Timescales of the permafrost carbon cycle and legacy effects of temperature overshoot scenarios

Minimizing the risks and impacts of climate change requires limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels, while the difficulty of reducing carbon emissions at the necessary rate increases the likelihood of temporarily overshooting this climate target. Using simulations with the land surface model JSBACH, we show that it takes high-latitude ecosystems and the state of permafrost-affected soils several centuries to adjust to the atmospheric conditions that arise at the 1.5 °C-target. Here, a temporary warming of the Arctic entails important legacy effects and we show that feedbacks between water-, energy- and carbon cycles allow for multiple steady-states in permafrost regions, which differ with respect to the physical state of the soil, the soil carbon concentrations and the terrestrial carbon uptake and -release. The steady-states depend on the soil organic matter content at the point of climate stabilization, which is significantly affected by an overshoot-induced soil carbon loss

Diverging responses of high-latitude CO2 and CH4 emissions in idealized climate change scenarios

The present study investigates the response of the high-latitude carbon cycle to changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in idealized climate change scenarios. To this end we use an adapted version of JSBACH – the land surface component of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Earth System Model (MPI-ESM) – that accounts for the organic matter stored in the permafrost-affected soils of the high northern latitudes. The model is run under different climate scenarios that assume an increase in GHG concentrations, based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 5 and the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, which peaks in the years 2025, 2050, 2075 or 2100, respectively. The peaks are followed by a decrease in atmospheric GHGs that returns the concentrations to the levels at the beginning of the 21st century, reversing the imposed climate change. We show that the soil CO2 emissions exhibit an almost linear dependence on the global mean surface temperatures that are simulated for the different climate scenarios. Here, each degree of warming increases the fluxes by, very roughly, 50 % of their initial value, while each degree of cooling decreases them correspondingly. However, the linear dependence does not mean that the processes governing the soil CO2 emissions are fully reversible on short timescales but rather that two strongly hysteretic factors offset each other – namely the net primary productivity and the availability of formerly frozen soil organic matter. In contrast, the soil methane emissions show a less pronounced increase with rising temperatures, and they are consistently lower after the peak in the GHG concentrations than prior to it. Here, the net fluxes could even become negative, and we find that methane emissions will play only a minor role in the northern high-latitude contribution to global warming, even when considering the high global warming potential of the gas. Finally, we find that at a global mean temperature of roughly 1.75 K (±0.5 K) above pre-industrial levels the high-latitude ecosystem turns from a CO2 sink into a source of atmospheric carbon, with the net fluxes into the atmosphere increasing substantially with rising atmospheric GHG concentrations. This is very different from scenario simulations with the standard version of the MPI-ESM, in which the region continues to take up atmospheric CO2 throughout the entire 21st century, confirming that the omission of permafrost-related processes and the organic matter stored in the frozen soils leads to a fundamental misrepresentation of the carbon dynamics in the Arctic

Snowfall-albedo feedbacks could have led to deglaciation of Snowball Earth starting from mid-latitudes

Simple and complex climate models suggest a hard snowball – a completely ice-covered planet – is one of the steady-states of Earth’s climate. However, a seemingly insurmountable challenge to the hard-snowball hypothesis lies in the difficulty in explaining how the planet could have exited the glaciated state within a realistic range of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Here, we use simulations with the Earth system model MPI-ESM to demonstrate that terminal deglaciation could have been triggered by high dust deposition fluxes. In these simulations, deglaciation is not initiated in the tropics, where a strong hydrological cycle constantly regenerates fresh snow at the surface, which limits the dust accumulation and snow aging, resulting in a high surface albedo. Instead, comparatively low precipitation rates in the mid-latitudes in combination with high maximum temperatures facilitate lower albedos and snow dynamics that – for extreme dust fluxes – trigger deglaciation even at present-day carbon dioxide level

Modulation of vaccine response by concomitant probiotic administration

Evidence suggests that probiotic bacteria modulate both innate and adaptive immunity in the host, and in some situations can result in reduced severity of common illnesses, such as acute rotavirus infection and respiratory infections. Responses to vaccination are increasingly being used to provide high quality information on the immunomodulatory effects of dietary components in humans. The present review focuses on the effect of probiotic administration upon vaccination response. The majority of studies investigating the impact of probiotics on responses to vaccination have been conducted in healthy adults, and at best they show modest effects of probiotics on serum or salivary IgA titres. Studies in infants and in elderly subjects are very limited, and it is too early to draw any firm conclusions regarding the potential for probiotics to act as adjuvants in vaccination. Although some studies are comparable in terms of duration of the intervention and age and characteristics of the subjects, most differ in terms of the probiotic selected. Further well designed, randomized, placebo-controlled studies are needed to fully understand the immunomodulatory properties of probiotics, whether the effects exerted are strain-dependent and age-dependent, and their clinical relevance in enhancing immune protection following vaccination

On the representation of heterogeneity in land-surface–atmosphere coupling

A realistic representation of processes that are not resolved by the model grid is one of the key challenges in Earth-system modelling. In particular, the non-linear nature of processes involved makes a representation of the link between the atmosphere and the land surface difficult. This is especially so when the land surface is horizontally strongly heterogeneous. In the majority of present day Earth system models two strategies are pursued to couple the land surface and the atmosphere. In the first approach, surface heterogeneity is not explicitly accounted for, instead effective parameters are used to represent the entirety of the land surface in a model’s grid box (parameter-aggregation). In the second approach, subgrid-scale variability at the surface is explicitly represented, but it is assumed that the blending height is located below the lowest atmospheric model level (simple flux-aggregation). Thus, in both approaches the state of the atmosphere is treated as being horizontally homogeneous within a given grid box. Based upon the blending height concept, an approach is proposed that allows for a land-surface–atmosphere coupling in which horizontal heterogeneity is considered not only at the surface, but also within the lowest layers of the atmosphere (the VERTEX scheme). Below the blending height, the scheme refines the turbulent mixing process with respect to atmospheric subgrid fractions, which correspond to different surface features. These subgrid fractions are not treated independently of each other, since an explicit horizontal component is integrated into the turbulent mixing process. The scheme was implemented into the JSBACH model, the land component of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology’s Earth-system model, when coupled to the atmospheric general circulation model ECHAM. The single-column version of the Earth system model is used in two example cases in order to demonstrate how the effects of surface heterogeneity are transferred into the atmosphere, influencing local stability and the turbulent mixing process. Furthermore, a simple flux-aggregation scheme was implemented into the JSBACH model. By comparing single-column simulations utilizing the VERTEX scheme and the simple flux-aggregation scheme, it can be shown that the horizontal disaggregation of the turbulent mixing process has a substantial impact on the simulated mean state of a grid box. Here, the differences between simulations with the two schemes may, in certain cases, be even larger than the differences between simulations with the simple flux-aggregation scheme and simulations in which surface heterogeneity is not explicitly accounted for (i.e., a parameter-aggregation scheme). © 2016 The Author(s

Representation of soil hydrology in permafrost regions may explain large part of inter-model spread in simulated Arctic and subarctic climate

The current generation of Earth system models exhibits large inter-model differences in the simulated climate of the Arctic and subarctic zone, with differences in model structure and parametrizations being one of the main sources of uncertainty. One particularly challenging aspect in modelling is the representation of terrestrial processes in permafrost-affected regions, which are often governed by spatial heterogeneity far below the resolution of the models' land surface components. Here, we use the MPI Earth System model to investigate how different plausible assumptions for the representation of the permafrost hydrology modulate the land-atmosphere interactions and how the resulting feedbacks affect not only the regional and global climate, but also our ability to predict whether the high latitudes will become wetter or drier in a warmer future. Focusing on two idealized setups that induce comparatively "wet" or "dry" conditions in regions that are presently affected by permafrost, we find that the parameter settings determine the direction of the 21st-century trend in the simulated soil water content and result in substantial differences in the land-atmosphere exchange of energy and moisture. The latter leads to differences in the simulated cloud cover and thus in the planetary energy uptake. The respective effects are so pronounced that uncertainties in the representation of the Arctic hydrological cycle can help to explain a large fraction of the inter-model spread in regional surface temperatures and precipitation. Furthermore, they affect a range of components of the Earth system as far to the south as the tropics. With both setups being similarly plausible, our findings highlight the need for more observational constraints on the permafrost hydrology to reduce the inter-model spread in Arctic climate projections.publishedVersio

Sensitivity of Arctic CH4_4 emissions to landscape wetness diminished by atmospheric feedbacks

Simulations using land surface models suggest future increases in Arctic methane emissions to be limited by the thaw-induced drying of permafrost landscapes. Here we use the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model to show that this constraint may be weaker than previously thought owing to compensatory atmospheric feedbacks. In two sets of extreme scenario simulations, a modification of the permafrost hydrology resulted in diverging hydroclimatic trajectories that, however, led to comparable methane fluxes. While a wet Arctic showed almost twice the wetland area compared with an increasingly dry Arctic, the latter featured greater substrate availability due to higher temperatures resulting from reduced evaporation, diminished cloudiness and more surface solar radiation. Given the limitations of present-day models and the potential model dependence of the atmospheric response, our results provide merely a qualitative estimation of these effects, but they suggest that atmospheric feedbacks play an important role in shaping future Arctic methane emissions

Mechanism of action of probiotics

The modern diet doesn't provide the required amount of beneficial bacteria. Maintenance of a proper microbial ecology in the host is the main criteria to be met for a healthy growth. Probiotics are one such alternative that are supplemented to the host where by and large species of Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium and Saccharomyces are considered as main probiotics. The field of probiotics has made stupendous strides though there is no major break through in the identification of their mechanism of action. They exert their activity primarily by strengthening the intestinal barrier and immunomodulation. The main objective of the study was to provide a deep insight into the effect of probiotics against the diseases, their applications and proposed mechanism of action

Effect of extracts from selected Kenyan plants on traits of metabolic syndrom in Wistar rats fed a high-fat high fructose diet

Purpose: To examine the potential of extracts from selected herbs used in African traditional medicine in diabetes patients, and to determine their effect on traits of metabolic syndrome in rats fed a high-fat and high-fructose diet.Methods: Ethanol and aqueous extracts were prepared from Mangifera indica (MI), Lonchocarpus eriocalyx (LE), Urtica massaica (UM), Schkuhria pinnata (SP) and Launaea cornuta (LC). Ethanol extracts (1:100 dilution) were examined for inhibition of pancreatic lipase and α-glucosidase activity invitro. Furthermore, aqueous extracts were administered for 74 days to male Wistar rats fed a high-fat and high-fructose diet to assess their effect on traits of metabolic syndrome.Results: Ethanol extracts showed at least 30 % inhibition of pancreatic lipase in vitro but no effect on α- glucosidase activity. Administration of the aqueous extracts caused significant reduction in liver triglycerides (except for LE). Muscle triglycerides and fat were also reduced, with the most pronounced effect elicited by LE. Urinary glucose excretion and plasma triglycerides, but not hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance, were reduced by UM compared to control.Conclusion: This exploratory study indicates that UM may be considered a candidate for the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes. Keywords: Kenyan traditional medicine, High-fat diet, High fructose, Insulin resistance, Triglycerides, Diabetes, Liver steatosi