Meh. Sounds like a hurricane wrecked the experimental sites and interrupted the experiment. I'm not sure that a disturbed and interrupted experiment is at all useful or dispositive in any reasonable sense. I love unexpected results as much as the next guy, but 'a hurricane destroyed my research' is not synonymous with 'publishable results'.

Human caused global warming as a theory is based on some knowledge, but also a lot of assumptions, many of them wrong.

"Human caused global warming as a theory is based on some knowledge . . ." Very generous of you Dave, there is precious little actual knowledge regarding climate change and no verifiable data on global warming. The assertions in supporting of AGW when tested fold like this instance.

There is some knowledge, but a lot of "you don't know what you don't know." Predictions aren't really meaningful at this stage of human knowledge, but there is a lot of money in trying.

Her Global Warming experiment was blown away by a hurricane. There's only one reasonable conclusion - Global Warming has gotten so bad that we must stop trying to test it and just assume the experiment would have proven the econuts right.

Except CO2 does not have a linear effect on heat absorption. So they are looking for the wrong things to start with. CO2 lags temperature increases.

"Science says that every possible scenario proves global warming."

It's just simpler to lie.

The result is only unexpected if you think in little boxes.
If the average temperature all around Puerto Rico rises you get more evaporation from the ocean, so more rain, damper soil.
Raise the temperature just on a small plot of land, you increase evaporation from that soil, drying it out. Unless you can artificially heat enough area to influence the regional evaporation -> precipitation cycle your results will be complete nonsense. And even if you could do that large an experiment you would still have enough confounding factors to make your results unreliable.

Experiments that make sense in closed systems are seldom useful in open systems.

Beat me to it. Open loop experiments that provide numbers to parameters are only useful IF you have a good understanding of the closed loop. We don't have that understanding so this work is essentially, a waste of time and money.

Except to the extent that it contributes to the "Climate Channge" hysteria...

Budhaha already read

Interesting, but if the result is moisture dependent I don't think anything can model that accurately at this point. There would be forest growth and changes in weather patterns among other things. The setup also sounds pretty artificial in that it uses IR heaters, which aren't the same as genuine warming. They should start by warming the ocean around Puerto Rico :)

Roe collected leaves from the plots, dried them out in the lab, and then returned them to the plots randomly.

I don't understand. Won't drying out the leaves slow down the rate of decomposition?

Perhaps the scientist is a vegan and doesn't know about beef jerky.

There was the obverse experiment back east where they scraped the snow off of the ground to simulate lower snowfall due to higher temperature. However, they neglected to heat the air above the bare soil, so the cold winter air really froze the ground solid and did a real job on bacteria, etc.

Result of the study, global warming reduces soil fertility due to lack of snow cover.

Which is why people need to be skeptical when some journalist/activist says "Science!"

We can, and should, argue over the theory and execution of this experiment. The reaction of the MSM/Greenies will be the same:

HERESY! Blocked, unfollowed, deleted, deplatformed!

Models are wrong
- bad theory
- bad results

Once again we are not going to die from catastrophic global warming hysteria.

Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose more quickly

No, the models can't "predict" that, it must be entered into the models as an assumption. Garbage in, garbage out.

it doesn't agree with the models, therefore it is invalid and false

Popsicle sticks? Really?

Somebody is sure desperate to be called "doctor"

Just before the conversion to digital plotting in archeology, they were indispensable on dig sites.

I'm sure there's a more expensive way to do it, but why?

That. . .is not what they were using them for

An incomplete poorly structured and poorly thought out project. Fails to account for all the impacts of warming which includes MORE water vapor in the air. Artificial heaters DRY the air and the materials.

15-20 yrs ago research reported in agricultural and environmental journals indicated increased CO2 uptake and growth of plants. It also indicated that NW and Europe would benefit from higher temps allowing crops to be grown further north and or longer periods.

And in all this the idiots only capture a tiny fraction of the information needed because they are incapable of thinking through all the interactions that are occurring.

Thinkabodit: cold soda, hot soda. cold oceans, warm oceans. CO2 solubility is highly dependent on the temp of the oceans. As oceans warm for whatever reason more CO2 is released to the atmosphere. A 1 C rise in just the top 10m can release 29 BILLION tons of CO2.

Greenhouses still enrich the carbon dioxide to encourage growth.

But the seance is settled!

busy work for credentialed clowns

HNNNJKHKJHKJHKJHKThe site consists of
three hexagonal plots of land enclosed by a ring of infrared heaters
raised four meters above the ground, and three more plots enclosed by
fake heaters that are used as the "control" forest.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-...
The site consists of
three hexagonal plots of land enclosed by a ring of infrared heaters
raised four meters above the ground, and three more plots enclosed by
fake heaters that are used as the "control" forest.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-...

Seriously? They installed fake heaters on the control site? So the dead leaves wouldn't know...

Which probably produces a very different effect (particularly on humidity and therefore soil moisture and decomposition) than overall atmospheric warming in a tropical rain forest located on an island. I think it's a really bad experimental design. Space heaters are going to knock down the relative humidity and accelerate drying. General atmospheric and ocean warming certainly wouldn't do that.

"The site consists of three hexagonal plots of land enclosed by a ring of infrared heaters raised four meters above the ground, and three more plots enclosed by fake heaters that are used as the "control" forest."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-...

Placebo? Jedi mind trick?

James Lovelock’s original Gaia hypotheses, much ‘cited’ but seldom read, was that the earth, as a system was homeostatic, meaning self-correcting, and not prone to runaway behavior. If this were not true, it would have been lost long, long ago during major disruptive events. Humans, even in ‘nuclear winter’ scenarios, haven’t anywhere near the catastrophic potential that major volcanic periods or large meteor strike have. And Lovelock was in general concerned, but trusted in The Gaia system’s resilience.

Yes. In biology and nature in general, negative feedback loops dominate. But the catastrophic AGW hinges on runaway positive feedback effects.

JDanaH 5+

I like to point out that we're as much a part of nature as any other animal.

The planet has certainly recovered from catastrophic events in the past, but most of the species around at those times didn't. I don't particularly want to go the way of T. rex.

Many periods of intense volcanism (hence highly elevated levels of CO₂) are hardly noticeable in the fossil record. Extinction-level events are not under consideration, unless you subscribe to Gore-level hyperbole. The earth has been, if anything, in a historically CO₂-poor condition since the last glaciation. The recent mostly man-made increase has actually caused a measurable greening with little temperature increase. The idea of an ideal period of planetary climatic history is illusory.

Given the fact that humans have managed to colonize pretty much every terrestrial habitat using nothing more than sticks and rocks, I don't think humanity is going to go the way of T. rex just because the planet warmed up a few degrees.

There was a time long ago when the Earth's atmosphere had 8000 ppm (.8%) CO2! Earth must have a regulated climate, otherwise none of us would be here.

RE: As Expected — by Myself

"Tropical forests store about a third of Earth's carbon and about two-thirds of its above-ground biomass. Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose more quickly, which would send a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But new research presented at the American Geophysical Union's 2018 Fall Meeting contradicts that theory." -- Article at Link

Reasonable warming results in increased plant growth, which results in more carbon being taken up and made into plant matter.

As long as there are adequate nutrients in the soil and the water cycle isn't affected.

Just at a quick glance, those are things this research seems to be looking into. We're sitting here bullshitting about what we suppose might happen. This junior scientist tried to find some new information worth knowing. I know! Let's stay on our fat asses and make fun of her!

https://youtu.be/ATKNmdkqRqE

Wow, what a poorly designed experiment. By artificially heating these areas in the forest, the experimenter has artificially reduced the relative humidity in their test area. Their conclusion is suspect when the supposition is that humidity will decline in a rainforest. This study should be rejected by any peer review board.

Now I'm no climate scientist, but I am a chemical engineer by training. This is fundamental thermodynamics. If this is any indication of their fundamentals in STEM, we should not believe anything they are promoting.

This. This experiment sounds like it was designed by a sixth grader for a science fair. The only positive aspect of it is that it was at least an attempt at a real experiment. In the climate study field they have corrupted the language to the point they call running unproved computer models “experiments” and the output “data”.

Also she concludes that the drier undergrowth, etc. are a result of more storms like Maria taking out the canopy and letting more sunlight reach the ground. But her samples are all pre-Maria.

I thought the same thing - real ambient increases in temperature would not be a dryer heat, it seems strange they would not account for this in the experiment (perhaps by adding misters to go along with the heaters).

Bingo! One of the major claims in the IPCC modeling effort is that there would be more greenhouse effect from GHG increases. Since water is probably 95%+ of the that load, I find this research somewhat heretical to the general mindset.

Need to account for whether it's an El Nino year or La Nina.