There's a lot of it around these days, much of it of the politicized financial variety. But it seems to me that a great deal of environmental "science" is also politicized twaddle.

The four-year study involved native Oklahoma tall grass prairie ecosystems that were sealed inside four, living-room-sized environment chambers. The dozen 12-ton, six-foot-deep plots were extracted intact from the University of Oklahoma's prairie research facility near Norman, Okla., in order to minimize the disturbance of plants and soil bacteria. Inside the DRI's sunlit-controlled EcoCELL chambers, scientists replicated the daily and seasonal changes in temperature, and rainfall that occur in the wild.

In the second year of the study, half of the plots were subjected to temperatures typical of a normal year, and the other half were subjected to abnormally warm temperatures -- on the order of those predicted to occur later this century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the third year of the study, temperatures around the warmed plots were turned down again to match temperatures in the control plots. The CO2 flux -- the amount of carbon dioxide moving between the atmosphere and biosphere -- was tracked in each chamber for all four years of the study.

DRI's EcoCELL facility gave the scientists an unprecedented degree of control over the enclosed ecosystems. Not only could they create the same air temperature conditions from year-to-year, they could also independently control the soil temperature in each chamber -- a key feature that enhanced the ecological relevance of the results. Each containerized ecosystem also sat on "load cells," the type of scales used to weigh trucks on highways. Scientists used the scales to track the amount of water that was taken up and lost by the plants and soil in both normal and abnormal years. Thus, each containerized ecosystem served as a weighing lysimeter, an instrument that's used to measure the water and nutrients that percolate through soils.

The scientists found that ecosystems exposed to an anomalously warm year had a net reduction in CO2 uptake for at least two years. These ecosystems trapped and held about one-third the amount of carbon in those years than did the plots exposed to normal temperatures.

"Large reductions in net CO2 uptake in the warm year were caused mainly by decreased plant productivity resulting from drought, while the lack of complete recovery the following year was caused by a lagged stimulation of CO2 release by soil microorganisms in response to soil moisture conditions," explained co-author Paul Verburg, also from DRI.

Making abrupt changes of this sort tells us little of value. That doesn't happen in real life, and in real life living things adapt to change. Worse, the "study" seems to have neglected an extremely important part of the simulated future environment - higher CO2 levels. Perhaps it's just poor reporting in the linked article, but if not it makes the "study" utterly ridiculous.

One of the key effects of higher CO2 levels is to make plants more drought tolerant. They don't have to breathe so hard to get enough CO2, so they lose less water to evapotranspiration. This keeps soil moisture levels higher too. Higher CO2 also promotes plant growth so long as there are no other limiting factors such as nitrogen.

"Our findings confirm that ecosystems respond to climate change in a much more complex way than one might expect based solely on traditional experiments and observations," said study co-author James Coleman, vice provost for research and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University. "Our results provide new information for those who are formulating science-based carbon policies."

Indeed, ecosystems do respond to environmental change in complex ways, apparently far more so than Coleman grasps.

If we want real information for policy makers we'll need the "scientists" to up their game significantly because it looks like what they are producing now is politicized twaddle.