Plants, Forests Discovered To Produce GHG Methane

[hatrack]

London: Jan. 12 (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE): They have long been thought of as the antidote to harmful greenhouse gases, sufferers of, rather than contributors to, the effects of global warming. But in a startling discovery, scientists have realised that plants are part of the problem. According to a study published on Thursday, living plants may emit almost a third of the methane entering the Earth's atmosphere.

The result has come as a shock to climate scientists. "This is a genuinely remarkable result," said Richard Betts of the climate change monitoring organisation in the UK the Hadley Centre. "It adds an important new piece of understanding of how plants interact with the climate."

Methane is second only to carbon dioxide in contributing to the greenhouse effect. "For a given mass of methane, it is a stronger greenhouse gas, but the reason it is of less concern is that there's less of it in the atmosphere," said Dr Betts. But the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has almost tripled in the last 150 years, mainly through human-influenced so-called biogenic sources such as the rise in rice cultivation or numbers of flatulent ruminating animals. According to previous estimates, these sources make up two-thirds of the 600m tonnes worldwide annual methane production.

Frank Keppler, of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, who led the team behind the new research, estimated that living plants release between 60m and 240m tonnes of methane per year, based on experiments he carried out, with the largest part coming from tropical areas. David Lowe, of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, said the new work, published in the journal Nature, is important for two reasons. "First, because the methane emissions they document occur under normal physiological conditions, in the presence of oxygen, rather than through bacterial action in anoxic environments," he wrote in an accompanying article. "Second, because the estimated emissions are large, constituting 10-30% of the annual total of methane entering Earth's atmosphere."

EDIT

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/003200601121963.htm

[xchrom]

1. by the time brazil is done with their rainforests

it won't be a problem at all.

[sui generis]

2. is Michael Crichton lurking around here?

well clearly the only solution is to turn the planet into a rather large-ish parking lot.

The EPA will now be concerned with busting people who grow real grass instead of the smokable kind.

[greenman3610]

3. Irrelevant

this is background emission that has presumably
been constant for millions of years, and part of the
stable climate equation.

[hatrack]

4. That was my take on it - our not noticiing it didn't mean it wasn't there

:eyes:

[phantom power]

5. It's still an important finding.

It changes our knowledge about what the "natural" methane concentration might be. And climate aside, methane production in an aerobic metabolism wasn't expected.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. My thought also

That we've only just noticed it presumably means it's not a major factor in the current warming, just that we've got our figures wrong on other sources. Methane is naturally produced and broken down at regular rates, and it's still the case that when we upset the balance, shit happens.

It is a facinating discovery though. Trees fart. Wow. :crazy:

[EC]

7. I'm surprised it took them this long to find out

that farting animals and decomposing plant-life add methane to the atmosphere....

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. It didn't - those are the long-known sources

The surprise is that trees produce it too.