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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?"
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.
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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.
Those three sentences pretty much answer all of your questions. Given the last sentence, one can infer that all plants release methane.
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.
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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.