Hamburg- A leading expert in Germany has spawned a major scientific debate by claiming that trees put millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere every year exacerbating the greenhouse effect. Amid controversy, Dr Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry has reaffirmed findings by his team in Mainz, Germany, in January 2006 that they had detected methane exhaled from living
plants.
"I am 100 per cent confident that plants emit methane," he told Chemistry World magazine, insisting that as yet unpublished research would confirm his findings once and for all.
Keppler's unexpected discovery has caused heated debate among biologists and atmospheric chemists. Though bacteria in soil or decaying matter produce methane in anaerobic conditions, there seems to be no reason or mechanism for living plants to emit the gas in an oxygen-rich environment.
The implications of the findings are worrying: on a global scale, Keppler estimated, methane emissions from plants and trees could amount to hundreds of millions of tonnes a year, throwing scientists' understanding of the greenhouse gas's sources and sinks way off kilter.
But many researchers have queried the global impact, suggesting that Keppler's scale-up calculations, based on methane emission per unit of metabolically active mass of plant, were a gross overestimate.
Yet until recently, no published research has questioned Keppler's central discovery that plants can emit methane in the first place.
All the leafy stuff here
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