They are off the hook after all. Last year a paper appeared that suggested, to widespread amazement, that plants are major emitters of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas (Â鶹´«Ã½, 14 January 2006, p 13). Now a trial in a gas-tight greenhouse has negated this. Plants do not, it turns out, contribute to climate change by emitting methane.
Tom Dueck at Plant Research International in Wageningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues grew six species of plants – maize, tomato, wheat, sage, evening primrose and basil – in air in which the carbon in the CO2 was the heavy isotope carbon-13.…
