James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist and communications consultant based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
The German government has at least temporarily suspended an experiment that would see 20 tonnes of iron dust dumped into the ocean between Argentina and Antarctica in hopes of inducing plankton bloom that sucks up atmospheric CO2, according to Nature. First, says the government, you have to do an environmental impact study. But the very experiment itself is a study in environmental consequences. After all, if it works, then we might have at our disposal a simple way to draw down as much as 10% of the atmospheric carbon that's heating the planet. But wait.
There's this international convention that amounts to a voluntary moratorium on ocean fertilization activities until there is "an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities." Seems like a bit of a Catch-22, don't you think? We're never going to get a scientific basis nailed down until we've carried out a fair number of pilot projects.
Now, maybe the good people at the Alfred Wegener Institute, which is leading the attempted experiment, should have floated some trial balloons first. Maybe they did. William Connelley says he can find no good reason for not letting them go head with the thing, and I'm tempted to agree, even with all my reservations about geoengineering schemes.
Dumping iron into the ocean may sound like pollution, but if it can actually draw down serious amounts of CO2, then we should be dumping money into such things as fast was we can. There are lots of unknowns at this point. A couple of years back, a long list of researchers published a review of the issue in Science. They wrote that:
A major unknown in the geological past is the fate of Fe incorporated into phytoplankton blooms. Was dust-mediated Fe supply lost to the deep ocean as declining blooms sank [as aggregates], or was it efficiently recycled by biota in the subsurface ocean and subsequently upwelled?
This is the key question. In theory, plankton fall to the bottom of the ocean when they die and take the carbon they've metabolized from the air with them. It's all part of the Earth's eons-long geochemical cycle, the one that we've accelerated by several orders of magnitude by sucking up fossil fuels and spewing the carbon back into the air from whence it came. But no one really knows if this will work in artificially induced circumstances, and there some hints it might not.
So we need to know. This is one of the more attractive geoengineering ideas. Unlike spraying sulfates into the stratosphere or lauching millions of mirrors into space, is relatively straightforward and inexpensive. Let's find at way to let the Germans go about their ocean dumping business.
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Comments
very good sites
Posted by: chat | January 15, 2009 4:59 PM
very good sites mcx
Posted by: sohbet odalari | January 15, 2009 5:15 PM
James if the Moon was made out of barbecue spare ribs, would you eat it and wash it down with a nice cool Budweiser? I know I would.
Posted by: Harry Cary | January 15, 2009 7:49 PM
Damn, you may have the worst troll infestation on ScienceBlogs. Why?
Meanwhile, back at the thread: Uh, don't big phytoplankton blooms have a rather unpleasant side effect of smothering, then choking, all the other fauna and flora in their vicinity as they expand to cover all the surface and then absorb all available oxygen while decomposing?
I have no idea what biota are to be found around the Straits of Magellan, but tend to suspect that killing it all off so we can continue driving SUVs and blow-drying our hair may not be the choice future generations would most appreciate.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | January 15, 2009 8:08 PM
I cannot excape the hilarity of one group of environmentalist wackos preventing another group of environmentalist wackos fron 'saving' the planet from CO2 by restricting and regulating their actions -based on environmental concerns. LOL, that is a riot! "Are we morally right to do this?"
Posted by: Manny | January 15, 2009 11:10 PM
To Pierce R. Butler (dude your name is ..... never mind, something for a stupid movie) anyways - the answer to "WHY" - is to just look at the body of "work" (hahahhahaha) James has laid down on paper or 10001000100100's. Read through it from a-z. Visit all his posts and lok at the honest responses and his responses to the responses. What a frickin' joke James H is (yes/no that is no proper sentence structure). When you reach a certain level of total stupidity and circleness and parrotocracy and hypocrisy + incompetence and ridiculousness, then people sorta catch on and notice and want to respond. I would summarize my point by saying that: "People know a total ass-bite when they see one." Yes you can quote me on that.
Posted by: Hazz Byte | January 16, 2009 12:30 AM
Hazz Byte: I see you.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | January 17, 2009 10:58 PM
To Pierce Butler Junior the Third. Dude, you were AWESOME as James Bond. Seriously! good job.
Posted by: Dustin Hoffman | January 18, 2009 5:31 PM
Damn, you may have the worst troll infestation on ScienceBlogs. Why?
I think it's his easy, laid-back biopic. The infantile trollers see James as a soft, non-threatening target. I don't like the idea of geo-engineering very much but I'm not against a good experiment or research project. Right now we are experimenting with the whole damn planet with a massive excessive CO2 geo-engineering project.
Posted by: Dan G. | January 19, 2009 12:01 AM
Damn, you may have the worst troll infestation on ScienceBlogs. Why? Because there a lot of people calling BS on your belittling holier than though crap.
Posted by: Your Mom | January 19, 2009 10:04 AM