Plants' Reactions To Climate Change Examined In New Study

* Plants flowering 8.5 times faster than predicted

* Changes have knock-on effect for food chain, ecosystems

By Nina Chestney

LONDON, May 2 (Reuters) - Plants are flowering faster than scientists predicted in response to climate change, research in the United States showed on Wednesday, which could have devastating knock-on effects for food chains and ecosystems.

Global warming is having a significant impact on hundreds of plant and animal species around the world, changing some breeding, migration and feeding patterns, scientists say.

Increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels can affect how plants produce oxygen, while higher temperatures and variable rainfall patterns can change their behaviour.

"Predicting species' response to climate change is a major challenge in ecology," said researchers at the University of California San Diego and several other U.S. institutions.

They said plants had been the focus of study because their response to climate change could affect food chains and ecosystem services such as pollination, nutrient cycles and water supply.

The study, published on the Nature website, draws on evidence from plant life cycle studies and experiments across four continents and 1,634 species. It found that some experiments had underestimated the speed of flowering by 8.5 times and growing leaves by 4 times.

"Across all species, the experiments under-predicted the magnitude of the advance - for both leafing and flowering - that results from temperature increases," the study said.

The design of future experiments may need to be improved to better predict how plants will react to climate change, it said.

Plants are essential to life on Earth. They are the base of the food chain, using photosynthesis to produce sugar from carbon dioxide and water. They expel oxygen which is needed by nearly every organism which inhabits the planet.

Scientists estimate the world's average temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1900, and nearly 0.2 degrees per decade since 1979.

So far, efforts to cut emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are not seen as sufficient to prevent the Earth heating up beyond 2 degrees C this century - a threshold scientists say risks an unstable climate in which weather extremes are common, leading to drought, floods, crop failures and rising sea levels.

The study can be viewed at http://www.nature.com/nature (Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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Comments

[Andrew Harvey]

04:34 AM on 05/08/2012

Sounds like "adaptation" to me. Who cares what day the flowers arrive?

[alteredstory]

11:59 AM on 05/15/2012

A large part of the functioning of an ecosystem revolves around timing. Flowers rely on pollinators, and pollinators on flowers - both have to be out at the same time. Then there are the species that eat the pollinators. The reason we have bird migrations is that the spring "boom" in the northern hemisphere produces a MASSIVE amount of food for birds, which can sustain a level of reproductive effort not possible in the tropics. If the birds arrive, and they miss that boom, they can't successfully reproduce. That's already started happening in some places.

That, in turn, has an impact on the species that rely on those birds, and so on. We live in a pretty complicated and inter-connected world, and we rely on it more than most people seem to think.

[StephenBP]

03:50 PM on 05/25/2012

"Biology? Ecology? We don't need any of your stinking science!"

That seems to be the attitude of Andy of the sushi hubcap. Or maybe those are clams on a hubcap.

At any rate, he seems to have some sort of Jesus complex and unless you can get certified and thrice blessed approval from a FOX approved authority figure, he will not believe a word that you say.

[Kenneth Alton]

12:21 PM on 05/03/2012

Like me most of my neighbors have already adjusted their garden plantings (over the course of about the past five years) for a one Zone*** shift. So have all our local farmers. I suspect the same is true nationwide. As a practical matter, the horse has left the barn and now it's all about adaptation.

(*** For you urban folks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_zone)

[jimboy71]

11:20 AM on 05/06/2012

Here is a shocking animation of the changes in less than 20 years:

http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm

[danR12356]

11:14 AM on 05/03/2012

History repeats itself. The whole GW hysteria thing is reminiscent of the war on fat of 2 decades ago, where there was unrelenting and undivided consensus on the horrors of consuming fat, zero-fat diet fads, and even court judges rebuking the infamous egg industry for daring to suggest eggs were a nutritious addition to one's diet. Cholesterol was gonna git yo' Momma.

Then the evils of the El/La Nina cycle. Until someone did a comprehensive risk/benefit analysis and found a net economic gain counting all regions together.

Atmospheric carbon is the new bete noir.

It's the end of all reality as we know it. Head for the fallout bunkers. The sky is falling.

[B Wood]

03:22 PM on 05/03/2012

Straw man alert!!!!

[jimboy71]

11:21 AM on 05/06/2012

Not only is this a straw man, it's a terrible one.

Cholesterol is indeed an indicator of health. A diet high in saturated and trans-fats combined with high sodium leads to hypertension and heart disease.

[Wanderland]

10:46 AM on 05/03/2012

The increased plant growth, sometimes touted as being nature's correction to increased atmospheric CO2, is accompanied by reductions in soil carbon. Soil is a potentially much larger sink for C than biomass, so this is a lose-lose tradeoff. Soils low in stable carbon compounds also happen to be less productive soils.

[danR12356]

11:17 AM on 05/03/2012

'potentially' is a hypothesis-testing weasel word. If there is a net increase in growth, the soil can hardly be called 'less' productive.

[Wanderland]

02:02 PM on 05/03/2012

You really have no idea what I'm talking about.

The ability of a soil to store carbon depends on C inputs, land management and climate. Change these and you change the ability of the soil to store carbon. In almost all cases, managed land can be managed differently to boost soil C storage without hurting production.

BTW, degraded soil is less productive than soil that was not degraded. One of the key measures of soil quality is organic matter content. This should not come as news to you.

[Daniel Hicks]

09:42 PM on 05/07/2012

Why do slash-and-burn farms built on cleared rainforest fail? It is literally because of their low nutrient content. The reasons for high biodiversity in the tropics are complex, but it is a fact that there is more biomass per unit area in the tropical rainforest than any other biome. Cutting down the trees takes away all the nutrients caught up in them, as well as in all the other plants and animals that used them as a habitat, as well as fundamentally changing the environment for anything that used to live on the forest floor.

Ecosystems can be thought of as exchanging their resources between different "reservoirs," such as the soil, the water, and different organisms that inhabit them. You take away ALL of those nutrients from an ecosystem, and expect it to still have the same productivity afterwards? It's simple subtraction, man.

[Kenneth Alton]

12:36 PM on 05/03/2012

You can fix that by, instead of raking all your leaves and thatch and bagging them in the fall, running a small portion of your leaf pile through a shredder and then mixing it under your winter mulch beneath trees and bushes. Just be careful NOT to do this in areas you have mold sensitive plants (e.g., certain cultivars of roses, yellow daises, etc.). Near them, only very well composted materials can be used. Otherwise shredded leaves are an excellent winter mulch; piled around garden plants they provide protection for the roots in winter.

In the spring, gently till a portion of the leaf and compost into the soil so as not to damage the roots, or, used as a summer mulch, a thin layers of leaves keep the ground cool, hold in moisture, and stifle weeds.

Best of all, you will be returning about 80pct of the necessary minerals and compounds used by growing trees back into the soil (including stable carbon).

:)

[Wanderland]

02:07 PM on 05/03/2012

Thanks, but wasn't my point.

Soils develop an equilibrium between carbon added, carbon stored and carbon lost (to the atmosphere or erosion). The equilibrium depends on several things, including temperature. Higher temperatures will result in more oxidation of soil organic matter, reducing the overall amount of carbon in storage.

So therefore, with higher temperatures, all soils will store less carbon than they would have with lower temperatures. You can make up for it with intensive work, as you suggest, but you can't do that much work on the entire landscape.

[Chipher]

07:23 AM on 05/03/2012

"Increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels can affect how plants produce oxygen, while higher temperatures and variable rainfall patterns can change their behaviour..."

"Excuse me, what are you talking about, specifically?"

"Wow, can't you see it?! CO2 is almost up to 4/100ths of 1%, tha-tha-that's gonna..."

"That's gonna what?"

'Well, we don't really know because all our experiments are isolated in a labs."

"Well, so what will milliscule (sp) changes in increased CO2 concentrations do?"

"Well, we really haven't quantified it because we can't accurately model the environment."

"Uhh, so what are you really saying?"

"INCREASE CLIMATE GRANT FUNDING, WE HAVE A GLUT OF GREEN GRADUATES!!"

[Climate Lurker]

09:30 AM on 05/03/2012

You ain't no chemist, that's for sure. If you think an increase of 40% is nothing, then I have an experiment for you. Start with air. Breathe. See what happens. Now add 200ppm of chlorine gas to your air. See what happens. I mean, it's on 2/100ths of 1%, so what's the harm?

"Bronchial constriction occurs in the 200-ppm range with evidence of effects on ciliary activity at exposure levels as low as 18 ppm. With acute exposures of 50 ppm and subacute inhalation as low as 9 ppm, chemical pneumonitis and bronchiolitis obliterans have been noted. Mild focal irritation of the nose and trachea without lower respiratory effects occur at 2 ppm. "

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/820779-overview#a0104

[danR12356]

11:19 AM on 05/03/2012

This is a straw-man diversion to the main issue. More growth, more sequestering.

[Maxamillion]

02:40 PM on 05/03/2012

A 40% increase in CO2 concentration may sound dramatic to the CAGWers. However you exclude important information. A 40% increase to the current level of 390PPM means we start with a CO2 level of approximatley 279PPM. Therefore, your argument rests on your premise that all of the Global warming to date has been caused by an addition of 111PPM of CO2 out of a system comprised of 1,000,000 parts, all-the-while ignoring the 600lbs elephant in the room, water vapor. In comparison to water vapor, carbon dioxide is background noise.
You are using an argumentaive falacy so common with headlines these days.
An example: A town has an average of one murder per year and then suffers through a year with 2 murders and the headline reads: Murder Rate up 100%! A less inflamatory measure would be murders per 1000 in population.
Your comparison of a relatively inert compound such as CO2 to a halogen such as CL is a non-sequitor.

[lbsaltzman]

09:46 AM on 05/03/2012

Scientists do more than experiments in labs. Plants can be observed by biologists and others in their natural setting. Samples can be taken and analyzed in a lab. Your thinking in general wouldn't pass a high school science class.

[eric14]

07:13 AM on 05/03/2012

Scientists estimate the world's average temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1900, and nearly 0.2 degrees per decade since 1979.
---------------------------------------------------------------
If rise is 0.2 per decade since 1979 then rise 1979-89-99-09 is 0.6.
Total rise since 1900 is given as 0.8.
So there was a rise of 0.2 1900-79?
And since then pace of rise has risen tenfold?

[lbsaltzman]

09:50 AM on 05/03/2012

Does that surprise you?

[eric14]

11:02 AM on 05/03/2012

Your pointless childish sarcasm does.

[Wanderland]

10:38 AM on 05/03/2012

That's correct.

[fumes]

09:34 PM on 05/02/2012

the plants know it:

the greenhouse effect is saturated..

and anymore CO2 is just candy!

[Jim Milks]

10:09 AM on 05/03/2012

Nice try, fumes. But if the greenhouse effect was saturated, then we wouldn't be measuring any rise in the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere and the energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere wouldn't exist.

[fumes]

10:44 AM on 05/03/2012

i'm sure you're right Jim Milks..

(i just don't think so LOL)

[StephenBP]

08:16 PM on 05/02/2012

The next generation after us is going to have to deal with the mess we are leaving behind. We who are pointing out this mess are mocked and called "alarmists" and "doom sayers" but the equation is simply this, in my estimation; we are wreaking massive changes on the environment through our spewing of thousand tons per second of combustion pollution, and the probabiliy is that the unexpected consequences of these changes are not all going to be all pleasant. Whereas in previous environmental disasters, we were talking about fairly minor (by comparison, thus far) scope, we now are talking about a cascading system wide disturbance with potential for really outcomes all over the place.

Nature had refined a very very beautiful eco- system on this globe over the last million years, and we are now tearing it up and kicking sand in its gears. Those who do not study nature are liable to be oblivious to this situation.

Cultural attempts to divorce humanity from its biological nature is the biggest hoax on the planet, one that is well suited for short term monetary gains, and one that is a recipe for species extinction.

[Conspiracy2Riot]

09:44 PM on 05/02/2012

Well said, Stephen.

[danR12356]

11:23 AM on 05/03/2012

If the aim is to fan the flames of GW hysteria, well said indeed. Prof Al Gore couldn't have said it better.

[Chipher]

07:29 AM on 05/03/2012

If not for agriculture, and now fossil fuel powered machine agriculture, you wouldn't be here, and we wouldn't be having this conjectural spin-fest. As fossil fuel becomes more dear, we will gradually see decrease in agricultural production, as more old growth is logged for farm biofuels and that GMO monoculture places all global agriculture at increasing risk. Far sooner than agriculture fades, Mil.Gov will starve the 3W populations off the planet surplus. What's really not sustainable is our $1,450 billion a year National Security (sic) State. Forget climate change, we can't sustain this blowout past 2018.

[jimboy71]

12:01 PM on 05/06/2012

Is your argument really that "you dance with the one that brung ye"?

Sure petroleum got us here. Horses did their part too. So did stone tools. Are you seriously advocating that just because petroleum has been useful, it must always be so?

Despite the fact that it is a finite and very dirty resource?

[silverwolf13]

05:38 PM on 05/02/2012

Considering this article together with the one asking if we can feed 9 billion people is scary. We are pushing the limits of the earth's capacity to carry people.

[Sunwyn Ravenwood]

06:53 PM on 05/02/2012

Add in the fracking study I just read and I am very glad that I will not live to see millions of people starve to death.

[snowballinhell]

03:08 AM on 05/03/2012

Millions already have in our lifetimes. Lives are lost to hunger every day, but not here in the land of the obese where we will use whatever force is necessary to assure our population that they can eat as much food as they can afford.

[Chipher]

07:34 AM on 05/03/2012

Despite ten years and a half trillion dollars in spending, sacrifices of 100s of 1,000s of lives,from allies & Afghans alike fighting no more than 25,000 Tango by our own strategic estimates, neither our supreme commander or our puppet shah can go abroad in day light and officially schedule an openly announced AF tour.

So what makes you think USA can solve the global demand for food and water?

Fahged abahd et, you're broke anyway...