Forest Global Warming Research Faces Govt Mandate
Posted on: Tuesday, 11 November 2008, 14:51 CST
The U.S. Department of Energy is at odds with researchers over the handling of a project aimed at showing the long-term effects of global warming on forests.
The ongoing project began more than a decade ago. Researchers have pumped large levels once-liquefied carbon dioxide in carefully metered doses into clusters of trees in hopes of gauging how well they would respond to global warming. The loblolly pines planted in 1994 at Duke in North Carolina are located behind gates several miles from campus.
There are also experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Harshaw Experimental Forest in Wisconsin. The carbon dioxide levels around the trees are about 50 percent higher than current levels - the amount expected 40 to 50 years from now.
However, the Department of Energy has called on the scientists to chop down the trees, collect the data and move on to new research. The agency’s Office of Biological & Environmental Research has announced that current research will be phased out by 2011.
"There has been an investment in these experiments and it's a shame we are going to walk away from that investment," said William Chameides, an atmospheric scientist at Duke University, where one of the experimental forests is located. "There is no question that ultimately we want to cut the trees down and analyze the soil. The question is whether now is the time to do it."
The Energy Department believes the millions of dollars being spent on the project can be better spent on new research that will look at the effects of higher temperatures, changes in rainfall, and variations in soil fertility, said J. Michael Kuperberg, a program manager with the agency.
"What we are trying to do here is balance the time to get optimal results out of the existing experiment with our desire for a new generation of experiments that we feel is more likely to realistically represent future climate scenarios," Kuperberg said.
Some scientists, though, believe ending the long-term research, known as Free Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE), may be a mistake.
Ronald Neilson, a U.S. Forest Service bio-climatologist in Corvallis, Ore., said the experiments should continue because they still have potential to answer key questions about how rainfall and fertility affect how much carbon a forest will store long-term.
Researchers are being ordered to get the definitive measurements on how tree growth, which represents stored carbon, was influenced, and should design new experiments to begin by 2012.
"To stop an experiment that cost $55 million, $10 million before it reaches its real conclusion makes no sense to me," said Ram Oren, associate professor of ecology at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and principal investigator on the experiments there.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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