Lab scientists tinker with microbes to battle climate change
By Suzanne Bohan
Contra Costa Times Contra Costa Times
Posted: 05/06/2011 04:51:11 PM PDT
Updated: 05/06/2011 04:51:11 PM PDTMicrobes will take center stage next week as the unusual protagonists in a free talk with local scientists tackling climate change.
The one-celled creatures are now part of a major research initiative at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to explore ways to recapture more of the 6 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide human activities generate annually
The researchers, who will speak Monday evening at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, are working with the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, a federal facility for genetic sequencing of microbes and other life-forms.
The terrestrial ecosystem, meaning everything on land — from plants to soil and other geological features — absorbs about one-third of atmospheric carbon. Much of the credit goes to microbes, said Donald DePaolo, an associate lab director who heads the Berkeley Lab’s Carbon Cycle 2.0 initiative.
“Microbes are doing a huge job of taking carbon out of the atmosphere,” DePaolo said. But how microbes, usually bacteria, do their work is still largely a mystery, he said.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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good Lord….
Don’t turn them loose, they’ll kill us all
I can just see it sometime in the future “the idiots made it colder”
Genuine Mad Scientist material.
Really, what could possibly go wrong? They are experts.
Does anything actually “trap” heat. I think the better word is “delay” it on the way out, but they love to save “heat-trapping”, which is the standard word throughout media.
Think of it like a bear trap with sharp jaws.
It’s standard climatologist lingo.
Exhibit A: Dessler et.al.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6900556.html
Count the appearances of “heat-trapping gases” in there. You see, they repeat it like a suggestive formula, which proves that climatologists are in the business of mass hypnosis, not science. Which actually explains their behavious rather well.
They will probably concoct those microbes in the same test tube that they concocted the AIDS virus.