Pros and Cons on spending on climate change

https://www.google.com/search?q=bio...e=univ&ei=g75YVeHwGaG5mAXA9ICICA&ved=0CDAQsAQ

Q http://tosterpandory.pl/tosterpandory/biosphere3.pdf

PROJECT BIOSPHERE 3

Introduction

You are a group of scientists, consisting of: a botanist, a meteorologist, an ecologist, and a doctor.
You are approached by a private organization to conduct a project, PROJECT BIOSPHERE 3.
There is only one problem none of you have ever heard of project Biosphere 1 or 2.
The good thing is that all funding for the project will be donated by a sponsor, who is interested in seeing what you can accomplish.
You can have whatever materials you need to accomplish your task.
You can go anywhere you want to make your Biosphere.
You can bring any person onto your team you feel you need to accomplish your task.

The Task

In order for you to proceed with Project Biosphere 3, first you must find out what biosphere 1 and project
Biosphere 2 are or were.
Then present your findings to your sponsor and the private organization.
Your presentation should include what the first two Biospheres are/were, your
conclusions on what needs to be changed or what should be done the same in Project Biosphere 3.
Your presentation should also include how you want to build your Biosphere, a rough design of what your
biosphere will look like, what you want to have in your Biosphere, (plants, animals, etc) and how long
you want to conduct you experiment for.
The sponsor and sponsor organization will then approve the necessary funding you think you need.

UQ
 
" The haunting true story of a man who spent two years in a self-contained 'Biosphere' and nearly fell apart"
Bill Gifford, "Spring Chicken" Apr 1, 2015

Q http://www.businessinsider.com.au/man-spent-two-years-in-biosphere-2015-3

In one of his periodic restless phases, he signed on as chief medical officer for Biosphere 2, the famous (or infamous) earthbound “space station” that was being built in the desert north of Tucson.

“I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times.

Funded by the venturesome oil heir Ed Bass, who considered himself an environmentalist, Biosphere 2 was a glass-enclosed, 3.15‑acre terrarium that was designed to replicate the major ecosystems of earth.
UQ
 
Q http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/bio3/2000projects/carroll_d_walker_e/whatwentwrong.html

Obviously, Biosphere II was not self-sustaining if outside oxygen had to be added in order for the crew to survive. The reasons behind this flaw in the project were not fully understood until some time later. As it turned out, the problem had more to do with carbon dioxide than with oxygen. Biosphere II’s soil, especially in the rain forest and savanna areas, is unusually rich in organic material. Microbes were metabolizing this material at an abnormally high rate, in the process of which they used up a lot of oxygen and produced a lot of carbon dioxide. The plants in Biosphere II should have been able to use this excess carbon dioxide to replace the oxygen through photosynthesis, except that another chemical reaction was also taking place.

A vast majority of Biosphere II was built out of concrete, which contains calcium hydroxide. Instead of being consumed by the plants to produce more oxygen, the excess carbon dioxide was reacting with calcium hydroxide in the concrete walls to form calcium carbonate and water.

Ca(OH)2 + CO2 --> CaCO3 + H2O

This hypothesis was confirmed when scientists tested the walls and found that they contained about ten times the amount of calcium carbonate on the inner surfaces as they did on the outer surfaces. All of the walls in Biosphere II are now coated with a protective layer, but oxygen levels continue to be somewhat problematic.
UQ
 
Q http://archive.bio.ed.ac.uk/jdeacon/biosphere/biosph.htm

A new beginning

In 1995 the management of Biosphere 2 was transferred to Columbia University (New York City), with the option for Columbia University to buy it for a mere $1 million anytime in the next 20 years. It was also placed under firm scientific control, with an eminent Scientific Director to guide its future. The vice-Provost of Columbia University, Michael Crow, said 'We view it as the world's first teaching and research tool about global management. It's a big laboratory'

Today, Biosphere 2 continues as a visitor attraction, but now also has a major educational role in informing the public about environmental issues. The focus of research is now on climate change and the potential consequences of the predicted increases in global CO2 levels. Central to this research objective, the agroforestry zone now houses some 200 cottonwood trees (of the willow family), which can be exposed to different CO2 levels (Figure 5).
UQ
 
Q http://archive.bio.ed.ac.uk/jdeacon/biosphere/mesocos.htm#Biosphere 2 Mesocosms

Recent modifications include the installation of a CO2 control system to adjust internal CO2 levels to programmed set points, air circulation fans to help reduce thermal stratification, continuous trace gas monitoring system, and movable partitions to isolate the rainforest and divide the agro-forestry into three separate sections.
...
Lightweight curtains allow reversible closure of the rainforest and three agro-forestry sections (Figure). The curtains provide isolated `system level' responses (e.g. net ecosystem carbon exchange, transpiration, trace gas production and isotope balances) to changing CO2 and/or other climate factors, allowing comparisons between vegetation types under set experimental conditions. The isolated mesocosm acts essentially like a large static chamber in which fluxes of water, carbon and other compounds can be monitored precisely. The associated data are invaluable to validate models that scale up from leaf to canopy to ecosystem.

These and future modifications will produce unique research opportunities to study `system-level' responses to elevated CO2 and climate changes.
...
Coral Reef Mesocosm

The Biosphere 2 ocean system is ideal for testing models of chemical or biological changes on coral reefs. It is unlike any other artificial reef system, due to its large scale and biological complexity. The unique closure allows whole system manipulations and monitoring that would be extremely difficult in a natural environment. Physical and chemical parameters such as mixing, gas exchange, nutrient concentrations, and partial pressure of CO2 can be independently manipulated.
...
Terrestrial Research

Concentration of atmospheric CO2 is now 30% higher (about 360 ppmv) than at the beginning of the industrial revolution (280 ppmv in 1800). With increasing fossil fuel combustion and changing land usage, elevated concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane, nitrous oxide) are predicted to increase global air temperature.

The combined impact of changing climate and trace gas concentration on terrestrial ecosystems is poorly understood. Experimental and modeling approaches represent two means to achieve an understanding, hence integrating both approaches will accelerate global change research.
...
Terrestrial ecosystem research at Biosphere 2 examines possible impacts of elevated CO2, water deficit, high temperature, and nutrient loading on ecosystem structure and function. Our research also seeks to determine the roles that these ecosystems play in regulating global climate. Current experiments in the wilderness mesocosms are linked to the development, calibration, and validation of ecophysiological models that predict dynamics of natural and managed ecosystems. While the wilderness area offers the potential to investigate specific processes in complex mesocosms, the agro-forestry area allows investigations of responses of a few cultivated species at a time, with an initial focus on managed forests under global change conditions.

No other facility exists with as large a controlled environment space (1,500 m2 planting area, 15 m high on average; soil and atmospheric volumes of approximately 2,000 m3 and 38,000 m3, respectively), allowing experiments investigating CO2, management (primarily water and nitrogen) and temperature interactions.
UQ
 
Last edited:
How many researchers of climate change in the world today? Many!
How much money we spent so far (or prepare to spend) on climate change research like below? Haha!

OddTrader said:
Q http://archive.bio.ed.ac.uk/jdeacon/biosphere/biosph.htm

A new beginning

In 1995 the management of Biosphere 2 was transferred to Columbia University (New York City), with the option for Columbia University to buy it for a mere $1 million anytime in the next 20 years. It was also placed under firm scientific control, with an eminent Scientific Director to guide its future. The vice-Provost of Columbia University, Michael Crow, said 'We view it as the world's first teaching and research tool about global management. It's a big laboratory'

Today, Biosphere 2 continues as a visitor attraction, but now also has a major educational role in informing the public about environmental issues. The focus of research is now on climate change and the potential consequences of the predicted increases in global CO2 levels. Central to this research objective, the agroforestry zone now houses some 200 cottonwood trees (of the willow family), which can be exposed to different CO2 levels (Figure 5).
UQ
More...
 
Modeling the Terrestrial Biosphere

Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Vol. 39: 91-123 (Volume publication date October 2014)
First published online as a Review in Advance on September 15, 2014
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-environ-012913-093456

Joshua B. Fisher,1 Deborah N. Huntzinger,2,3 Christopher R. Schwalm,2 and Stephen Sitch4
1Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109; email: jbfisher@jpl.nasa.gov
2School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability;
3Department of Civil Engineering, Construction Management, and Environmental Engineering, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011
4College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ, United Kingdom

Q http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-012913-093456

ABSTRACT

The land surface comprises the smallest areal fraction of the Earth system's major components (e.g., versus atmosphere or ocean with cryosphere). As such, how is it that some of the largest sources of uncertainty in future climate projections are found in the terrestrial biosphere? This uncertainty stems from how the terrestrial biosphere is modeled with respect to the myriad of biogeochemical, physical, and dynamic processes represented (or not) in numerous models that contribute to projections of Earth's future. Here, we provide an overview of the processes included in terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs), including various approaches to representing any one given process, as well as the processes that are missing and/or uncertain. We complement this with a comprehensive review of individual TBMs, marking the differences, uniqueness, and recent and planned developments. To conclude, we summarize the latest results in benchmarking activities, particularly as linked to recent model intercomparison projects, and outline a path forward to reducing uncertainty in the contribution of the terrestrial biosphere to global atmospheric change.
UQ
 
Q http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/research/models/sib3/
http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/toy-models/

SiB3: Simple Biosphere Model

http://biocycle.atmos.colostate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SiB3.png

SiB3The Simple Biosphere (SiB) Model was originally developed by Piers Sellers in the mid-1980’s as an internally-consistent module to surface-atmosphere exchanges of radiation, heat, moisture, and momentum over land.

It was extended in the mid-1990’s by a team of interdisciplinary scientists to include mechanistic linkages to photosynthesis, stomatal physiology, and satellite remote sensing.

Since that time it has been extended to include improved treatment of carbon cycling, soils, snow, hydrology, stable isotopes, phenology, and crops.

Below you will find a formal model description with references, links to key publications describing model formulation and results, model code and documentation, and a complete reference list.

Model Formulation

The Simple Biosphere model (SiB) is based on a land-surface parameterization scheme originally used to compute biophysical exchanges of energy, water, and momentum in climate models (Sellers et al., 1986), and later adapted to include ecosystem metabolism (Sellers et al., 1996a; Denning et al., 1996a). The parameterization of photosynthetic carbon assimilation is based on enzyme kinetics originally developed by Farquhar et al. (1980), and is linked to stomatal conductance and thence to the surface energy budget and atmospheric climate (Collatz et al., 1991, 1992; Sellers et al., 1996a; Randall et al., 1996). The model has been updated to include prognostic calculation of temperature, moisture, and trace gases in the canopy air space (Vidale and Stöckli, 2005), and the model has been evaluated against eddy covariance measurements at a number of sites (Baker et al., 2003; Hanan et al., 2004; Baker et al, 2008). Direct-beam and diffuse solar radiation are treated separately for calculations of photosynthesis and transpiration of sunlit and shaded canopy fractions, using algorithms similar to those of DePury and Farquhar (1997). Other recent improvements include biogeochemical fractionation and recycling of stable carbon isotopes (Suits et al., 2005), improved treatment of soil hydrology and thermodynamics, and the introduction of a multilayer snow model based on the Community Land Model (Dai et al., 2003; Stöckli et al, 2008a), a prognostic phenology algorithm that assimilates vegetation imagery (Stöckli et al, 2008b), the biogeochemical cycling of carbon among decomposing organic pools (Schaefer et al, 2008), and the ecophysiology of corn, soy, and wheat crops (Lokupitiya et al, 2009). The model is now referred to as SiB3.

Model Results

SiB has been used to analyze regional to global controls on ecosystem productivity (Schaefer et al., 2002, 2005; Williams et al, 2008) and atmospheric CO2 mixing ratio (Denning et al, 1996b, 1999; Law et al, 2008; Patra et al, 2008; Parazoo et al, 2008, Corbin et al, 2008a). It has been coupled to the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) and used to study local- and regional-scale interactions among carbon fluxes, turbulence, and CO2 mixing ratio (Denning et al., 2003, 2008; Nicholls et al., 2004; Wang et al, 2007; Corbin et al, 2008b McGrath-Spangler et al, 2009). The model has also been used as a basis for regional carbon source/sink estimation by assimilation of atmospheric CO2 mixing ratio (Zupanski et al, 2007; Prihodko et al, 2008; Lokupitiya et al, 2008; Schuh et al, 2009). Following previous work with CASA (van der Werf et al, 2006), we also plan to add a fire module to this model.

Key Papers
...

UQ
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top