Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Startling Discovery - Plants Increase Global Warming, Not Decrease iy

It has always been thought that leafy plants and forests decrease Global Warming by sequestering Carbon Dioxide.
A frightening recent discovery has now shown the unthinkable. Leafy plants and forests exhale Methane!
Methane has always been thought to be produced by
Bacteria, Microbes, Animals, burping cows, humans, and other living organisms. But never by growing plants, that is until a startling discovery was made a few weeks ago.
Plants exhale methane, a product never included in the oxygen/carbon dioxide/photosynthesis gas exchange of plants, and thus was never looked for.
It now looks as though Methane figures concerning Global Warming will have to be revised to take into account the planting and cutting down of vegetation.
High levels of Methane a Greenhouse Warming gas that trap the heat of the Sun has been found in Brazilian Amazon, which gave rise to the discovery.
Very Interesting read below.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4604332.stm

Nice find, Mike, thanks for posting it. I have to love it when people find out something that has always been around; it's like discovering that water is wet.

This is disturbing news. So now we have to isolate which trees if any do not produce methane and plant forests full of those particular species?

Do not ever believe the nonsense you read in the press about scientific discoveries. Did those geniuses check wheather the metane amount in the atmosphere is increasing?

es

"Our estimates suggest that 10 to 30% of the atmosphere's present methane content is produced by plants, mostly from tropical regions. Before now biological methane formation was only thought to occur under strictly anaerobic conditions (without oxygen), in environments such as wetlands."
Frank Keppler (Max Planck Institute) in Nature magazine, 12 January 2006.

Here's another interesting study by Keppler and co. released in 2005:

New insight into the atmospheric chloromethane budget gained using stable carbon isotope ratios

Let's be serious here. Do not shovel truth under the rug: old farts are reason for global warming. Houston, we have a problem. Stinky science and media, the farts - mean this world is dead on arival. The BS is making history! Well, what is new about that?

e s

First Half Knowledge is more dangerous than no Knowledge.
Do we know that Oxygen is also capable of delivering a death sentence?
Research should always carry the boundary conditions of the experiment before making it public.Death of Tree is hurting today because we have already lost many.
Fine if you insist on the accuracy of the predictive Model Used for Global Warming but I seriously doubt intentions behind such half-baked releases.

Care to expand your comment with a little science? I'd like to see diagrams showing the peaks, troughs and trends of global flatulence.

This is exactly what I want to see. Instead, those richly paid super scientists exhale CO2 and produce that abundance of metane!

e s

What amazes me about this find is that no one knew about it before!

Now, can I hook up some of houseplants to help heat my house this winter?

Yes, well that is surprising.
I suspect that the relatively few tests done on single plants placed under a bell jar, since Victorian times, did not detect methane? Or if it was detected, it was such a minute amount that it would have been thought of having been part of the natural methane present in the Bell Jar atmosphere.

The important thing to remember is that this discovery does not change the overall rate of Methane production one iota.

Estimated production figures for animal life will be cut back by a minute amount, with a similar minute amount now be attributed to plant life.

However, I can see some scientist for want of something better to do...checking plants to find the variety that exhales the most Methane.
Then suggesting it might be cloned with a Methane producing Bacteria.
Well thats modern science I suppose, keeps some lab: staff employed, and the science fiction writers, writing.

This reminds me of the article DA posted a link to a while back concerning the poison in Komodo dragons. It's just hard to believe that in all that time nobody looked.

Good comments Mike.

The scientists concerned have issued a clarification which they hope will counter the media's widespread "misinterpretation of the results".

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20060018205918data_trunc_sys.shtml

I'm really glad they cleared up the misinterpretation! Whew.
Only a 4% negative effect so I'm assuming a 96% gain in absorbing CO2?

"They explain that these emissions have existed since long before man arrived on the scene and that plant emissions are part of what they call "the natural greenhouse effect."
Are the natural greenhouse effects different only in morality from the man-made green house effects. I still don't see what was wrong with the initial report.

The wrong thing is that so called "science" is uncapable of the proper analyzis of global climate changes. The fact that this sort of 'discoveries' is being made yet, must prove it to everybody.
Instead the whole importent issue is a pseudo-scientific political football

ES

Which planet do you live on extrasense? One in which science is a static restatement of known facts or one in which it is a vibrant search for better understanding of our environment ... our universe.

The one I live on has scientists that are humble, know they don't know all of the answers, and continue to learn and refine predictions.

Pseudo-science hardly? Go bury your head in the sands of wilfull ignorance if that is your desire. But don't take others with you. Some of us like the bright light of education and knowledge.

Dogrock, the problem with the article is that it alluded that planting forests would not be helpful to reduce global warming.

Plants emitt a small percentage of greenhouse gases but they still absorb a larger percentage. So they ARE helpful. Two leaps forward and a baby step back. Go ahead and plant more trees!

You can see the misinterpretation by the title of the original post for this string.

Ok, point taken. However for my own part I'd rather react to the symptons of global warming than to a disease not yet proved. The energy required to stop what could be a natural cycle of events might be unlimited, and would slow our advance to developing further technologies to deal with whatever is thrown at us. However I agree with simple actions that have an immediate benefit in anycase; like planting trees and not cutting down the rain forests. But some of the attemps at reducing pollution make things worse, they often just push the problem somewhere less visable.