The Missing News of the Missing Methane

Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Here's a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn't: a new study indicates that plants don't release lots of methane gas.

You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas--perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.

The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology--scientists have been studying the gases released by plants for a long time, and so it was surprising that they could have missed such a giant belch. Making the matter of pressing interest was methane's ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. Suddenly plants became a much bigger player in the global warming game...

More here.