fool", you are suddenly no longer arguing a counterpoint, and your opponent wins the day. When you do this, it sounds like you have no solid rebuttal. Remember the saying in law school: "When you have the facts on your side, cite the facts. Otherwise, pound the table." It sounds like you are pounding the table, so people assume you don't have the facts on your side.
My assertion was that no one has shown me definitively that there even is a phenomena called global warming, nor that CO2 is responsible for it.
Your argument says that I am stupid and that trees are carbon sinks and that the US is responsible for destroying the world (including Bush) through global warming. Oh, and by the way, you said that the "elites" don't care for you or me. These are all fascinating arguments, but my original question remains unanswered to this day.
You seem very convinced that global warming is a real phenonema and that CO2 emissions are the root cause. I assume, by logical corollary, that you are advocating that Global Warming is bad, but you have not proven that point either. I imagine you are one of the crowd that thinks we should stop driving cars, because the cost of driving a car (global warming) outweighs the benefits.
Tell me, why do you believe that global warming is occuring? Why are you certain that CO2 and not some other chemical or process (sun's radiation, earth's internal heat) is to blame? And why is global warming bad? Show me the cost/benefit analysis of global warming and driving my car, and show that it is advantageous for me to stop driving my car?
Now, stop thumping the table and calling me names, and start addressing my arguments.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I have research the global warming issue, carefully and studiously. There are not answers to most of the questions I pose. It's sad really. They are very basic questions. I can tell you all about the fundamental theories of physics and how they work in a matter of minutes. But you cannot, in thirty minutes time, answer a single of my simple questions. Isn't that odd?
25 years is not enough data to make any determinations, especially data collected so poorly and used so poorly.
We are not collecting enough data even during those 25 years to understand what the average temperature is and whether it is increasing.
The sun has far more impact on our atmosphere's temperature than any other factor.
The cost of limiting CO2 output is FAR greater than the cost of Global Warming.
And Global Warming would be a good thing, because it would turn Africa BACK into a rain forest, ending most of the starvation and disease there, and cause Europe's glaciers to recede, allowing people to grow wheat in the northern parts again.
I have also investigated why Global Warming is even so touted. Note that the forces behind Global Warming issue are not all or even most scientists. Most scientists don't care or don't know. I couldn't find one physicist at my university that "believed" in it and thought anything important of it. They were more concerned about nuclear war, not what kind of car they drive. The one professor who was investigating global warming was doing it because the government was giving money to him to do it, nothing more or less. The scientists that get behind global warming are not ones I have reason to respect anyway. I've read their papers, and they are not very thorough. Heck, a BS Physics guy can poke holes in their arguments on the first reading.
The Global Warming movement is powered by the old communists. It is a move to neutralize the US, not save the world. Hence, the Kyoto Protocols that harms the world's cleanest nation and NET CONSUMER of carbon in the atmosphere, and leaves the worst offenders and net producers of carbon in the atmosphere alone. Global Warming is about trying to convince Americans to stop being so productive, and give Europe and the old Soviet Union a chance to be superpowers again.
And the other conclusion I came to: The communists haven't gone away. They put on environmentalist clothing and are trying to advocate communism from that pedastal. If you can't see that, you're blind and believe whatever is published in the New York Times.
That's the conclusion I came to after careful study.
Next time you see a global warming article, go find the research paper and read it yourself. Question it thoroughly like a real scientist. Then go find other papers by the same scientist and read them as well. Ask yourself: Is this scientist neutral, or do they seem to have an agenda? Who is paying for their research? Who is reviewing it? Who is publishing it? (Nature, for the most part, has been shown to lack basic controls on what gets published and has turned into a political pedastal and is no longer worthy of being considered a science periodical.) For instance, if PETA publishes an paper that says that milk causes cancer, I wouldn't believe it anymore than Phillip-Morris publishing a paper saying cigarettes don't.
Be more like Einstein; stop following the herd and question fundamental yet unproven assumptions.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Now, let me introduce a few ways to fool with the results. I'm surprised they didn't mention in the paper how to guard against this.
I could be a scientist handling the ice core samples and leave some samples out for longer than another. This would allow more gas to leech out. At what rate do the gasses leech out? Do some gasses leech out faster than others? Probably. But leaving them out for a while would also allow gasses in the atmosphere to leech in.
They also calibrated the gas measuring device using a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2. If we wanted to get a different result, we could toy with the calibration.
There are a couple of assumptions they have been making, one of which was found to be incorrect. How old is the gas compared to the age of the ice it was found in? They used to think it was 6,000yrs. But someone found out it was actually closer to 6,000yrs, give or take a few hundred years. But that is only for the coldest periods. How did gas and ice accumulate in the warmer periods? No mention of this.
They made another interesting assumption in determining the historical temperatures of the samples. They assumed that the levels of O18 (isotope, not chemical) and D (deuterium) were related to the temperature. I can't find any reference to why this would be so.
The pretty graph on the page is missing one import feature: Error bars. I don't see any. Without error bars, I can't tell if the data is significant at all. Just the fact that they left out error bars means they either don't understand the science of measurements and modelling, or they do and are trying to hide the fact that the error is +/- 10 degreed C and 100 ppmv. In fact, just by data collected by other scientists, it says to me that the data is not good within 3 or 4 degrees C. And they have a friendly note on the bottom of the graph: Wider lines means more data, not more variability.
When physicists do something like measure the charge or mass of an electron, they have serious discussions over whether something is 5.000001 or 5.000002. If Scientist A said 5.000001 +/- 0.0000003, and Scientist B gets 5.000002 +/- 0.0000003, then we throw both results out until we discover what A or B (or both) did wrong. In the meantime, we put footnotes in our textbooks: Use 5.0000 +/- 0.00001 just to be on the safe side. Variations outside of the range of error are not tolerated. Why do you tolerate variations in people's assessment of the historical temperature?
Oh, and I can't find any documentation or reasoning on how they know the age of the ice or the air. That's odd... You'd think the most important part of their research would be mentioned somewhere.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
It's true that most plants are not a long-term solution, but plantations of moderately fast growing trees could be. They can grow and store carbon for decades to centuries, and then be harvested, at least buying us a little time along with other solutions. Probably not ideal, but still a net sequestration. Then we have efforts to produce biodiesel from algae - not carbon storage, but something that would cycle carbon already in the atmosphere and allow a reduction in fossil carbon emission. Obviously there's not going to be one cure, at least for the foreseeable future, but there are several approaches that together could make a dent.
What exactly is the error in their reading? You say a few percent. Then why do the numbers disagree so much with other experiments trying to find the same data? Why do we see a period where the numbers vary almost 2 degrees C? If we discovered that, and the error was assumed to be 2%, well, then something has gone terribly wrong. There is some assumption being made that is not correct and it must be discovered and replaced with a more correct assumption.
My comparison to the mass of an electron is that when physicists show they results they are extremely careful to include error in their calculations to prevent the possibility of someone else coming along, performing a different experiment, and obtaining a completeld different result, and then totally discrediting the original work. It's called being careful because the worst thing that can happen is to be found out to have been utterly wrong with no other explanation than being foolish.
Let's talk about communism. Go ahead and roll your eyes. Your type rolled their eyes when some very observant people talked about the possibilities of massive terror attacks in America. That's okay. People who see an understand the threats need to address them appropriately.
When environmentalists come out and say, "Hey, this earth thingy is warming up", they always tack on the following statements.
1. This is bad.
2. The US is to blame, not China or Russia or anyone else. Just the US.
3. If only the US would stop driving their cars / stop being productive, we wouldn't have this problem.
A capitalist would respond to the basic concept of global warming as follows:
1. We don't know if this is bad or good.
2. We don't know if anyone is to blame. However, rather than pointing fingers, we should address real problems as they arise, and carefully weight the cost/benefit of each action we take. (Putting millions of people out of work is probably more damaging to the earth than losing a few thousand acres of tundra.)
3. When and if we face real challenges due to global warming, our only real hope to overcome them, or even reverse the damage, is through the free market.
When's the last time you read an article by a "leading" scientist who said that the free market will come up with ideal solutions for any problem we face? Never. Never does any of the leading scientists in the global warming advocate anything but communist, government-imposed, restrictive and anti-freedom solutions. Hence, they are communists.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
What does this have to do with my original point, which was that I can't find any real evidence of global warming, just a bunch of shoddy reporting on incomplete research articles?
I am not in the oil industry, but from what I can tell (ANWR) the lack of oil has more to do with the US government forbidding the extraction of newly found oil sites and less to do with there actually being less oil. In fact, I've read several articles saying that some oil sites in Louisiana have filled up again, and they are extracting from the same sites again.
Have you heard about the theories that oil isn't a fossil fuel, but is generated by geothermic processes? The Russians have used this theory to find new and abundant oil sources. Some Americans are catching on.
What you are told about oil in the mass media is not the truth about oil.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I dont get my information from the mass media, not without corroborating it from more reliable sources.
That crackpot theory about oil not being a fossil fuel smells like horseshit to me. The Russians are always at this crazy stuff. Twenty years ago you would have been all about how full of crap they were. But its the same crazy shit now that it was back then.