Ocean iron fertilization. Source: Woods Hole
From the best laid plans of mice and men department.
In the late 1980’s, the late John Martin advanced the idea that carbon uptake during plankton photosynthesis in many regions of the world’s surface ocean was limited not by light or the major nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus, but rather by a lack of the trace metal iron. Correlations between dust input to the ocean (which is the major source of iron) and past climate changes and CO2 levels, led Martin’s to exclaim “Give me half a tanker of iron and I’ll give you the next ice age”.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute wrote a paper about it Effects of Ocean Fertilization with Iron to Remove Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere Reported April 2004 News Release from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
From Slashdot and New Scientist:
Earlier this month, the controversial Indian-German Lohafex expedition fertilised 300 square kilometres of the Southern Atlantic with six tonnes of dissolved iron.
This triggered a bloom of phytoplankton, which doubled their biomass within two weeks by taking in carbon dioxide from the seawater. The dead phytoplankton were then expected to sink to the ocean bed, dragging carbon along with them. Instead, the experiment turned into an example o f how the food chain works, as the bloom was eaten by a swarm of hungry copepods.
While the experiment failed to show ocean fertilization as a viable carbon storage strategy, it has pushed the old “My dog ate my homework” excuse to an unprecedented level.
h/t to Dan Watts (no relation)
I can’t even IMAGINE anyone being even remotely surprised by this. Not even remotely. Not even the tiniest little bit.
In the future, I will be referring to this as the ultimate example of a ridiculous idea that almost everyone not involved could see wouldn’t work, and a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences. Even with only high school biology I knew this was going to go something like this.
Also, in the future these types of things (and we will see more of them) will be referred to as a sort of “crazy time”, when reason and sanity took a back seat to the hype and hyperbole of “climate change” and “mitigation”. Maybe we just need giant leeches to “bleed” the planet…
Wouldn’t it have been easier to go to the corner pet store and buy 6 tons of fish food to dump into the ocean? Same result!!!
Well this is what global warming is really all about:
It’s illegal to feed wild animals.
And the unintended consequences of the study, was a huge increase in the incidence of diabetes in squid.
It only works when all other necessary conditions are right. All the other nutrients from colder deeper water have to be mixed into the warmer upper layer. Predator populations have to be low (because they eventually starved after eating up the plankton and died out to lower numbers) as the blooms begin. And dust needs to be a continuous feed, not a once and we’re done thing. The article answered some of the questions that lead scientists to understand natural phenomena. Not a bad thing. But spin will destroy this important bit of information and we will walk away still scratching our heads, knowing nothing. The null hypothesis proven is as instructive as the null hypothesis not supported. This narrowly defined study with its narrowly defined hypothesis, inadvertently revealed a major finding if eyes are open to it.
I think we are seeing the last gasps of ocean iron fertilization as a carbon storage strategy,”
But it’s great for the whales, so maybe when the threat of CAGW is debunked, greenies will embrace this fertilization technique.
Sounds to me like all they did was give a boost to the food chain by providing an abundance of the lowest organism on it, while simultaneously eliminating the idea of carbon capture by these means.
Ever hear of two birds with one stone?
Maybe the Japanese can use this as a “whale hunting offset.” Dump the Iron, Save the Whales!
I don’t understand how the experiment is a failure. The goal was to take CO2 out of the air and grow biomass in the ocean. Why does it matter what the form of the biomass takes? Eventually all biomass dies and goes to the bottom. What am I missing?
“complex chain of events”, “difficult to control”. All that is missing here is the crackling and interference on the last radio message sent by the group.
More worrying is that as the hype gets shriller and the “schemes” get more insane eventually some real damage will be done.
A quick glance here (centre of page) has a host of top doom mongers arguing about a scheme to take land from those not using it correctly and cover it in “biochar” to remove excess CO2. Apparently it will be cooked up on an industrial scale using huge microwave ovens – you just couldn’t make this stuff up.
Hah! Last year I wrote a note for a local newspaper (Milenio) talking about the generation of this problem from “fertilizing” the oceans with iron. As always, this people think that the Universe is static. They have to be thankful their luck for not have caused a major disaster, eutrophication, for example. This failure reveals how little those people know on nature works. They’re doing the same on climate and physics.
Well at least plankton grew initially to support part of his hypothesis. Cloud seeding remains, of course, the most down and dirty practical way of actually cooling the earth of we needed to.
Not that nature isn’t helping recently…
Phytoplankton are not massive enough to sink very fast. Some research has shown that their remains (diatom frustules) are transported to depth in copepod fecal pellets. But even the recycling of those in upper water layers probably is significant. One would expect a very slow sequestration of carbon anyway, based on the fact that average worldwide sedimentation rates are only a couple of cm per millennium. Fertilization is for farming. Somebody might want to try fishing in that 300 sq km test plot.
Could this be a way of feeding the world’s population? “Fertilize” the oceans with iron dust, increase biomass and let the food chain do the rest? Sounds interesting.
Where y’all are seeing a failure of carbon sequestration, I’m seeing a potential deep-sea aquaculture opportunity. Assuming, of course, that you could a) control the critters reaping the bloom, b) keep the predators at bay before you harvested and c) resolved the ownership issue of your open-sea cropland.
‘Cause $600 worth of fertilizer for even a minor harvest of giant shrimp or some other commercial shellfish off of three hundred square miles of area sounds like a pretty good deal.
I propose a massive government program to educate the amphipods on the value of becoming vegetarian.
The copepods will still eat the phytoplankton (being vegetarians themselves), but will then be allowed to live full, productive copepod lives before finally taking the carbon with THEM to the bottom when they die.
I would think red dust blown into the oceans from deserts would be the natural version of this experiment.
Now that’s funny! We’re going to change climate with a half tanker of iron. The earth is um, big guys!
—
Jeff C made an amazing discovery on the antarctic paper.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/auto-matic-correlation/
I guess I’m missing something. Can someone tell me why it matters if the carbon ended up in amphipods rather than at the bottom of the ocean?
Maybe six tons in 300 sq. km. was too much? They really need to do the experiment on a curve varying levels of iron. There might well be a lower threshold in which results may be more favorable.
I just recently saw a program where they were talking about the deep ocean “abyssal snow”. It seems that the dead bodies of the various plankton end up getting stuck together in clumps which causes them to fall more rapidly.
But what bothers me is that these are the same people that complain about ocean acidification and adding this iron probably results in a local acidification that changes the pH and allows those plankton to absorb nutrients better.
Adding iron is an easy way to lower pH in soils, I would expect it to work the same way in ocean water.
geo –
The big deal is that the result of the experiment was different from the prediction. In “science” this makes it a complete failure… (but what does “science” have to do with AGW, anyway? Other than its perversion.)
And I agree, this is a great way to accomplish other tasks, but although not a hand-waving leftist environmentalist loon, I still think it is a BAD PRECEDENT to start dumping chemicals of any kind into the ocean for any reason. Imagine the outcry if I was dumping old cars out there!
Sorry, but I must dissagree with the findings of the report – the experiment *did* work!! The whole point was to transfer the carbon which was in a gasious solution in the water (I believe that is the correct way to explain it) to a solid form in the phytoplankton and this *did* occur. Just because it wound up in the stomach of a fish instead of the sea floor is not the issue. The transfer from a gas to a solid took place…which was the whole point. It is the gasious form of the carbon which is increasing in the atmosphere.
Think about that,
Jeff
The study may hint at why/how the CO2 lags temperature as seen in the Vostok Ice Cores. Climate warms by some mechanism (Milankovitch Cycles, solar irradience, whatever). Ocean area available for primary production increases as sea ice diminishes. Land area warms up as the seas remain relatively cool. The greater difference in temperatures increases winds. The winds facilitate upwelling in the oceans, bringing cold, nutrient-rich deep water to the surface. Plankton blooms soar (due perhaps helped by fertilization by stuff on the wind) using CO2 in the oceans (not the air). This facilitates increased population growth of the lower animal life, which in turn causes higher ocean fauna to flourish. The winds bring moisture-laden air to the land. Rain falls. Terrestrial plant flourish while erosion brings more minerals down from the mountains and out onto the shelf waters further helping the plankton blooms. All those critters on land and sea eating the flora and the lower form of fauna emit CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 in the atmosphere rises AFTER things warm up and primary production ramps up producing more life.
Somebody please point out the big flaw in that explanation. Otherwise, it works for me.
Crosspatch – you are correct. Nearly all AGW “wanna-believers” in fact have a bias against (or an envy of) development & growth, technological progress, corporations, capitalism, success, etc.
Branding CO2 to be an evil poison just fits too nicely into their belief systems. Accordingly, they chose not to question the validity and will always accept it to be a fact.
This is not to imply that these folks are in any way disingenuous. It is the nature of the human mind to readily accept information that supports strongly held beliefs and to just as readily filter out information that is contrary.
We who question AGW are also guilty. Don’t we get a much greater “serotonin rush” when the monthly global temperatures fall, thus validating our belief that it is more about the Sun and nature and not so much about CO2?
Fortunately, over time, wisdom prevails. It will prevail when those in middle, whose minds can be changed understand the truth. We all can thank Mr. Watts (and perhaps a very dormant Sun) for shortening the amount of time that this will take.
“Just because it wound up in the stomach of a fish instead of the sea floor is not the issue”
If it made it to the stomach of a fish, it will make it to the sea floor, albeit in different form.
I think the origin of all these newly concocted theories is the need for survival of the involved scientists: they propose a research to be made (whatsoever you can imagine…you got to live!), then they get, if well or appropriately concocted, the funding.
What happens afterwards….you see, just “roses, roses”
Thanks god there are people who really work, like, you know, Thomas Alva Edison, etc. and thanks god, and fortunately, those newly babyboomers scientists can not change what they thought they could, like climate or planet venus temperature. 🙂
For the posters who don’t get it. The experiment is a failure because the fish return almost all the CO2 back to the environment by burning the phytoplankton in their bodies. Just like humans burn wheat in their bodies.
Does this mean there is a biological aspect to life on earth? Could biological issues also affect the climate?
[Sarcasm off]
My understanding is Lohafex wanted to sell carbon offsets. It doesn’t matter if the experiment worked or not. It only matters if they can make a profit on it. If government mandates are in play, then it still may be profitable.
Don’t laugh when somebody proposes to kill off the copepods in order to save the planet.
Off topic but has anyone noticed the lack of coverage about the snow in Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas? Forcast of 8to14 in. along the entire pan handle with life threatening conditions for anyone caught out in this storm.They mention the snow in Denver but nothing about the other states or how rare this is given it’s spring.And as for the flooding in North Dakota I pray for those people but nothing is mentioed as to what caused it to begin.They have had a record snowfall season beating it by over 25 inches.Where is the coverage on this or lack there of?You know it just does’t go with AGW propaganda .
WakeUpMaggy (07:34:04) :
“I would think red dust blown into the oceans from deserts would be the natural version of this experiment.”
Yes, Of course!. And all the rivers that discharge on the 7 seas. Could you imagine how many times nature outnumbers fools’ experiments, and..of course nature uses ferric oxides instead of ferrous sulphate.
JeffK,
If the gaseous CO2 was converted to ‘solid’ carbonates and then eaten, the digestive acids would then redissolve the solid carbonates back to gaseous CO2. This would have been re-released back into the ocean.
The net effect, I believe, would be very little sequestration ending up on the ocean floor due to the iron experiment. Just a recycling back to dissolved ocean gas as it was in the beginning.
Jim
Roger Knights (07:02:35) : “But it’s great for the whales, ”
There is an academic article out there that raised concern about whale flatulence increasing methane in the atmosphere. The biomass of the large whales makes them a noticeable contributor of atmospheric CO2 through respiration and a carbon sink through lunch.
It appears to me that a robust cycle of life through primary and secondary production naturally leads to increased CO2. If one’s obsessive fear is of that minor gas and the only way to assuage that fear is to reduce it, the logical solution is to curtail the cycle of life.
Note: whale do not take CO2 out of the atmosphere, but do emit tonnes daily. Perhaps the AGW folks in Greenpeace would therefore advocate killing all the whales. (Paul Watson would violently oppose that notion.)
I like Dyson’s engineered trees better.
“If the gaseous CO2 was converted to ’solid’ carbonates and then eaten, the digestive acids would then redissolve the solid carbonates back to gaseous CO2”
Some, yes, but not all. Fish excrement contains a rather high concentration of calcium carbonate.
So the more dissolved calcium in the water, the more the fish make “gut rocks” that end up on the ocean floor.
The big discovery here is the find that copepods never ever poop….even bigger was the discovary that animals that eat copepods don’t ever poop either.
Some of the carbon ends up as flesh on the predators. If there is more food, the predators grow more quickly and/or there are more predators more quickly than without the fertilization. More waste from the predators ends up on the ocean floor more quickly. There should be some increased carbon sequestration, although it is harder for the researchers to quantify.
The research was a failure only in producing the result which the researchers expected. The result was more complex than they expected, but the researchers do seem to confirm that there was an increase of the small creatures of the food chain after their fertilization.
Symon (08:02:02) :
For the posters who don’t get it. The experiment is a failure because the fish return almost all the CO2 back to the environment by burning the phytoplankton in their bodies. Just like humans burn wheat in their bodies.
So living creatures are CO2 sinks?
Fine but what’s wrong about storing carbon in whales? 😉 A whale is a natural gadget that does a lot of work more efficiently than the devices envisioned by many geo-engineers. We can grow a few million of cute and lovely whales (and sharks) who will store the carbon for us. 🙂
Thank god. These geoengineering kooks scare the crap out of me.
Re: 3×2 (07:19:01) :
“More worrying is that as the hype gets shriller and the “schemes” get more insane eventually some real damage will be done.”
This worries me a great deal as well. The fact that the experiment failed only adds weight to the arguement that these clowns have no clue what they are doing and they will get us all killed.
These environmental fundamentalists are cursing the western world for the evil artifical tinkering of the atmosphere through CO2 emissions. Why is their tinkering any different? I’d argue its worse, because its a much more dramatic step-change perturbation to the climate system than a slow increase of life-benefiting gas over a long period of time. Their tinkering is the equivalent of poking an atomic pile in a nuclear reactor with a stick.
Someone, please stop these idiots now….
Ken Caldeira at Stanford! The hollowing out of Academia is more advanced than I’d feared.
NEWSFLASH…NEWSFLASH…NEWSFLASH…NEWSFLASH…
Scientists find complex system of unknown and unpredictable interactions behaves nothing like their models predict.
This kind of abject stupidity must be stopped in its tracks. In fact, these clowns should probably be thrown in jail. Have these so-called “scientists” not learned from experiments like introducing cane toads in Australia and other such idiotic concepts?
JeffK (07:46:22) :
Sorry, but I must dissagree with the findings of the report – the experiment *did* work!! The whole point was to transfer the carbon which was in a gasious solution in the water (I believe that is the correct way to explain it) to a solid form in the phytoplankton and this *did* occur. Just because it wound up in the stomach of a fish instead of the sea floor is not the issue. The transfer from a gas to a solid took place…which was the whole point. It is the gasious form of the carbon which is increasing in the atmosphere.
We must also consider the large amount of methane released in fish flatulencies, rotting of zooplankton and fish corpses, etc. 🙂
Crosspatch 06 55 08
has posted probably one of the most significant links ever to appear in this Blog. I followed it through to the UN paper which-if true-is dynamite and IMHO warrants a thread by itself so as not to hijack this one.
Here is the link right through to the UN Discussion document
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/032709_informationnote.pdf
it is indeed a UN document to reorder the world
Whilst everyone should scrutinise each line in order to see what we had always believed was an agenda behind the IPCC (they couldn’t seriously believe all their models could they) some highlights are
Page 6 item 17
page 8 item 25 and 27
page 9 item 34
page 10 item 37
page 14 item 60
Conclusions on p15
Any comments from anyone?
Tonyb
WakeUpMaggy (07:34:04):
I would think red dust blown into the oceans from deserts would be the natural version of this experiment.
Adolfo Giurfa (08:09:19):
WakeUpMaggy (07:34:04) :
“I would think red dust blown into the oceans from deserts would be the natural version of this experiment.”
Yes, Of course!. And all the rivers that discharge on the 7 seas. Could you imagine how many times nature outnumbers fools’ experiments, and..of course nature uses ferric oxides instead of ferrous sulphate.
Indeed… Red and black winds also drag virus which kill corals. Another experiment, although no natural, has been the discharges of detergents and other organic wastes to rivers, creeks, lagoons, etc. The final effect is similar. Something worrisome is the consumption of oxygen dissolved in water, which is consumed quickly by the excessive population of animals and aquatic plants causing an acceleration of the ecological succession.
Same effect as the one here?
“When deep water is vented, it brings not only CO2 to the surface but nutrients. Phytoplankton consume the extra nutrients and multiply.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/12/wind-shifts-may-stir-co2-from-antarctic-depths/
It also looks at plankton spikes, which means biomass increase. Hard to see how it could be all bad, more fish food = more fish.
As a carbon sequestration trial, it failed, yes. As a science experiment it had quite interesting and conclusive results. Apparantly this is a cheap way to stimulate the production of squid and fish in iron poor areas of the ocean. Not a trivial result, methinks.
When science looked for a replacement for ivory to make billard balls, they found a very useful explosive. A guy looking for chemical dyes found the replacement for billiard balls – plastic.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a novel, “The Deep Range”, about a future in which the oceans are the breadbasket of the world, with fertilized plankton farms (as mentioned in the New Scientist article), herds of whales bred for milk and meat, artificial upwellings of nutrients, etc. Hey, we fertilize the land, right?
Who would have guessed their computer models didn’t even factor in the food chain…
O/T See the report of the UN – world government: On FOX News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510937,00.html
“U.N. ‘Climate Change’ Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions to Form New World Economy”
I don’t see why this technique shouldn’t be used to increase fisheries (carefully). I don’t buy the argument that the “natural way” should never be messed with especially when it’s already been messed up, and I’m tired of barely catching any fish in the ocean whenever I try (very infrequently). I will defer to the wiser commentors on whether the experiment was or wasn’t a failure to sequester CO2.
So this is a solution to: ” … global warming could be harming whales, because it restricts their food supplies”
Whether fertilization is being done to reduce carbon dioxide or to feed the whales starved by global warming, it’s a success.
This kind of projects must be seen as pure window dressing.
Window dressing of the AGW/Climate Change Doctrine.
And if people ask themselves why a “respectable” organization like the UN should invent the AGW scare, here is the answer:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510937,00.html
Also take a look at http://green-agenda.com
This organization will spend every Dollar or Euro against us.
Just think of the Durban Meeting which is boycotted by most G20 countries, including Europe and the USA.
Shouldn’t that be “the best laid plankton” 😉
Trying to find a silver lining in the cloud.
On the bright side of this failed experiement, perhaps this website could be of great use:
http://www.squidoo.com/calamarirecipes
I would say the Cajun Style Calamari with Lime Vinaigrette recipe sounds really good, especially since squid should be more plentiful now.
;>P
I see more miracle solutions to come. Governator Schwarzenegger advocates we all become bodybuilders because “Id vill make you biggur end your muzzles vill seqvester de carburns!”
JeffK (07:46:22) :
“”Sorry, but I must dissagree with the findings of the report – the experiment *did* work!! The whole point was to transfer the carbon which was in a gasious solution in the water (I believe that is the correct way to explain it) to a solid form in the phytoplankton and this *did* occur. Just because it wound up in the stomach of a fish instead of the sea floor is not the issue. The transfer from a gas to a solid took place…which was the whole point. It is the gasious form of the carbon which is increasing in the atmosphere. Think about that, Jeff
Guess you don’t understand the food chain. The photoplankton ended up in the stomach of shrimp, which most of the carbon would have been digested and aspirated as CO2. The small remaining carbon was then ate by the next step up the food chain, digested, and most would have been released as CO2. And on and so forth, all the way up the food chain.
By the way this website sounds like a great way to deal with the remaining small amount of carbon that made it into the squids:
http://www.squidoo.com/calamarirecipes
P Folkens:
“Land area warms up as the seas remain relatively cool”..
Those winds will cool off rapidly the surface. Let us assume a volumetric heat capacity of land area as about 2 J cm-3 K-1 (silica is 1.547, aluminum 2.422).
Water VHC is 4.186 j and air is just 0.001297 j cm-3 K-1
So, water doubles heat capacity of surface (SIAL layer-silica aluminum-), air having 1542 times less heat capacity than surface will transfer rapidly that heat. Water, again, having 3227 times the heat capacity of air will conveniently hold heat for us humans not to die.
The question is: what does heat oceans? , TSI ?, Dr.Svalggardt says it doesn’ t changes, submarine volcanoes and tectonic displacements?
http://www.scielo.org.pe/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1561-08882005000200002&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=es
(you can get a good translation of this html using google toolbar)
a mix of all these?.
John Silver (22:51:20) (In the sahara dusts post):
“Hungry shrimp eat climate change experiment”
So it would be good to know commercial shrimps’ formula:
K: 0.9%
P: 0.24%
N: 0.9%
Mg: 0.018%
Fe:0.014%
And if you cut all four legs off bullfrogs, and command them to jump; you will discover that they have all become stone deaf, and not a single one will jump on command.
Yes the experiment was a failure; a failure of data analysis by brain dead researchers; an attribute which seems to be somewhat prevalent in “climate science”.
It is well known that the entire ocean food chain is thoroughly messed up by human overfishing, without understanding the full interractions of the various levels in the chain (I’m quite sure I don’t understand them).
But everybody understands that phytoplankton take up CO2, and that zooplankton eat up the phytos, and move the carbon up the food chain.
I’ve seen reports that the decks of the Titanic wreck are littered with the dea skeletons of zooplankton; which gorged themselves into starvation, and died to rain down on the decks. This has all happened since the first expedition to the wreck was made many years ago; there wasn’t any zooplankton rain back then.
But since then, fisherfolks have depleted not only the game fish species, but also the bait fishes; using them for fertilizer, or cat food, or the Omega-3 snake oil fad. The result is that phyto and zooplankton are totally out of balance because of the disrutions in the upper food chain.
I would say that the experiment was a resounding success; and agree that the approach may have been a bit like a bull in a china shop, so the biologists need to go back to the blackboard, and do some more planning to get the dosages right, and at the same time work on correcting the upper chain disruption.
Copepod skeletons are just as good CO2 repositories as rotting phytoplankton; probably even better. Get some of that CO2 into some bony fishes, and you could make real progress.
Of course the whole idea of carbon sequestration is insane anyway; for CARBON read OXYGEN sequestration. That we don’t need, and our plant friends can use all the carbon they can get their twigs on.
This process or something along those lines could be a valuable tool in restoring ocean fisheries. There’s an article in SCIENCE (yesterday) about the recovery of school fishes (like bait fish). Evidently there’s a critical mass “tipping point”.
George
CodeTech (07:45:27) :
“ Imagine the outcry if I was dumping old cars out there!”
The sea floor off of the Gulf Coast is very poor for fishing. That is because most of the bottom is sand and will not physically support plant life. Over the years, commercial fisherman (and some recreational) have dumped cars to create artificial fishing reefs. The exact locations are jealously guarded secrets because if you know where to find them you can “loot” the other person’s fish.
But wait! There’s more!
Here is a picture of the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany being sunk to create an artificial reef off Florida’s Gulf Coast:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Oriskany_sinking.jpg
In a previous life: I has a friend that was in the business of making fish reefs. Instead of using cars, he made three sided pyramids, about 6 feet high with 6 inch holes cut in the sides. They were weighted so that the would stay put. The idea was that the smaller fish could hide from predators inside the pyramids. Fisherman paid him to drop these and within six weeks or so the change in the profile due to vegetation growth was noticeable (on the fisherman’s “sonar “fish finder”). He had a pretty good market because this was a lot cheaper and easier than dropping cars out there.
I was working in the Jacksonville FL shipyard and they had a project paid for by the government. They had a left over WW II floating dry dock and they were preparing it for an artificial reef. They took out the asbestos insulation and cleaned the oil tanks, etc. The they took it out off the coast and sank it.
As for the thesis of the oricinal post. I agree with Pamela Grey. The science involved is of interest. I belikeve that the information received from a properly run experiment would have been of value. And the idea of this measely amount of iron making a difference is laughable.
It’s just too bad that the whole thing was wrapped in AGW instead of being a straight forward experiment.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
This is re post from earlier plus update , please read and comment-or can we have a separate thread please?
Crosspatch 06 55 08
has posted probably one of the most significant links ever to appear in this Blog. I followed it through to the UN paper which-if true-is dynamite and IMHO warrants a thread by itself so as not to hijack this one.
Here is the link right through to the UN Discussion document
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/032709_informationnote.pdf
it is indeed a UN document to reorder the world
Whilst everyone should scrutinise each line in order to see what we had always believed was an agenda behind the IPCC (they couldn’t seriously believe all their models could they) some highlights are
Page 6 item 17
page 8 item 25 and 27
page 9 item 34
page 10 item 37
page 14 item 60
Conclusions on p15
Any comments from anyone?
update;
This is the ad hoc working group composition and its aims, that have created the UN report above.
http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2008/awg6/eng/08.pdf
These are the key chairs
harald Dovland Norway –chair minister for environment http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-180526631.html
Mam Konate Mail Vice chair http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop11/enbots/enbots1704e.html
Chan Woo-kim Republic of korea http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:py3_vPi45-wJ:www.unescap.org/esd/environment/mced/singg/documents/Programme_SINGG_Final.pdf+chan-woo+kim+republic+of+korea&cd=18&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
Ms Christiana Figueres Costa rica http://figueresonline.com/
Nuno Lacasta Portugal http://www.wcl.american.edu/environment/lacasta.cfm
Brian smith new zealand (also a bryan Smith-same person?
Marcelo Rocha Brazil http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file50347.pdf
Talking about carbon markets and here
http://www.iisd.ca/vol12/enb12378e.html
Any comments from anyone?
Tonyb
Hey now, remember the abiotic oil experiment that actually made light sweet crude out of iron and calcium carbonate?
@ Jon Jewett (10:31:36) :
I went to Oahu last fall. The ocean floor off Wikkiki is the same-very flat with few place for fish to nest. I took a submarine tour and we only saw sea life around various artificial reefs and other items deliberately sunk there, such as old cargo ships and a twin-engine airplane.
I also seem to recall reading a ‘Mark Trail’ Sunday comic in my childhood about sinking old cars to create artificial reefs.
TonyB,
After reading the relevant passages you posted, I have a few comments:
The UN climate proposals are more stringent than the changes imposed on the defeated nations following WWII, and they are aimed directly at the U.S. and the West. They are hostile, and they are based on fraudulent science as a means to an end.
Following the end of WWII the Soviets expropriated not only massive amounts of industrial equipment from Germany, but also tens of thousands of highly educated engineers and scientists, and made them slaves of the Russian state. Almost none of those individuals were ever released or repatriated. The immediate result was the detonation of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, less than one year after the war ended. Russia’s first hydrogen bomb test occurred only a matter of months after the first U.S. test.
[The West, despite what is portrayed in history books, took similar actions. For example, the giant cranes and gantrys lining Long Beach harbor were dismantled in Germany at the end of the war and moved to California; taken with no compensation as the spoils of war.]
The UN now demands nothing less than the complete surrender of the West to its version of world socialism, with the UN as world dictator. The spoils of this undeclared war are in the posted documents; industry will be forcibly relocated to other countries, with no compensation. Taxes will be raised as high as necessary to enable this theft — all in the name of “combating climate change.”
It is all there in the UN documents. IMHO, simply evicting the UN from the host country is completely inadequate. The UN is the enemy. They are extremely hostile, and must be destroyed. It is quite clearly them or us.
It should be pointed out that the latest move in this concerted effort is toward a single world currency. Why? Because along with a world monetary system, there must also be a world police force to prosecute financial crimes, and a world court to adjudicate financial crimes. Note that financial “crimes” were high on the list of Soviet offenses committed by the kulaks [the Russian middle class, which was forcibly exterminated].
Climate alarmism is just part and parcel of the deliberate move toward a dictatorial world government. It is simply a means to an end, as is the demand for a world currency. And in the approaching world government, there will be zero sympathy for Western values, because those involved in the UN agenda do not possess Western values.
I desperately want to be wrong about this.
But I am not wrong. Look, and you will see it happening.
O/T — but do I see something that might just turn out to be a sunspot?
Smokey
e UN is the enemy, and must be destroyed. It is quite clearly them or us.”
But. tell me, who is behind this?, is it a NGO, a “secret society” like Hitler’ s Thule Society, or who/what else?
Tony,
You forgot Agenda 21.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21
http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/index.htm
“Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.”
Note how they have planned to act on such a vast level without asking any population for approval. Aren’t agendas and manifestos supposed to be presented by representative politicians to a voting public instead of being crafted by faceless unelected bureaucrats who make the decisions for everyone?
Smokey,
You are correct. The UN is the enemy of democracies everywhere. It has become a refuge of dictators, socialists, ecomaniacal utopianists, and scoundrels. The hundreds of UN scandals seem to have taught us nothing. When they are put down, we will be well rid of them.
It seems that of all world leaders, only Vaclav Klaus has their true measure.
Smokey
Thanks for taking the time to read this. We could see the models and evidence from the IPCC did not match up with each other, and some are so slanted you must wonder how they got past peer review.
I have always been reluctant to accept the IPCC/UN had an agenda, but this document clearly describes the world order they seek to put in place through scaring everyone with tales of catastrophic climate change
“H.L.Mencken wrote:The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Please could other people read this important document. Sorry to go off thread
TonyB
It may be time to revive a plan I penciled up when Richard Branson offered a big prize for carbon sequestration ideas last year. We assemble a fleet of heavy duty ocean going tugboats and send them out to the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. When icebergs calve off the ice sheets the tugs move in, latch on, and tow them posthaste to coastal areas adjacent to the worlds deserts. This is already being done in the North Atlantic to move the bergs out of the shipping lanes, but some engineering will be required to perfect the technique for long hauls. The bergs would be beached on the coasts and the melt water collected and piped out to the desert to irrigate new plant growth. Since we want to tie up the carbon for long time, I’m thinking Sequoias or California Redwoods genetically modified for desert climate and faster growth might be the ticket, but plant selection is something that needs more analysis, Theoretically the melt water could be diverted for potable water or chilled water for residential or commercial uses before proceeding to the irrigation plan. If some of the plant mix is food or biofuel types we may be able to develop a market for the bergs, but if the weather persists as it has recently we may end up having to drill and blast to keep the flow of bergs going, Most of the technology required for the plan already exists, although realtime access to ocean surface currents would facilitate the speed and economy of delivering the bergs. Admittedly I’d had a few beers when I came up with this, so I can’t warranty that I’ve covered all the bases, but hey, what could possibly go wrong?!
I think we should just vote out those bums at the UN … oh, wait … we never elected them in the first place!
Off topic:
I just passed by http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
At a first glance it looked like the ice has started to melt rapidly everywhere and then I thought it was sensor problems again sending weird data.
But the colors where correct. It looks like they have changed all colors so that anything but 100% ice coverage cause a significant color change and looks like rapid melting.
Now if you are into the conspiraty bussiness one could thing that change was made to make it look like arctic is melting faster and that anything but 100% is abnormal…
But I am not.
I do think though that the color change gives the wrong impression of the ice status in arctic. For an unexperienced eye it looks like the ice is even breaking up during the winter. Exactly 100% ice coverage is not the normal status all over arctic but one could be fooled to think that with the new colors.
” Dave Wendt (11:30:06) ”
I have an easier method …
Mine coal. Burn it. Plant trees that absorb the CO2 from the burned coal and turn it to cellulose. Make paper. Use the paper for books, magazines, and newspapers. When done with the paper, turn it into a slurry and pack it into old coal mines. There … carbon placed right back where it came from.
It will never be adopted because there is no way to make a bazillion dollars off ot it. Simple, and effective, yet utterly impossible. You way has potential, Dave. It requires “a fleet of ocean going tugboats” which means a Congressman has to issue a contract to someone to build them and that makes for great opportunities to sell the contract to the highest donating competitor … and I am sure that fleet of tugboats would be running on … what? … cold fusion?
Jon Jewett (10:31:36) :
“…As for the thesis of the original post. I agree with Pamela Grey. The science involved is of interest. I belikeve that the information received from a properly run experiment would have been of value. And the idea of this measely amount of iron making a difference is laughable.”
I guess, to me, the ultimate question is: for each individual phytoplankton, how much of it’s mass is from the iron dumped overboard, how much is from the CO2 absorbed & how much is from other minerals involved in the growth process?
Still, IMHO, the only way this experiment would have been a failure is if the bloom did not occur. However, how ultimately effective it was on this scale may not be that much but it is still an interesting idea…but it is starving (or should I say, robbing food from) the trees 😉
Jeff
Ocean fish stocks cycle with oceanic oscillations, not with overfishing records. The mismatch has been discovered and corrected. I know, it seems like overfishing would be the reason for decreased fish counts, but when long term records were compared, the correlation of one or two data points between fish stocks and fish take that fed the overfishing hype disappeared.
The above study simply demonstrates what happens on a larger scale in the natural cycle. On a larger scale (as in ocean wide and on occasion, world wide), there is enough plankton floating around to spare. Not all of it gets eaten. The dead plankton, along with the CO2 it used and converted to sugar, sinks to the bottom of the ocean. It works just like the study thought it might. It just only works that way when nature sets up the complex conditions.
Let’s hope the AGW’s don’t screw the 30 to 60 year cycle up by attempting to reduce CO2 during the exact moment in time that it needs to be at its highest.
“But. tell me, who is behind this?, is it a NGO, a “secret society” like Hitler’ s Thule Society, or who/what else?”
There is no secret society or conspiracy. It’s just cronyism, idealism, political correctness and too much cocaine.
That is simple! All the little otherwise powerless countries have realized that if they work en mass on a common agenda, they can break the back of the powerful industrial nations and skim a few trillion dollars off the top for themselves while they are at it. It is like a mob each moving to serve their own ends but having little if any central control. Over time its own bureaucracy will develop that control and common agenda, but it is simply an alliance of convenience.
The mistake people make, is to try to put a single face on a “supposed conspiracy” when a large number of independent actors working toward mutually beneficial goals accomplishes the same things. It is simply an alliance of convenience that what is of benefit to Chad is probably also of benefit to Bangladesh, or Guatemala etc.
Like an army of used car salesmen they are each pursuing their own interests, but are ready to jump on any available “sales tool” that they can twist to their own benefit.
They also serve as useful fools to be manipulated by the industrial nations from time to time, to serve their own ends, and provide cover for actions that would not be politically expedient otherwise.
Just like the League of Nations, that organization only exists because they are being subsidized by the major industrial nations. They have no intrinsic power, authority, or funding that we (the major nations) to not give them.
As soon as the 2 or 3 largest contributors pull the plug they will fold like a house of cards, but it is not “politically correct” for us and other major nations to fold our hand and go home.
They have no power without the influence and muscle of the major nations. In every case since the 1950’s the only effective enforcement actions were underwritten and almost totally the result of major nations like the U.S. UK, France, Australia, Canada etc. with out their forces their “peace keeping missions” are jokes militarily, and their aid efforts would evaporate without the input of the major contributors.
Just look at the troop strength contributions to the major efforts or who pays the tab for food and medical aid given out under U.N. auspices. The same nations names are always at the top of the list.
Larry
Back when I was studying geography, chemistry and physics at high school we were supposed to know the chemical make up of a Welsh stream, or how river deltas develop, or imagine a future world called a Metropolis. You know, things that made us use our brains, heightened our imaginations, made us innovative. That was in the late 80s.
This is the sorry dumbed down state of science in the UK today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7967600.stm
GCSE Science (Edexcel, 2006)
Many people observe the stars using
A) A telescope B) A microscope C) An X-Ray tube D) A synthesiser
GCSE Biology (AQA 2008)
When we sweat water leaves the body through…
A) Kidneys B) Liver C) Lungs D) Skin
Questions like these were what we were expected to answer in primary school. Now it is GCSE level, to create a generation of useful idiots.
Pamela Gray (11:49:57) :
Ocean fish stocks cycle with oceanic oscillations, not with overfishing records. The mismatch has been discovered and corrected
Absolutely right!…However the return of species(*) which migrated to colder and deeper waters when sea was warmer-talking about SA west coast- ( during 1998 el nino and the years after) are now being explained as a consequence of fishing restriction policies adopted.
You are right because it does not matter how big for our dimensional human standards could seem, what we are doing it is but nothing, compared to what natures does.
(*) among these: sea bass, flounder fishes,etc
Even native Americans got this wrong. As they witnessed, within a little more than a generation, fish stocks decreasing while agricultural and fishing practices increased, they wrongly assumed that there was causation. Stop flood irrigation. Close ditches. Encase water. Blow up dams. Keep the water in the rivers. Stop fishing.
So now salmon have lost their spawning ground (the side streams that farmers used for irrigation ditches. The water table has decreased (because flood irrigation is no longer allowed) which has starved the lower rivers of mineral rich ground water that seeps back out of the ground and into the river at lower elevations. And now the upper valleys are no longer fish nurseries.
So let’s get back to the feast or famine cycle of mother nature. We must adapt to the fact that cyclically, salmon populations will decrease and we will be forced to eat something else. The Indians were forced to eat something else, they just didn’t live long enough to pass on the knowledge of natural cycles (and didn’t have the understanding of why the cycle occurs) to the next generation. Pull off the fish screens from irrigation ditches. Get rid of sprinklers and go back to flood irrigation. Let the rivers go dry (they are supposed to do that) as the water seeps down into the water table to pick up needed minerals. Adapt to the long cycles of nature.
crosspatch (11:45:00) :
and I am sure that fleet of tugboats would be running on … what? … cold fusion?
You seem to forget that plans to save the planet are exempt from cost- benefit analysis, see for instance biofuels, cap and trade, wind and solar power,etc.. But seriously, I was remiss in failing to append a [sarc] to my comment. I keep forgetting that scientific types tend to lack my own well developed sense of irony. While my plan may have more potential for addressing the notion of removing CO2 from the atmosphere than anything proposed by Algore and his UN buddies, it is still essentially a boondoggle trying to spend large amounts of money to solve a problem is almost certainly nonexistent.
Just look at the European Commission and imagine how bad it must be at the UN which has zero accountability and whose representatives are immune from prosecution (as are its thieving, looting, raping, smuggling soldiers).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1494167/Cocaine-found-at-Brussels-parliament.html
The claims of drug abuse at the European Parliament complex was greeted with derision by Nigel Farage, an MEP for the United Kingdom Independence Party. He said: “Given the stultifying boredom of committee work in Brussels, it is hardly surprising. But it could explain the decisions they come up with.”
OT – Watts up with Climate Audit? I can’t get there.
Just wait some lefty will respond and use the mantra of all left leaning political and economics and science issues , “It just was not big enough” had we used 10,000 times the amount we would succeed. They are never wrong, just not enough political will, material, money, participation, etc for the plan.
oops Should have read the article closer it was already in there…
“You would have to keep doing it over, and if you wanted to have a big impact ”
Want another example, the US Administration’s approach to the current recession. The reason the recession has not ended yet is because we have not SPENT enough on STIMULUS and rescues and BAILOUTS yet.
Mark my words there will be a Son of TARP (either in the budget or on the side), then a Bride of Stimulus before next year. Also they are going to let Cap and Trade die and instead have increased the EPA budget by 10 Billion over two years for Clean Air Act enforcment now that CO2 is a danger. This will bring in the 15 Billion in PTC via fines they need for Wind/Solar and will not rely on the Budget process.
These are fool’ s experiments, if instead of the seas and all its fantastic volume we were to fertilize, more humbly, say a pool in our backyard we would do it mainly with magnesium, to promote chlorophyll.
Again, fortunately, those fools can not do any harm to their “Gaia” and…I suspect Gaia itself is waiting for them to fertilze “her” with their corpses.
The original idea was to exploit the fact that large patches of the ocean are “deserts”. That is, there is insufficient iron to support the bottom of the food chain. No plankton – no fish. So where exactly did they perform this experiment? And where did those fish come from?
Anyway, if the idea was to suck CO2 out of the air and store it didn’t this work? It is now fish flesh or fish poop.
The other idea was to pick a “desert” over the abysmal plain so that when stuff sank it stayed sunk for thousands of years.
The AGW crowd has been trying to discredit this idea from the git go. Not that I think that excess CO2 is a problem because negative feedback cycles correct for the small additions being made by mankind.
–Mike Ramsey
TonyB and Smokey,
I have assumed for some considerable time that there is a nefariousl political agenda behind all this.
However, my assumption has been about it being *at the expense of* the developing world. Preventing them from “catching up”, controlling them in an imperialist sense. After all, it’s only the rich nations that have any chance at all of producing significant energy from alternative sources.
So now do I need to revise my viewpoint? If so, why does the AGW scam have such devoted support among the rich and famous, and the big corporates such as General Electric, who have such a big stake in wind and solar, etc?
Oh those bastards! The scientific and world community stopped the ship back in January but they did it again under the press radar in early March. Those rogue scientists must be tripped of their jobs for doing grand-scale experiments with the planet.
They can’t have it both ways. They say we have too much nitrogen flowing out of farmland into the ocean causing blooms of algae which in turn suck the oxygen out of the water (really it is phosphorous which causes the bloom but they want to blame nitrogen, so be it).
So now they go around fertilizing the ocean in a different manner to cause a bloom (which probably also oxygen depletes the water) and it is good?
So when THEY do it, it is good … when WE do it, it is bad.
But what they are probably doing by dumping all that iron in there is making the water locally a little less basic, this allows nutrients to flow though the cell walls easier (same reason you adjust pH in soil) allowing it to more easily take up available nutrients. Or you could just increase the acidity locally by bubbling something like … i dunno … maybe CO2 … into the water and do the same thing. It would be interesting to hook up a CO2 bubbler and see what impact it has. Bet that would cause an algae bloom, too. The ocean is pretty basic. It is sort of like a lime solution. Making it a bit more acidic locally probably allows plankton to absorb nutrients much more efficiently.
Oh well, we tried!
http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=4027314&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/
Is anyone else extremely irritated with the non stop advertising and promotion of “Earth Hour”… Yet every ad and commercial and news story doesn’t mention ANY environmental problems.. Everything just talks in a NON SCIENTIFIC way about “climate change”. Why are people so stupid and unable to think for themselves…. uGGGGHHH so frustrated I don’t know what to do.
New use for all the vacant California backyard pools. Algae beds.
By the way, may I ask everybody here to support Earth Hour 🙂
I really mean it. Not for the daft climate change reasons, but to highlight that we do need to conserve energy and be as efficient as possible with our use of energy.
We’ve got a world that is, despite this recession, always developing. More and more are coming out of poverty and demanding use of electricity. The demand is growing while supply has problems because of partisan politics, activism and limited resources. This problem isn’t going to go away until we come up with a source of energy to replace everything we rely on today so we need to conserve energy whenever possible. Spreading out our use buys us time.
This is all politicians have needed to say to us, but instead they’ve chosen scare tactics and a method of maximising profits (carbon trading) from the dying breath of the carbon era.
So when someone asks you did you support Earth Hour, say yes and tell them your realistic reason for doing so while reminding them you don’t believe in the bogus reasons. Good idea for spreading critical thinking?
Ryan C:
This will make you happy: 🙂
Progressive Governance Conference and Summit
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/27/biden-visits-chile-for-pr_n_179927.html
Dear Anthony: For your attention :
http://pgc09.wordpress.com/
A perfect example of what I call “one dimensional chess” with a two dimensional board. You can always win if the other player is not allowed to respond.
I would like to support earth hour, but the WWF is putting it on and if you read their writeup about it, all it talks about is global warming. No mention of ANY REAL ENVIRONMENTAL problems… Maybe I need to start my own Earth Hour that is aimed at pollution and wasting resources. I refuse to stand up for such a politically motivated pile of BS. As much as it hurts the environmental side of me.. I plan on running my pickup truck on idle in the driveway and turning on every appliance and light in my house.
@ Aron,
I understand your wanting to support Earth Hour, but I just saw a post on a Hodar Report and frankly, I’m sympathetic to this fellow’s point.
It seems much of environmentalism has been hijacked by the anti-capitalism left. Look at the satellite photo of the nighttime division line between backward North Korea and capitalist, prosperous, fossil-fuel burning South Korea.
I’m turning the lights on, cranking up the furnace and watching my big screen TV on Saturday night. I’m all for energy conservation, but I object to legitimate concerns about energy and pollution being used to drive us into darkness and guilt.
O/T For all you off topic “UN” trash-talking folks, here is what you are looking for:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EDBLICKRANT.pdf
First few lines are:
United Nations politicians, while admitting their lack of evidence, gave birth and nurtured the fraud of Anthropogenic Global Warming (APG). Their Malthusian purpose is to frighten people into accepting the UN as the “centerpiece of democratic global governance” and let the UN, ration our fossil fuel.
Note, it is stored as Ed Blick’s rant: Enjoy!
If this can be used to increase the potential food that the ocean could yeild, where is the problem?
Tax fisheries, use the tax money to help increase their catch, lowering the cost of food in the market while improving the fisherman’s profitability. Everyone wins! Am I wrong here?
Apparently OT, but…
“Maybe six tons in 300 sq. km. was too much? They really need to do the experiment on a curve varying levels of iron. There might well be a lower threshold in which results may be more favorable.“–Kevin P. (07:42:32)
Yeah. Like zero, maybe.
The major point is: These morons didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. They assumed they did, sure. But there was no opportunity for oversight beforehand, including pilot scale tests. They just dumped the stuff, using the Earth as their very own petrie dish. They are idiots driven by GWeed.
Aron, I’m supporting Human Achievement Hour. I will have every light and motor on, running the dishwasher, cars, etc. for that hour.
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/24/celebrate-human-achievement-hour/
So lets see. The worlds oceans are 361M km^2 and six tonnes of iron treats 300 km^2 every fortnight. So that’s just 187,720,000 tonnes of iron a year and we’re done.
How much co2 gets produced obtaining that amount of iron and delivering it to the ocean?
Doh! Back to the scribbling pad guys.
Surely this needs experimental proof? We need numbers not assertions. I bet most of that extra carbon is still swimming around in the sea. Just how much methane and CO2 do you discharge compared with the weight of solid and liquid excrement you generate from your food? Why are fish any different? And don’t forget the cycle keeps turning with the CO2 they do emit getting reabsorbed by phytoplankton in the sunlight.
And what happens to the iron? Does it get recycled and what effects does it have on the way around?
In my opinion the only legitimate reason to support earth hour is to support dark skies for astronomers.
Larry
Aron: It would be better to remove the nihilist ecomaniacs who will find reasons to cause problems with any new source of energy. They want us dead, they are tired of you plebians causing traffic jams on their freeways.
Pamela Gray (11:49:57) :
Ocean fish stocks cycle with oceanic oscillations, not with overfishing records. The mismatch has been discovered and corrected. I know, it seems like overfishing would be the reason for decreased fish counts, but when long term records were compared, the correlation of one or two data points between fish stocks and fish take that fed the overfishing hype disappeared.
Pamela, can you point us to a link on this?
Well, this experiment worked really well when we modeled it.
With apologies to the dignity and scholarly integrity of the assembled company:
http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=3784381
Oh, and Sam the Skeptic, I’ve also noticed that plage coming around at the same latitude as the last one (which sure looked like a speck for a few hours on the 21st!) This new one made a nice bright spot on the limb on the EIT 195A GIF (which I was watching last night, because Spaceweather was pointing to a “proto-sunspot” that looked an awful lot like the plage of earlier in the week — and was.).
Steve Schapel
Your question is valid. I realise that posters can write whatever they like (within the bounds adjudicated by the moderator) however sometimes I feel the political rhetoric only disrupts from the analysis and detracts those – of the ‘left’ – who are questioning the CAGW hypothesis. The argument I often hear from ‘believers’ is that those responsible for propagating ‘denial’ are powerful right wing elites with an economic and social agenda, but undeniably every government – right, left, up, down – has an agenda just as every individual does. There are plenty of blogs off all ideological persuasions where such issues can be debated, I’m just not sure whether by using WUWT as such a medium, those of us skeptical of the science are not further concretising the minds of warmists and frightening away honest seekers.
OT: Editors: Suggestion for new topic:
The UN Makes it Official: Global Warming Hysteria Is All About Redistributing Wealth
http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/03/27/sheppard_global_warming_un/
The UN paper (framework convention on climate change):
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/032709_informationnote.pdf
Smokey (11:03:14) :
TonyB,
“After reading the relevant passages you posted, I have a few comments:
The UN climate proposals are more stringent than the changes imposed on the defeated nations following WWII, and they are aimed directly at the U.S. and the West. They are hostile, and they are based on fraudulent science as a means to an end.
Following the end of WWII the Soviets expropriated not only massive amounts of industrial equipment from Germany, but also tens of thousands of highly educated engineers and scientists, and made them slaves of the Russian state. Almost none of those individuals were ever released or repatriated. The immediate result was the detonation of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, less than one year after the war ended. Russia’s first hydrogen bomb test occurred only a matter of months after the first U.S. test.
[The West, despite what is portrayed in history books, took similar actions. For example, the giant cranes and gantrys lining Long Beach harbor were dismantled in Germany at the end of the war and moved to California; taken with no compensation as the spoils of war.]
The UN now demands nothing less than the complete surrender of the West to its version of world socialism, with the UN as world dictator. The spoils of this undeclared war are in the posted documents; industry will be forcibly relocated to other countries, with no compensation. Taxes will be raised as high as necessary to enable this theft — all in the name of “combating climate change.”
It is all there in the UN documents. IMHO, simply evicting the UN from the host country is completely inadequate. The UN is the enemy. They are extremely hostile, and must be destroyed. It is quite clearly them or us.
It should be pointed out that the latest move in this concerted effort is toward a single world currency. Why? Because along with a world monetary system, there must also be a world police force to prosecute financial crimes, and a world court to adjudicate financial crimes. Note that financial “crimes” were high on the list of Soviet offenses committed by the kulaks [the Russian middle class, which was forcibly exterminated].
Climate alarmism is just part and parcel of the deliberate move toward a dictatorial world government. It is simply a means to an end, as is the demand for a world currency. And in the approaching world government, there will be zero sympathy for Western values, because those involved in the UN agenda do not possess Western values.
I desperately want to be wrong about this.
But I am not wrong. Look, and you will see it happening”.
Smokey,
You hit the nail on the head again.
For anyone with questions, read this:
http://green-agenda.com
and realise that Obama is serving the UN goals:
from http://tbirdnow.mee.nu/the_hitler_youth_updated
March 27, 2009
The Hitler Youth Updated
Dana Mathewson
Obama’s Americorps (translation: Hitler Youth Updated) seems to be supported by the loons in Congress, who don’t seem to even understand the implications. Here’s a conservative paper in San Francisco (yes, such a thing does exist) sounding the alarm:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/Expanded-Americorps-has-stench-of-authoritarianism-41869152.html
This is not funny anymore.
Aron (13:40:35):
So when someone asks you did you support Earth Hour, say yes and tell them your realistic reason for doing so while reminding them you don’t believe in the bogus reasons.
Though I’m sincere and won’t support Earth’s Hour simulation, that’s exactly what I told my granddaughter’s teacher this morning.
Oops! Assuming that comment escapes from moderation, is there any way to substitute this cleaner link for that cluttered one?
http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2009/3/27/128826665430442946.jpg
Aron (13:40:35) :
I will be participating in earth hour by turning on every light I own, inside and out, just like last year… But only for an hour.
I conserve the rest of the year because it makes economic sense. And I’m an avid environmentalist. Not the kind you think of when I use that word, the kind that really matters, one who uses and appreciates and deeply understands nature. So when someone asks me, did I support earth hour, yes, I did it the best way possible, to highlight the erroneous and preposterous “solutions” the other “environmentalists” would push upon us.
Until we recognize and confront the green agenda, the result will be economic decline, and its associated devastation of the environment, the concept the environmentalists purportedly support. We can’t let them be wrong 1000 times in a row, the earth and our society is far too valuable.
I urge everyone to do their part, for one hour, to show your opposition to the folly of the green agenda.
There are several problems with this experiment. Firrstly, fertilization might stimulate the growth of toxic algae, and this might result in a mass kill of animals higher up in the food chain. Secondly, there would be a rapid deletion of silicates that are required by the diatoms and this would limit the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the water.
The simple solutions to these problems would to bring starter cultures of good alga and a tanker with sodium silicate aka water glass, and release these with the iron.
The bottom of the ocean is relentlessly oxidising. That is why deep sea muds are red. The oxygen minimum is at about 400 metres, part way down the continential slope. To bury carbon there, you have to have a reasonably fast rate of sedimentation.
Seeing the effect they got for six tonnes of dissolved iron (iron chloride?), it could be worthwhile to enhance commercial fisheries. I wouldn’t give up on it.
“If the gaseous CO2 was converted to ’solid’ carbonates and then eaten, the digestive acids would then redissolve the solid carbonates back to gaseous CO2″
Fish that have pharyngeal teeth do not have a true stomach, nor do they use acid in digestion. Only about half of fish species have acid stomach acid, I believe the rule of thumb is that small saltwater herbivorous don’t have stomach acid and predators do. pointy teeth=stomach acid. This does not apply to the large grazers, like whale sharks, who did the carnivore/omnivore/herbivour evolution route.
The fish that eat organisms with a calcium carbonate exoskeleton generally don’t have stomach acid, I believe, but it has been a long time since I did fish biochemistry. Here are a couple of links:-
General fish digestion and pH
http://books.google.com/books?id=tUxFmfs1mlkC&pg=PA187&lpg=PA187&dq=fish+herbivores+stomach+pH&source=bl&ots=mx2XfoXcb2&sig=aV3cEuNfjNqZsEYYP1RXY9zFqcQ&hl=en&ei=22zNSeSuLJmEtAP2kbShAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result
“Fishes, possessing morphological adaptations for trituration, ingested quantities of calcium carbonate material and did not contain gastric acidity low enough to lyse algal cell wells.”
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119571157/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Plankton!
Turning off lights for one hour will not cause power plants to
shut down. It is however, a good indicator of your neighbors
intelligence!
Anybody who calls this experiment a failure has never run a real experiment. This isn’t high school where someone is replicating an experiment that has been done a thousand times before with a known expected outcome. You do a real experiment because you don’t know the outcome.
I did a great experiment in an industrial lab to increase the life of our widget. I had a very good, convincing rational as to why my change was going to make the product last much longer. The result was the shortest lived widget we ever made. This was not a failure! From this and other experiments, we learned what the critical parameter was that determined life for our product. We weren’t trying to make a thousand widgets. We were running an experiment to learn something and we did. Success!
This experiment proved the scientists right. Iron is the critical element lacking in that part of the ocean for abundant life. If one of the hoped for benefits was not as good as hoped, does not mean that the experiment was a failure. It was a great successful experiment and could lead to increased fishing grounds.
If you think this was a failure, I suggest you go back to your computer modeling and complain about how the real world is providing bad data that doesn’t agree with your model. I would also note that people were fighting against this experiment. The only rational I can see for opposing it, was it would not result in devastated economies or poor people dying of malnutrition while food is burned for fuel. Had this experiment proved to cause a huge amount of carbon sequestration, it was obvious that it was also going to provide a lot of food. The usual suspects were against it.
David Archibald (16:08:11) :
David, so nice to see you here, I’ve read a lot of your work. Could you please expound on the oxygen minimum at 400m? Does this mean (aside from the obvious strict sense) that oxygen is higher at both closer to surface, and higher at greater than this depth? Do you have any charts on the subject to get a gauge of relative levels by depth, and what it might mean for biological activity? I would guess this varies around the world depending on ocean currents and mixing. Sounds like an interesting subject that the researchers might have considered in their, um, eh… model?
Thanks, Mike S.
David Archibald (16:08:11) :
“The bottom of the ocean is relentlessly oxidising. That is why deep sea muds are red. The oxygen minimum is at about 400 metres, part way down the continential slope. To bury carbon there, you have to have a reasonably fast rate of sedimentation.
Seeing the effect they got for six tonnes of dissolved iron (iron chloride?), it could be worthwhile to enhance commercial fisheries. I wouldn’t give up on it”.
Yes, marvelous, now we can fish with magnets instead of hooks and nets!
OT: bsneath wrote:
“We who question AGW are also guilty. Don’t we get a much greater “serotonin rush” when the monthly global temperatures fall, …”
BTW, how’s March shaping up–it would be convenient (and consistent with the roguishness of the Pranksters Above) if it (and succeeding months) were distinctly cooler than normal.
Adolfo Giurfa (11:10:49)
But. tell me, who is behind this?, is it a NGO, a “secret society” like Hitler’ s Thule Society, or who/what else?.
IMO It’s the result of an ideology or affiliation of ideologies which all have a common root belief that the Earth is overpopulated and threatened by mankind. What the Malthus worshipers must do in crediting mankind with the ability to eat himself into oblivion is ignore the fact that mankind’s ability, if left unchecked, to continually adapt and to use his technical ability is what has given the human species such success in numbers as to scare the pants off of Malthusians.
Lets face it we the underclasses were defying natural selection by our technical ability which was spreading rapidly to improve the lives of people on a global scale. It’s being halted, as Malthus believed hunger and disease were natural positive checks implemented by God himself to keep population in check.
I used to enjoy Science Friday on NPR. Now, every commentator has thier pet AGW scare story, and there is no couterpoint. Ira Plato, at times, tries to ask a good question, but the answer is always the same: it’s science, and there is no discussion.
I tried to call in to ask about C02 levels in the Ice Age, but got the pledge line instead.
As for cloud seeding being down & dirty, I agree. Have never seen anything but bad things happen afterwards. Choose your poison. Cloud seeding as a last resort, but it’s still done as an ‘enhancement’.
Someday, I’d like to see the issue have it’s lid blown off.
“The only rational I can see for opposing it, was it would not result in devastated economies or poor people dying of malnutrition while food is burned for fuel. Had this experiment proved to cause a huge amount of carbon sequestration, it was obvious that it was also going to provide a lot of food. The usual suspects were against it.”
Suppose that carbon was sequestered. Suppose also that the experiment, which had unknown outcomes, severely affected our food chain. Or suppose that the sequestered carbon cools temps just enough (we are, as is frequently pointed out, only 0.8 C above the Little Ice Age) to cause unintended weather consequences. There are good reasons to be against this kind of experiment when it directly involves a large portion of the food chain.
Also, there are other plans to cool the Earth, such as placing mirrors in space to reflect sunlight, injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, and so on. It is lunacy. Experiments are one thing, but when you are talking about possibly freezing the planet over because you did your calculations in liters, and your dosage in gallons I get a little concerned. Me thinks experiments of this nature are better left as theories.
“CodeTech (14:26:21) :
Aron, I’m supporting Human Achievement Hour. I will have every light and motor on, running the dishwasher, cars, etc. for that hour.
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/24/celebrate-human-achievement-hour/”
Be careful, the next step is you may be monitored with offenders publicly humiliated !
Steve Schapel (13:04:57, 3/27) : “TonyB and Smokey, ‘I have assumed for some considerable time that there is a nefarious political agenda behind all this.
However, my assumption has been about it being *at the expense of* the developing world. Preventing them from “catching up”, controlling them in an imperialist sense. After all, it’s only the rich nations that have any chance at all of producing significant energy from alternative sources.’
So now do I need to revise my viewpoint? If so, why does the AGW scam have such devoted support among the rich and famous, and the big corporates such as General Electric, who have such a big stake in wind and solar, etc?”
IMO, any pseudo-religious movement such as “global warming” has always and forever been about the elites who hope to gain control — whether it is capitalist “captains of industry”, fascist oligarchs, or communist “dictators of (to) the proletariat”. Each elite will have its humanitarian/moral/purification purpose. Today financial interests seem to be at the top of the heap.
The American version of representative democracy with equal-opportunity (not welfare) capitalism is the only antidote to this terrifying human illness of wealth, power, and control of which I am aware. I dearly hope it still works. Two election cycles enmeshed in fraud (2000 and 2008), the second going so far as to negate the Constitutional requirements for President, have dimmed my hopes.
I used to be soothed by fact that computer games showing tit-for-tat (cooperation-for-cooperation and negative response for a non-cooperator) was highly successful in evolutionary terms. It held firm under many attacks. Then the demons came along — if a non-cooperator teamed up with a vicious aggressor, tit-for-tat no longer succeeded. I hope we in the U.S. have not been blind-sided by a similar situation in our present reality.
For all the UN talkers here, please see: 17 Revelations 7:13. Sorry, I don’t normally do that, but it seems relevant to what you are thinking. I would be happy to discuss religious ideas somewhere else, but please don’t turn Mr. Watts’ blog into a religious discussion by responding to this. If you want to discuss, post a link to somewhere appropriate, and I will follow it.
I pray for my friends and family there as well, but the cause is the same EVERY year. I lived in Fargo for more than 25 years and the roots of my family are all from the area. Fargo/Moorhead floods virtually every year, just how much almost completely depends upon the snow accumulation at the time of the spring melt and the rate of that melt, and has almost NOTHING to do with the ANNUAL snowfall. The Red River is rare in the Northern Hemisphere as it flows from South to North. Although parts of North Dakota had record snowfall this year, Fargo area did not, not even close. Instead, areas to the south and East had record or near record snowfall, and when melted, naturally flows into the Red River which in turn flows Northbound through Fargo. This same thing happened to Grand Forks (to the North of Fargo) in 1997 and almost completely decimated the city (along with many many small surrounding towns).
I have been watching this very closely over the past several days and in constant contact with friends and family that live there. There are several pieces of misinformation floating about in the MSM about this particular flood. Some of those things pertain to “record flooding”, which is misinformation because of the lack of clarification.
Yes, this is the highest crest for the Red River ever recorded, however, this is by no means the worst flood, those are two separate topics. Hopefully, with a little break in the weather (it has cooled a lot) and a bit of luck and hard work, this will not become the worst flood in the City’s history.
Part of the misinformation pertains to the past recorded crest record which has been stated in the MSM as 1897, which is also incorrect. The flood of 1997, which WAS, and to date IS the worst flood not only in North Dakota history, but in U.S. history, actually set the crest record for the Red River at that time. The reason why 1897 was not a record is because the placement and method of measuring the river level at that time (and up to around 1952) was done completely differently and is difficult to correlate to the current measurement method. In 1997 this topic was in all of the local media, and I can remember watching a local news special about the flood where a guy from NOAA or National Weather Service extension office (I forget which now), showed why there was a difference in measurement. Additionally, they estimated that the prior measurement in 1897 would have equal to about 34-35 feet instead of the 37 foot measurement recorded, thus making 1897 only the record up until 1997. I believe the 1897 measurement recording has not been altered to reflect this however, so is still being erroneously cited as being the old record (in the MSM, not locally).
About the snowfall. At the time that the North Dakota snow melt began this year, Fargo only had a 60 inch snow accumulation, which by historical measure is not all that significant for Fargo. Consider for example in 1997, the total snow accumulation at the beginning of the spring snow melt was 139 inches, more than twice as much as this year! That water is not coming from the snow accumulation in Fargo, but rather from South and East of Fargo where record or close to record snowfall did occur this year. Which, brings me to the final point…
Why was 1997 a worse flood? Because it was a worse flood for the area as a whole, not just Fargo, but the entire area. This was a direct result of the 139 inches of accumulated snow that I just mentioned. There was so much snow and the spring thaw happened so fast (super El Nino) that it caused unprecedented overland flooding that not only inundated the Red River, but turned hundreds and hundreds of square miles of farm land into a virtual lake (largest flood ever in US).
Now, being a former resident of the area and having family and friends there, I by no means mean to trivialize this event at all, as it is extremely significant and if they don’t have some good luck and fortune in the coming days, could end up being one of the worst City floods in Fargo’s history. But, I like to point these things out because it distresses me that the MSM like to sensationalize and focus on the wrong things. Look, this flood is certainly bad enough without having to try to spice it up for news worthiness. People are working hard there and getting tired. People are and will have to suffer through this event and they need everyone’s support. I have lived through several similar events in that area and they are not easy to get through. It takes a lot of effort and is exhausting and in a lot of cases heart wrenching. Information needs to be accurate instead of the “shock and awe” to sell the news. Isn’t is “shock and awe” enough already without the embellishments?
Oh, and to comment about the AGW factor .. The facts are that Fargo and the entire Red River Valley is the lake bed of the ancient Lake Agassiz, which was one of the largest inland bodies of fresh water on the planet. More than 750mi. long and 250mi. wide. That whole area used to be a lake only 14,000 years ago! We used to have a joke about how we thought mother nature had decided to revert the area back to a lake again, and perhaps she is…
The Red River Valley has flooded many times in the past, and it will continue to do so well into the foreseeable future. Its just what it does …
Roger Knights wrote: “But it’s great for the whales, so maybe when the threat of CAGW is debunked, greenies will embrace this fertilization technique.”
No the REAL problem for the whales today is not lack of phytoplankton. The real problem is their being fished to near extinction by our own species.
The staggering Chinese demand for the usesless concoction of Sharkfin Soup is doing the same to the world’s shark populations (hence my screen name here).
The staggering overfishing of the aforementioned apex predators, the sharks, the kings and queens of the oceans, who have survived FIVE mass-extinctions and have been around for 450 million years, such overfishing has led to a current cascade effect of other less desirable species in the ocean’s foodweb, including jellyfish explosions and cownose ray infestations.
THE REAL PROBLEM vexing the oceans today is the STRIP-MINING of important biology that help balance the ocean’s health.
THAT is where the focus to correct should be aimed…NOT at some unproven “iron fertilization” means to coax more phytoplankton growth.
But the OCEANS…the life support system of the planets, the vast majority stretches of Earth that shape EVERYTHING we do on land…are one of the MAIN current casualties (and a major victim thrown under the bus) thanks to all of the misdirected, EMO, pseudo-scientific tizzy of the new world religion, namely The Worldwide Church of the Anthropogenic Warming.
But I don’t give a **** on what Al Gore has to say about our precious CO2.
Fixing our terrestrial problems are predicated on fixing our oceans!!
And for everyone who likes to take pot-shots at the former Bush Administration (myself included)…one of the best things he or any president EVER (has done for the oceans) was the creation of HUGE oceanic national parks (one of them stretching NW through the long Hawaiian Archipelago).
CHECK OUY THIS BIT OF INFO:
“The oceans, like outer space, is filled with many mysteries. The US government spends 4,000 times more to study outer space than it does to study the oceans. There is no food in outer space but the world takes over $80 million in food from the ocean annually.”
Read this entire link that has this quote here:
http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/ocean.html
It is BAFFLING that more airtime is not given to this.
But perhaps the previous poster was right….”iron fertilization” is an offset from the lobbyists for the Japanese and Norwegian whaling industry….
Or an offset from the lobbyists for the ONE BILLION DOLLAR Chinese/Taiwanese Sharkfin Industry…
Or an offset from the lobbyists for American companies like OMEGA PROTEIN….who STRIP-MINE the oceans of VITAL lower-rank foodchain species such as Menhaden…..just because they can and just because it is cheap.
Or all three of the above….or including others.
Whatever the case, the oceans precede us.
They DEFINE us.
We have NO business ignoring them at the expense of protecting our precious CO2.
Our approach is more than a little….as we say in the south: “BASS ACKWARDS”.
Our approach is an egregious example of reactive vs. proactive in action!
WHEN ARE THE SMART PEOPLE THAT REALLY GET WHAT IS GOING ON, GOING TO BE IN PLACE TO ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING???
Hopefully by that time it will not be too late for our species.
But hell…if it is…then we deserve what is coming to us.
I still hope for the best! Save the oceans. Save the ******* sharks. Save the Earth.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, U.S.A. [such as it is]
“why does the AGW scam have such devoted support among the rich and famous, and the big corporates such as General Electric, who have such a big stake in wind and solar, etc?””
The cracks are already appearing in “big corporate” support for that agenda.
“The bottom of the ocean is relentlessly oxidising. That is why deep sea muds are red. ”
Then how is limestone formed? I thought it was formed in deep seas, while red shales were formed in shallow seas.
Correction: The Worldwide Church of the Anthropogenic GLOBAL Warming.
Also, the touted capacity of wind power has been greatly overstated both in small capacity and in large scale operations.
We are being lied to. We are being hoodwinked. People who want to do something to help, to make a small sacrifice to make a better world are being led down the garden path to their own unemployment.
Who is the UN? It is mainly small countries run by dictators. This is a coordinated grab of our cash to siphon of to them. Now why do you supposed fat cat politicians and big business might go along? Because kickbacks and bribery are a cultural norm in those places. They stand to enrich themselves in exchange for moving business to places like that.
Eyeballing…Looks like both NH and SH ice extent is either normal or above re 1979 levels (so yes, Will was right), certainly not below. Of course the 0 line is not significant in any case being based on only 30 yrs data…
sorry link here http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/index.new.html
“The US government spends 4,000 times more to study outer space than it does to study the oceans. ”
Yup. We know more about the daily surface temperature of Mars than we know about the daily surface temperatures on Earth’s abyssal plains.
Michael D Smith (17:15:56)
This is what I remember from my Exxon training circa 1983. I haven’t seen any publicly available data on it but all the oceanographers would be aware of the partial pressure of oxygen through the water column. You can only preserve carbon in an anoxic environment. Thus a closed basin like the Black Sea would be a far better candidate than the open ocean.
A few comments here have blamed greenies for this iron-spreading, but I think that’s an inaccurate criticism. Fertilizing the oceans is an adaptation strategy (coping with the effects of warming) rather than a mitigation strategy (reducing CO2). Most greenies, especially the extremists, and especially until recently, were pretty scornful of adaptation strategies in general, and iron-seeding in particular.
Cathy, I’m with you! I’m turning on ALL of my lights, TV’s, radios, anything that I can find a switch for. I even brought out some of the Xmas lights again! Considering even starting the lawnmower to watch it run. I refuse to be a stooge and slave for such BS (bad science) propaganda!
“The staggering Chinese demand for the usesless concoction of Sharkfin Soup is doing the same to the world’s shark populations (hence my screen name here).”
But the science is settled. The debate is over. Consensus of all Chinese medical authorities is that sharkfin soup is very effective medicine, make your fin stand up very straight.
So how does one get the crosspatches, the George E. Smiths, the Pamela Grays, the Lief Svalgaards, the Geoff Sharps, the Robert Batemans, the Vuks, the tallblokes, the Smokeys. Squidlys, Anna Vs and every other smart person on here…..(lets not leave out our gracious host, Anthony).. to moblise here…..WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP??
We need a new corporation that consists of the greatest scientiific minds on Earth….to stand up against this ******** and help make it right.
The time is now.
I have a corporation in mind. (Have already incorporated it). Would any of you be interested? Please email me at sharkhearted@gmail.com
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Molon Labe (18:57:27) :
“The bottom of the ocean is relentlessly oxidising. That is why deep sea muds are red. ”
Then how is limestone formed? I thought it was formed in deep seas, while red shales were formed in shallow seas.
Although the original statement in generally true
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_minimum_zone )
it is still a generalization & there are local important exceptions to the rule – also partially described in the wiki link.
Limestones can be formed both shallow water & deep water environments. The Jurassic Twin Creek, which I believe you might be familiar with, was deposited in a shallow water environment. Understanding the paleo-environment is often key to successful O&G exploration. Redbeds in the geological record are more commonly associated with sub-aerial to marginal marine deposits, such as the Jurassic Arapien
savethesharks (18:53:42) wrote:
“Roger Knights wrote: “But it’s great for the whales, so maybe when the threat of CAGW is debunked, greenies will embrace this fertilization technique.”
No the REAL problem for the whales today is not lack of phytoplankton. The real problem is their being fished to near extinction by our own species.”
That’s a red herring. More plankton is great for the whales, regardless of the degree to which they’re being fished.
savethesharks (18:53:42) also wrote:
“THE REAL PROBLEM vexing the oceans today is the STRIP-MINING of important biology that help balance the ocean’s health. THAT is where the focus to correct should be aimed…NOT at some unproven “iron fertilization” means to coax more phytoplankton growth.”
That’s a false dilemma. We don’t have to choose one or the other. There’s no reason we can’t do both. Further, iron fertilization to coax more phytoplankton growth can no longer be considered unproven.
Crosspatch wrote: Who is the UN? It is mainly small countries run by dictators. This is a coordinated grab of our cash to siphon of to them. Now why do you supposed fat cat politicians and big business might go along? Because kickbacks and bribery are a cultural norm in those places. They stand to enrich themselves in exchange for moving business to places like that.
The TRUTH of the ages……
Gary P (16:55:02) :
Their experiment as designed by their hypothesis was a total failure. It is not that we did not learn anything from this. We all did. But the outcome had nothing to do with the premise.
Not a RED HERRING at all, Roger Knights. More like a NON HERRING.
And this is not a ‘false dilemma” as you conclude. I agree that we need to do both.
But given the DIRE conditions of the world’s oceans….neither is this AT ALL a “red herring” or a “false dilemma” as you put it.
We need to answer the vexing questions related to big corporations and thier strip-mining the oceans just because it is is cheap and just because they can.
The burden of proof is on you to show the REAL problems that are vexing the worlds oceans and the planet as well!!
Addition: Iron fertilization may be a route. But lest we ignore the deeper causative problems of the MESS we are in today…..do not ignore other, more practical solutions.
Thanks, Dave, Jorge, others. I would love to go camping with you folks and decide around a campfire the withering nonsense of AGW, policy, and such. Right now, must sleep. Pick it up in the AM… Thanks for the discussion. Mike S.
savethesharks (21:04:08) :
I have a great idea, outlaw fishing for sharks with anything but a bowie knife. Then only real men will know what shark soup tastes like…
“The real problem is their being fished to near extinction by our own species.”
I believe the population of virtually every species of whale is increasing and has been for quite some time. Many areas of our oceans are believe to be at maximum carrying capacity for some species.
The notion that whale populations are decreasing is a legacy of the 1960’s and 1970’s that keeps being repeated without the benefit of current realty injected into the discussion.
Blue whales: The estimated rate of increase is 8.2% (95% confidence interval 3.8-12.5%) per year between 1978/79 and 2003/04
Gray whales: The population was increasing at a rate of 3.2% (95% confidence interval 2.4% – 4.3%) over the period 1967/68 – 1987/88 with an average annual catch of 174 whales.
Bowhead whales: The net rate of increase of this population since 1978 has been estimated as about 3.2% per year (95% confidence interval 1.4% – 5.1%).
Humpback whales:
Western North Atlantic – A rate of population increase of 3.1% (SE=0.005) was obtained from the Gulf of Maine for the period 1979-1993
Southern Hemisphere: Rates of increase. East Australia: 1981-96 12.4% (95%CI 10.1-14.4%). West Australia: 1977-91 10.9% (7.9-13.9%)
Northern Pacific: Rates of increase of about 7% have been reported for the eastern North Pacific, 1990-2002.
Right whales: There is evidence of increase rates of 7-8% for populations of Argentina, Australia and South Africa
Please do not repeat that nonsense about declining whale populations because it is false. Whale populations have not been in decline for decades.
Once upon a time there was a population of extremely cold-adapted people living in the far North. These people did not have bows and arrows, did not hunt caribou and lived by spearing seals and walrus as they emerged from their breathing holes in the ice. Then the climate changed. The Earth warmed and in summer, the ice melted. When they tried to approach seals and walrus on the beach, the animals would simply swim out to sea. These people also did not have boats. They were ice people. They had no means of hunting at sea and no means of hunting land animals that they could not get close enough to spear.
As the ice melted, other people better adapted to the climate (Inuit and Thule) moved into their territory. These people had bows and arrows and boats. They drove the tall ice people off their lands. The ice people starved to death. The Medieval Warm Period resulted in the extinction of a race of humans called the Dorset people that we still know very little about.
The demise of the Dorset people had nothing to do with fossil fuels but if something like that were to happen today, rest assured that some politician would make it our fault.
Ohioholic (21:16:25) said: I have a great idea, outlaw fishing for sharks with anything but a bowie knife. Then only real men will know what shark soup tastes like…
BRAVO Ohioholic. Well said.
Crosspatch wrote: “Please do not repeat that nonsense about declining whale populations because it is false. Whale populations have not been in decline for decades.”
Not nonsense bro. Neither nonsense about the declining eco-systems of our oceans.
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/6/3308.full.pdf
I HATE the politicization of science just as much as you do.
But to ignore the fact that the AGW smokescreen has thrown the real driver of our weather (the oceans) under the bus…is to commit logical suicide.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, U.S.A. [such as it is]
And the increase of the whale populations can not be ignored as being directly correlated to the international attempt to protect the same.
WHALE FISHING HAS BEEN PROHIBITED INTERNATIONALLY FOR TWENTY YEARS….WHAT THE **** DO YOU EXPECT IN THE DATA???
That is a GOOD trend….so the current attempts to enforce the same (Paul Watson on the Animal Planet channel…are just puncuations in a broader struggle.
For shame crosspatch.
I give you credit elsewhere (and many times) for a very enlightened opinion…..and this is the best that you can come up with??
Chris
Norfolk, VA
“So how does one get the crosspatches, the George E. Smiths, the Pamela Grays, the Lief Svalgaards, the Geoff Sharps, the Robert Batemans, the Vuks, the tallblokes, the Smokeys. Squidlys, Anna Vs and every other smart person on here…..(lets not leave out our gracious host, Anthony).. to moblise here…..WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP??”
Pay us more than we make in our day jobs. Show me the money, then we can talk about your “corporation”. Seriously. I am a capitalist.
Hansen’s mass AGW rally is snowed off. The Arctic ice is as thick as ever. The carbon rich phytoplankton ends up on the menu. One might start to believe that Madam Nature is having a little fun at the expense of our misguided warmist brothers and sisters…
NormD
” I don’t understand how the experiment is a failure. The goal was to take CO2 out of the air and grow biomass in the ocean. Why does it matter what the form of the biomass takes? Eventually all biomass dies and goes to the bottom. What am I missing?”
Facts – no where on the planet are there old accumulations of biomass. It gets continually recycled into the biosphere. Given the assumed age of the sea floors, Jurassic, then there shouls be some evidence of these accumulations. Except there are none.
@ savethesharks: Wikipedia says:
“a red herring is an argument, given in reply, that does not address the original issue. Critically, a red herring is a deliberate attempt to change the subject or divert the argument.”
The original issue was, Is more plankton great for the whales? Your response was to say that they were being slaughtered, and that that was the real issue. That’s a red herring–an evasion and a diversion from the original question.
Here’s an analogy. I say that it’s great for the Simpsons that Lisa has persuaded them to eat more greens. You respond that I’m wrong, because the REAL issue is their exposure to Mr. Burns’s nuclear emissions. You may be right, but you were not right to say I was wrong.
=======================
savethesharks also wrote:
“And this is not a ‘false dilemma” as you conclude. I agree that we need to do both.”
But that’s not what you implied in your original statement, where the two policies were presented as mutually exclusive:
“THE REAL PROBLEM vexing the oceans today is the STRIP-MINING of important biology that help balance the ocean’s health. THAT is where the focus to correct should be aimed…NOT at some unproven “iron fertilization” means to coax more phytoplankton growth.”
It is always a pleasure to read your page. Gentlemanly science at its best. In the end you will have more influence on events than Al Gore. Please keep your page going.
The largest source of CO2 produced by human activity is not industrial but rather…exhaled breath. Many claim it is need not be addressed because of its closed loop nature…things we eat are removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This points out another opportunity…eat less.
Squidly: “The Red River Valley has flooded many times in the past, and it will continue to do so well into the foreseeable future. Its just what it does …” Why be so passive about the repeated destructiveness of a river onto its flood plain/former lake? Just send West the “excess” snow in the winter and the over-the-top melt in the spring. We will gladly drink the water so you and your family can live in a safe and less exhausting environment.
Louis Hissink (01:15:03) :
Facts – no where on the planet are there old accumulations of biomass. It gets continually recycled into the biosphere. Given the assumed age of the sea floors, Jurassic, then there shouls be some evidence of these accumulations. Except there are none.
From http://www.uwsp.edu/geO/faculty/ritter/glossary/l_n/limestone.html
Limestone is a sedimentary rock containing at least fifty-percent calcium carbonate. Several different types of limestone exist and are differentiated based on the texture (e.g. oolitic limestone), mineral content (e.g. dolomitic limestone), origin (e.g. coral) and geological age (Carboniferous limestone). Karst topography develops in regions underlain by limestone. Most limestone is partly or wholly
areorganic in origin and contain the hard parts or shells of mollusks and coral (fossiliferous limestone). Because limestone is mainly calcium carbonate it serves as a store for carbon that is released upon dissolution.–Mike Ramsey
David Archibald:”Seeing the effect they got for six tonnes of dissolved iron (iron chloride?), “.
It is ferrous sulphate, as far as I know. To produce it you have to use either iron scrap as raw material or magnetite ore concentrate and reduce the solution (which is in part ferric sulphate) with iron scrap to ferrous sulphate again…so, my guess is, these fools will be producing more tons of their favorite gas, along with a lot of others, than the amount they will supposedly recapture.
None of these idiots can see the beauty of nature´s simplicity, as the orbits of our Sun around the barycenter:
Round and round I go,
the barycenter longing to find and rest,
because the farthest I go
the more furious I become
The Sun
Mike (05:42:18) :
The largest source of CO2 produced by human activity is not industrial but rather…exhaled breath. Many claim it is need not be addressed because of its closed loop nature…things we eat are removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This points out another opportunity…eat less
This is a marvelous advice for their FAT LEADER
I would very much like to see scientific data re the opposing arguments of crosspatch and savethesharks regarding the bountifulness of whales and the preservation of the ocean floor, again for life’s bounty. Is the main problem overfishing or over-harvesting or is it temperature and upwellings? I have seen evidence for both sides.
The iron fertilization experiment — my first response is to send out the gunboats (whose?) to stop these idiots from messing with “our” oceans without some very careful experimentation beforehand. However, many commenters on this blog appear to believe dumping tons of stuff, stuff that someone believes is relatively benign, is no big deal, and, in actuality, might prove how to farm the oceans better.
For example, Roger Knights (19:46:25) : “Fertilizing the oceans is an adaptation strategy (coping with the effects of warming) rather than a mitigation strategy (reducing CO2). Most greenies, especially the extremists, and especially until recently, were pretty scornful of adaptation strategies in general, and iron-seeding in particular.”
On the other hand, other are cautious or incredulous.
Nasif Nahle (07:20:04) : “Hah! Last year I wrote a note for a local newspaper (Milenio) talking about the generation of this problem from “fertilizing” the oceans with iron. As always, this people think that the Universe is static. They have to be thankful their luck for not have caused a major disaster, eutrophication, for example. This failure reveals how little those people know on nature works. They’re doing the same on climate and physics.”
And see 3×2 at 7:19, 3/27. Anthony, I hope you will continue this discussion/debate with further science regarding some of the topics opened up on this thread. (By the way, I use iron phosphate to keep the snail and slug population within bounds.)
“Facts – no where on the planet are there old accumulations of biomass. It gets continually recycled into the biosphere. Given the assumed age of the sea floors, Jurassic, then there shouls be some evidence of these accumulations. Except there are none.”
Try putting Azolla Event in WikiPaedia.
That biomass is only 40 million years old and so is about half way to becoming an oilfield that will make Saudi look like a puddle. 100,000s years of our present consumption of fossil fuels would only dent the sequestered carbon there.
When the cultists stamp their foot and insist that all the biomass that grows each year rots each year so it doesn’t figure in Man’s desecration, I’m often tempted to laugh.
I wonder if anyone has attempted to guesstimate the total tonnage of organic silt the Amazon sequesters each year?
Roger Knights “The original issue was, Is more plankton great for the whales? Your response was to say that they were being slaughtered, and that that was the real issue. That’s a red herring–an evasion and a diversion from the original question.”
No the ORIGINAL issue was the topic at hand on this thread about “iron fertilization” and I was making the point that we would not have such dire problems in the oceans if our species had not decimated its supply in the first place.
Taking time to point out the root causation of the ocean’s health is in no way, shape, or form a red herring…and neither was i trying to divert the argument here as you say.
Why don’t you ask me some DIRECT questions if you don’t like what I say and I can promise you bro you will get some DIRECT answers!
Back to topic: As my screen name here implies…another dire problem in the oceans is the worldwide decimation of the sharks thanks to some commercial fishing techniques but mostly thanks to the black-market-driven Chinese shark-fin industry.
You all know what happens. The shark is hauled aboard, fins are sliced off, then the shark is thrown back in the water without the ability to swim and slowly dies.
In the northwest Atlantic alone, some large predatory shark species have been virtually wiped out:
From http://cmbc.ucsd.edu/People/Faculty_and_Researchers/baum/Baum_etal_2003_Science.pdf
“Excessive fishing has caused a 90% decline in shark populations across the world’s oceans and up to 99% along the US east coast, which are some of the best-managed waters in the world,” according to Baum.
“The decline in predators such as sharks can have devastating consequences for the local marine ecology.In a case study published last year, Baum found that a major decline in the numbers of predatory sharks in the north Atlantic after 2000 had allowed populations of the sharks’ prey, cownose rays, to explode. The rays in turn decimated the bay scallop populations around North Carolina. “There was a fishery for bay scallops in North Carolina that lasted over a century uninterrupted and it was closed down in 2004 because of cownose rays.”
And SO….until we tackle the problems in the ocean that we HAVE caused, it really does not make alot of sense to introduce another variable in the oceans such as “iron fertilization” that has the potential to exacerbate the cascade of problems that already exist in the ocean. Look at the simple illustration at the head of this topic: iron fertilization could cause even greater harm.
Why not fix the fixable problems first??
No doubt the iron fertilization idea is used as a diversion and an offset by the whaling, commercial fishing and sharkfishing lobbies so they can continue to strip-mine the oceans.
And not to mention its a diversion for the AGW crowd to be sure. How about a new acronymn to describe the state of the oceans “Anthropogenic Oceanic Biology Catastrophe” or AOBC.
It is unfortunate that the the rickety tie-dyed, exhaust-belching VW bus of AGW contines to careen down the scientific freeway at 100 miles per hour, sweeping REAL and solvable issues under it along the way!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, U.S.A. [such as we are]
CLARIFICATION: “I was making the point that we would not have such dire problems in the oceans if our species had not decimated its supply [OF VALUABLE MARINE LIFE] in the first place.”
Roger Knights wrote: “Here’s an analogy. I say that it’s great for the Simpsons that Lisa has persuaded them to eat more greens. You respond that I’m wrong, because the REAL issue is their exposure to Mr. Burns’s nuclear emissions. You may be right, but you were not right to say I was wrong.”
Folks here an example of how arguments cascade into little side issues and they try to take on a life of their own. If you go back to your original quote, Mr. Knights where you said:
But it’s great for the whales, so maybe when the threat of CAGW is debunked, greenies will embrace this fertilization technique.”
I did not really say that you are wrong. I was pointing to the REAL root cause of the problems in the oceans….some of them are absolutely anthropogenic.
And introducing another variable such as iron fertilization which may cascade the wrong direction as per the topic of this article and thread…is basically trying to fix one PROBLEM with ANOTHER! Makes no sense!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, U.S.A. [such as we are]
Louis Hissink (01:15:03) :
Facts – no where on the planet are there old accumulations of biomass. It gets continually recycled into the biosphere. Given the assumed age of the sea floors, Jurassic, then there shouls be some evidence of these accumulations. Except there are none.
I know there’s a theory that petroleum emanates from the magma, but I’m unaware of an abiotic explanation of coal.
savethesharks (21:54:48) :
Crosspatch wrote: “Please do not repeat that nonsense about declining whale populations because it is false. Whale populations have not been in decline for decades.”
Not nonsense bro. Neither nonsense about the declining eco-systems of our oceans.
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/6/3308.full.pdf
I agree that over fishing is a disaster. Getting the facts is the first step in fixing the problem.
Dr. Nicholas Makris, MIT professor and Director of the Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing is tackling this problem.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16850-fish-megashoals-could-be-worlds-biggest-animal-group.html
“OAWRS is different from sonar-based technologies in that it sends out lower wavelength sound waves that travel further through the ocean.
Traditional high-frequency beams dissipate within about 100 metres. Yet with one vessel sending and another receiving the waves, researchers using OAWRS can take a snapshot of a 100-square-kilometre area every 75 seconds.”
“If we had this OAWRS system and we were looking [at Georges Bank] 500 years ago, all we would have seen is cod,” Makris says. “Now you look out there and there’s no cod to be seen.”
–Mike Ramsey
I wrote: “So how does one get the crosspatches, the George E. Smiths, the Pamela Grays, the Lief Svalgaards, the Geoff Sharps, the Robert Batemans, the Vuks, the tallblokes, the Smokeys. Squidlys, Anna Vs and every other smart person on here…..(lets not leave out our gracious host, Anthony).. to moblise here…..WHAT IS THE NEXT STEP??”
Crosspatch wrote:” Pay us more than we make in our day jobs. Show me the money, then we can talk about your “corporation”. Seriously. I am a capitalist.”
I can’t show the money just yet but i can certainly present to you my ideas for the corporation. Capitalist here, too. Would love for you to shoot me an email and i would be happy to forward you my thoughts. sharkhearted@gmail.com
Best,
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Is this really a failure? It’s only a failure if the net carbon budget is zero sum or worse. I haven’t seen that this was stated to be the case.
Roger Knights wrote: But that’s not what you implied in your original statement, where the two policies were presented as mutually exclusive:
“THE REAL PROBLEM vexing the oceans today is the STRIP-MINING of important biology that help balance the ocean’s health. THAT is where the focus to correct should be aimed…NOT at some unproven “iron fertilization” means to coax more phytoplankton growth.”
No where in that statement is any mutual exclusion going on. You can read into it what you would like. I was merely saying that we are trying to fix one problem with another.
Better trying to fix the root cause (disastrous overfishing) first, without introducing another unknown into the oceans (iron fertilization) which could cascade the wrong way, as per the theme of this thread article.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
“And the increase of the whale populations can not be ignored as being directly correlated to the international attempt to protect the same.”
I never said that. I said that the populations hadn’t been in decline for a long time. Where populations have recovered, it is probably better for them overall to harvest a certain amount of the population. Otherwise the population is moderated only by food supply resulting in a large population living constantly on the edge of starvation. Harvest of a certain portion of the population would probably improve the health of the remaining population.
We just can’t have an uncontrolled cull. Heck, I would even be in favor of a one or two year global fishing ban to allow fish stocks to recover. But then allow the fishermen to return.
I would like to point out that Robert Burns actually wrote:
I would like to point out that Robert Burns actually wrote:
From To a mouse
Perhaps more relevant that the corrupted line used.
Wow … looks like politicians have recently discovered a form of energy production that works 24×7 and doesn’t emit any CO2:
Crosspatch wrote: “I never said that. I said that the populations hadn’t been in decline for a long time. Where populations have recovered, it is probably better for them overall to harvest a certain amount of the population. Otherwise the population is moderated only by food supply resulting in a large population living constantly on the edge of starvation. Harvest of a certain portion of the population would probably improve the health of the remaining population.”
That is a very balanced and reasonable approach. Well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
“We just can’t have an uncontrolled cull. Heck, I would even be in favor of a one or two year global fishing ban to allow fish stocks to recover. But then allow the fishermen to return.”
I am inclined to agree with what you are saying….to an extent…and as i said in the previous post your logic makes sense.
The only problem with that approach though is that not all of marine life are created equal and reproduce that fast.
Whales and sharks are both very slow to reproduce.
Some studies indicate a 99% depletion of large predatory sharks in the north-west Atlantic (!)…and so it would take a lot more than one or two years to replenish.
And even with the 20-year international ban on whaling does not stop countries from abusing such.
Even worse, there are no international protections afforded for sharks.
And my point is we need to do something fast, or we are going to lose many of these apex predators forever.
Sharks have survived FIVE mass-extinctions and have ruled the deep, controlling the entire oceanic food web, until a new predator came along: homo sapiens.
This may seem a little OT but it really isn’t…
Because if Woods Hole and Scripps were busy championing saving the oceans, as opposed to wasting their time giving undeserved awards to Al Gore, and focusing on whether introducing another unknown (iron fertilization) into the already troubled seas is a good or bad idea, as opposed to aggressively tackling the problems that man has already caused in the ocean, then perhaps we could reverse the troubled seas a little more quickly.
Again…all of these REAL issues that we CAN solve get thrown under the AGW bus.
To Al Gore and his henchmen: Want to save the planet? Then save the oceans.
The oceans certainly deserve more airtime as they are the planet’s life-support system!
Chris
Norfolk, VA
They expect the CO2 to sequester, or sink to the bottom and hide there. fact is the dialectic layers of the ocean which are usually 4 degrees Celsius are warming up. If the cold water belts containing ancient CO2 are rising, dumping more CO2 into the surface may be doing more damage than good.
The issue seems to be about alkalinity “and” temperature.
Adding only iron seems shortsighted, I would think a broad spectrum mineral “food support” supplement would be superior. The food support supplement could be slanted toward having more iron, yet should consider other subtle nutritional needs as well.
Protecting these cold water layers is essential. These same dielectric layers of anomalous temperature bands also naturally exist in the atmosphere- and they are also under stress from pollutants, solar flares and rocket science . . . these deep sea rivers also help maintain proper pH (Salinity).
We need to protect these cold arteries of life the same as we need to protect and nurture the great living reefs and the continental rain forests . . . these need to be our priorities as stewards of this blue-green biosphere.
Let’s not make the common and absurd mistake of treating the symptoms and ignoring the true cause of the problem.
When you body becomes acidic over a prolonged period of time, calcium and other minerals are drawn from your bones in a last ditch effort to “alkalize” . . . this causes loss of bone density and other health challenges. Our planet is suffering from the same “acidosis” and the “blood of the planet,” or sea water, is drawing the minerals out of the coral.
My intuitive knowledge suggests perhaps recycling some of the dead coral calcium found along some shore lines in with the supplemental mineral mix.
All life is connected through the food chain to the environment and down to our very genetic switch boards . . . by helping to cure our environment we will discover how to heal the nations and our bodies. The same natural principles govern our health as well as the planets health.
If your body’s temperature rises above 98.6, you call it a fever . . . our living planet has a fever. We can either be part of the problem or part of the solution, but “the answer does exist” . . . let’s hope we discover it before irreversible damage has been done.
Suggested reading: Viktor Schauberger’s Living Water , or Living Energies, to understand the importance of “cooling” and revitalizing technologies.
“Viktor Schauberger’s basic thesis contains a universal, twofold movement principle. He meant that life sustains by a gathering, “implosive type of movement” and reversed, a spreading, explosive movement that leads to the extinguishing of life. “With the implosive movement coolness, suction growth and healthiness follows.”
The explosive movement generates heat, pressure, fragmentation, illness, and death. His opinion was that man had only succeeded in mastering the movement of death in order to release energy. All known engines are based on explosion, heat and pressure. To only use the explosive movement, definitely leads to the destruction of nature. These thoughts did not get any sympathy in his time, decades before the environmental problems showed up.”
Do I have a witness?
Tod Faassé
http://www.wisescribe.wordpress.com
Louis Hissink (01:15:03) “Facts – no where on the planet are there old accumulations of biomass. It gets continually recycled into the biosphere.”
I would think fossil beds are old accumulations of biomass.
I was in the Lostine Tavern yesterday talking with the local Indian who is responsible for distributing salmon smoltes back into the river systems here. He was completely unaware of the life cycle of the salmon, his people’s history of salmon catch here in Wallowa County, and the long term oscillation of salmon counts. He was also unaware of how oceanic upwelling determines food supplies for this fish. He had no knowledge of how trade winds figure into this cycle or how the rotation of the Earth on its axis causes the East to West direction of the trade winds. He thought it all had to do with how the white man took away his heart. My explanations of how this cycle works actually made him mad because I was taking the blame off the white settlers. He could not handle the thought of any discussion contrary to his belief.
Here is the address to a very well documented work on the salmon cycle as it pertains to oceanic oscillations.
Psi
http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/Y2787E/y2787e00.HTM
Do you know where to find ancient global warmists?…Go to any phosphates mine, there you´ll find them…their bones turned into just calcium triphosphate. They just can´t cry any longer neither preaching crowds of morons nor profiting of fools´money.
I too enjoy the womanly scientific discussion at this website ;~). So to jump into the debate between overfishing and cyclical upwelling (regardless of debate foul and point), the common ground, for those willing to go there, would be to study this long term cycle and to manage fish catch according to the cycle. When the ocean is in its “green” stage, fishing can occur with fewer regulations as to total tonnage of fish. During the ocean’s “desert” stage, restrictions should be put into place. That would give me 4 marks would it not?
And by the way, if this cycle is what I think it is, it would make sense that the ultimate predator would be the last to show decline during the warm desert stage of the ocean. Overfishing at its lowest point would be playing with fire. It will also be the last to show a steady increase once the green stage is in place.
What we should not do, I think, is mess with a long term cycle, as much as we would like to. Many above water species also have long term cycles that have set up cascades of species that are dependent on these decades long cycles. Oceanically speaking, messing with one part of it in the hopes of increasing marine life during the desert period may, and not inconsequentially, screw up the entire chain for possibly 100’s of years.
In most scientific discussion circles, it is assumed that plant biomass can only be inferred, not directly measured, as a layer in oceanic sediment. The animal life that feeds on plant biomass is the measure used to determine plant life in the historical record. What may be the case is that some of the layered carbon rained down as dead and dying phytoplankton that was not consumed by well fed members of the chain just above it. Though the percent is hard to determine, it can be inferred with reasonable discussion. Initial sudden and massive blooms would definitely have dead and dying matter as there would not be sufficient grazers around to consume it all until that population increased from the now abundant food supply.
Wisescribe wrote:
If your body’s temperature rises above 98.6, you call it a fever . . . our living planet has a fever.
The optimal temperature of a human body for health has been determined, obviously.
What is the optimal temperature of “our living planet”, Tod, and who determined it?
If the optimal temperature is deemed to be what it has been recently, then this is called foolish sentimentality. Otherwise, to say the planet has a fever is just plain foolish.
“The only problem with that approach though is that not all of marine life are created equal and reproduce that fast. ”
True but we can’t go around “saving” them to death either. Or “saving” one thing that causes other things to suffer. An example might be whales wandering into fresh water rivers. Who “saved” them before we arrived? That is probably part of the natural balance of things. They wander up the river, get sick or stuck and die. Their carcass serves as food for birds, crabs, small species and immature large species of fish, and all sorts of other life. “Saving” those whales prevents other ecosystems from flourishing.
But in any case, attempting a logical discussion with someone who obviously has a strong emotional attachment to the subject of the discussion is usually futile.
And I believe that is the sort of pompous narcissism that causes more harm than good.
“Protecting” cold layers is “essential”? Climate has and will change dramatically, sometimes by huge amounts over short periods of time in both the warm and cool directions. Who “protected” the various layers in the past? Nobody. It is what it is. “Protecting” things to mollify someone’s emotional attachment to them might not be the best approach.
“we need to protect and nurture the great living reefs and the continental rain forests”
Every single “great living reef” on the planet is actually less than 12 or 13 thousand years old. Go back 20,000 years and they were at about 400 feet above sea level and dead as a doornail. The only reason they are alive today is due to “global warming” and a melting of the glacial ice that rose sea levels to where they are now. I would imagine that there are some quite dead reefs that are 400 feet under sea level that were closer to the surface during the last ice age. As ice ages last about 10 times longer than interglacials, I would expect those reefs to be a lot larger than the current “great reefs” but also dead as a doornail.
Stop trying to “protect” things and prevent change. Change is the norm. Climate always changes, and often dramatically.
“the continental rain forests”
Every continental rain forest that existed 30,000 years ago is probably long dead. During the last ice age, equatorial regions became too dry to support rain forests which died and turned to grasslands. Rain forests formed in two belts roughly centered on the tropics. At the end of the ice age, these forests died and the current rain forests formed.
crosspatch (11:18:02) :
Stop trying to “protect” things and prevent change. Change is the norm. Climate always changes, and often dramatically.
There are natural changes and a natural range of variability. I believe that the warming trend in the last half of the 20th century and the subsequent cooling trend in this first decade of the 21st century are part of the natural variabilty in the earth’s climate.
It is laughable to think that we can prevent these natural changes no matter how hard we try.
But human’s can do damage to the environment. China is polluting the air. Over fishing is damaging the oceans. These changes aren’t natural; they are caused by us. China can put scrubbers on their coal fired power plants and fishing can be done in a sustainable manner. And unlike global warming/cooling, these changes are within our control.
One man’s opinion anyway.
–Mike Ramsey
A friend of mine expressed some questions about the basic assumptions. Any answers to these questions?
I was working on this issue earlier in the week. I have two questions: (1) why does iron fertilization cause algae productivity to rise? and (2) why does consumption of the algae negae carbon sequestration?
The iron question stems from the fact that iron is not a micronutrient directly needed by the algae, but seems to play some indirect role, possibly chelating other micronutrients so they can be absorbed more readily by the algae.
The consumption question question stems from the fact the coccolithophores, the algae at issue, sequester carbon in the form of calcite. Some organizations can breakdown a small fraction of the calcite coccoliths, but I would still expect nearly all of the calcite end up on the ocean floor regardless of the complexity of the food chain.
“But human’s can do damage to the environment. China is polluting the air. Over fishing is damaging the oceans. These changes aren’t natural; they are caused by us. China can put scrubbers on their coal fired power plants and fishing can be done in a sustainable manner. And unlike global warming/cooling, these changes are within our control.”
I agree with all of the above. We shouldn’t be irresponsible. But the notion that we can “protect” sea temperatures is a little “out there”.
Re: crosspatch (22:29:32) and capitalism.
While it may be viewed by some as harsh, I tend to agree with you. Profitable businesses and healthy economies, just like electricity generation, light in our homes, heating, air conditioning and medicines are critical for human advancement. With everything going on in the economy currently, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing capitalism=evil (just like electric power=evil, coal trains=evil, co2=evil etc.).
I’m not a believer in some big conspiracy here, though the UN articles some have linked to in this chain are very disturbing. However, I think it is clear that there is a growing momentum around the idea that capitalism=evil, western world=evil, power generation=evil, “big oil”=evil, cars=evil, co2=evil, etc, etc, etc. It is a kind of “technological depression” – a self perpetuating ideal in which human advancement is seen as a bad thing. Some would tie it to a “dumbing of society” – make the masses clueless, and every time you say “boo” they will come running like sheep to the trough willing to pay extra taxes to stave off a threat that does not exist.
It really appears that the enviromental extremists for example will not be happy until the human race are all living in dark biodegradable hovels with a biodegradable windmill outside for electric power, rationed ecologically friendly water, rationed breathing (the CO2!), biodegradable tofu (solent green?) for food and daily chanting, prayer and sacrifice to “Mother Earth”, lest she throw a tornado, hurricane, earthquake or pestilence upon us. Sound like the regilious repression of the Dark Ages anyone?
We have to shake ourselves and realise that just like the clueless climate modelers don’t understand the complex real climate, the clueless iron filling scientists don’t understand real ecology or climate, there are many people setting policies right now that are equally clueless and are basing their policies on the entire clueless pyramid of “settled science” and computer model output underneath them.
Time to wake up and smell the coffee all you sheep and lemmings. Try reading a few books, doing some research and thinking for yourself for once. Unless you like the idea of being a worker ant in a colony that is.
I wrote: “The only problem with that approach though is that not all of marine life are created equal and reproduce that fast. ”
Crosspatch replied: “True but we can’t go around “saving” them to death either. Or “saving” one” thing that causes other things to suffer. An example might be whales wandering into fresh water rivers. Who “saved” them before we arrived? That is probably part of the natural balance of things. They wander up the river, get sick or stuck and die. Their carcass serves as food for birds, crabs, small species and immature large species of fish, and all sorts of other life. “Saving” those whales prevents other ecosystems from flourishing.”
In the case of sharks, something needs to be done. They have ruled the oceans for 450 million years, keeping the entire oceanic food web in balance. And now many of their kind are threatened with extinction.
This following is sums it all up from Scripps Oceanographer Jeremy Jackson:
“Taken together, these problems [in the ocean] risk “transforming once complex ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified, microbially dominated ecosystems with boom and bust cycles of toxic dinoflagellate blooms, jellyfish, and disease.”
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Crosspatch wrote: “But in any case, attempting a logical discussion with someone who obviously has a strong emotional attachment to the subject of the discussion is usually futile.”
Logic and emotion under one roof is by far not a “futile” combination. To the contrary…such a combination is what makes us human and what gives us the ability and passion to solve problems.
Watch the award-winning docu-drama called Sharkwater. If you have not seen it, besides being a physically stunning piece of cinema, it will change the way you think about sharks and their importance on the planet.
Best,
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Mike Ramsey wrote: “But human’s can [and] do damage to the environment. China is polluting the air. Over fishing is damaging the oceans. These changes aren’t natural; they are caused by us. China can put scrubbers on their coal fired power plants and fishing can be done in a sustainable manner. And unlike global warming/cooling, these changes are within our control.
You have hit the nail on the head Mike.
And Pamela’s words about fisheries understanding the many oscillations that govern the oceans are on point too.
The fisheries management system needs to be overhauled to reflect such, but that is another topic for another day I guess.
Chris the sharkman.
Norfolk, VA
Correction: “fisheries NEEDING to understand the many oscillations that govern the oceans…
David Gladstone (13:31:48) :
(1) Why does iron fertilization cause algae productivity to rise?
Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
“Iron is a trace element necessary for photosynthesis in all plants, however it is highly insoluble in sea water and is often the limiting nutrient for phytoplankton growth. Large phytoplankton blooms can be created by supplying iron to iron-deficient ocean waters.”
Also, see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v383/n6600/abs/383508a0.html
(2) Why does consumption of the algae negate carbon sequestration?
The idea behind sequestering carbon in the deeps is (my words):
1. Coccolithophores, the remains of organisms that feed on them, and fecal matter sink, by force of gravity, into the deep ocean.
2. The remains are buried in sediment where they stay a long time.
Microorganisms can break down these remains and turn the carbon back into CO2 where it can find its way back into the atmosphere. Also, organic carbon and calcite falling to the sea floor can drive changes in the ocean’s pH to maintain steady state. Like most things in nature, there are negative feedbacks that keep things in balance. Still, there is a lot of limestone out there. 🙂
–Mike Ramsey
Who is behind the UN and the CAGW movement? Haven’t you been watching the Fed? The Fed/IMF/World bank and the major central banks are all just names on doors at castle in Basel, where the 11 real masters of the universe make the monetary decisions for the rest of us. The Fed is owned by holding companies, 11 to be precise, which are private and mostly foreign, residing in the City of London. Did no one think to ask where the Fed got the extra trillions they just printed? They just took it from the man hours of every person in the US and Europe and the rest of the world; instantly, in less than the blink of an eye. Notice how Volcker took $5T from struggling countries in europe and gave it to the World Bank, which is famous for giving money to corrupt generals and dictators? The Fed and its parallel institutions have increased their power and reach and influence and is one of the major architects of a new world government that will inevitably follow this new world economy into being.
David Gladstone (19:02:57) :
The Fed and its parallel institutions have increased their power and reach and influence and is one of the major architects of a new world government that will inevitably follow this new world economy into being.
I will not comment on the existence of vast left or right (take your pick) wing conspiracies to enslave us all.
I will say that I think that the English philosopher Edmund Burke got it right when he said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’
So do something.
–Mike Ramsey
And conspiracies get real old real quick….when compared to the real problems vexing us.
Might as well try to solve the obvious problems at hand.
Agree with Mike..and with Sir Edmund Burke.
“So do something.”
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Mike Ramsey (19:50:58)
I will say that I think that the English philosopher Edmund Burke got it right when he said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’
So do something.
Yes but what?
In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
Therefore I think David Gladstone is doing about all anyone can. I need a web adress of where this stuff is being discussed, this blog IMO has a different role.
savethesharks (07:38:26) wrote:
========
Roger Knights wrote: “But that’s not what you implied in your original statement, where the two policies were presented as mutually exclusive:
“THE REAL PROBLEM vexing the oceans today is the STRIP-MINING of important biology that help balance the ocean’s health. THAT is where the focus to correct should be aimed…NOT at some unproven “iron fertilization” means to coax more phytoplankton growth.””
==========
No where in that statement is any mutual exclusion going on.
The first boldfaced phrase above excludes (with its “NOT”) doing iron fertilization in addition to preventing overfishing, so it does present the two policies as mutually exclusive.
“You can read into it what you would like. I was merely saying that we are trying to fix one problem with another.”
I never implied that we should fix one problem with the other–you read that into what I wrote. I spoke of iron fertilization as being successful only insofar as it would provide more food for the whales. That’s all I said and meant. I didn’t mean that fertilization was the be-all and end-all solution for all the whales’ problems, or even that it wouldn’t necessarily cause other problems. My intent was only to poke mild fun at the greenies because something they disliked on principle–an adaptation tactic–wound up instead benefiting one of their iconic animals. Further, I added, in a subsequent comment, “We don’t have to choose one or the other. There’s no reason we can’t do both.”
crosspatch (11:18:02) : “‘We need to protect these cold arteries of life the same as we need to protect and nurture the great living reefs and the continental rain forests . . . these need to be our priorities as stewards of this blue-green biosphere. ‘ And I believe that is the sort of pompous narcissism that causes more harm than good.
realitycheck (15:18:46) : “Re: crosspatch (22:29:32) and capitalism.
While it may be viewed by some as harsh, I tend to agree with you. Profitable businesses and healthy economies, just like electricity generation, light in our homes, heating, air conditioning and medicines are critical for human advancement. With everything going on in the economy currently, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing capitalism=evil (just like electric power=evil, coal trains=evil, co2=evil etc.).
I enjoy reading crosspatch’s posts on WUWT and elsewhere and mostly agree with him(?). Realitycheck gets the tone — harsh. American Conservatives have difficulty getting in touch with “tough love”, rather than revelling in “harsh”. They honor the producers of the world (capitalists and entrepreneurs), but forget about the equally essential efforts of the workers in production — and the everyday details of their lives. This blind side has permitted global corporations, including, preeminently, financial ones, to opt for the cheapest labor, illegal immigrants, poor health care delivery to many, environmental destructiveness, and little public support for excellent schools and excellence from students.
This blind side has enabled the worst of global actors, primary among them are the ones yelling anthropogenic global warming, evil-CO2, cap-and-trade, etc. Many Americans, along with others in the world, have turned to the wolves in sheeps’ clothing who argue “love”, “save-the-earth”, “protect-us-from-harsh [capitalistic] ogres”. And they have permitted the fraud and corruption, with global tentacles, that is grasping at the American way of life because they have not perceived that they are “cherished” by Conservatives. They have needed the consistent “tough love” that Crosscheck says he means when he is confronted with his own harshness. IMO, the classical liberal has more to offer along these lines. Nevertheless, we must work together as hard as we have ever worked in our lives to prevent that 2009 UN conference from being successful. Much gratitude to Anthony and crew for unstinting efforts.
If the desert condition is necessary in order for the green condition to exist (and we don’t know that but we should at least be asking the question), we should allow the oceans to run naturally dry of its ecosystems. As in, if plankton has become depleted, allowing grazers to reduce in number to a subsistence level, we should leave it alone and let it happen. This relatively predatory free, CO2 rich, dusty land condition may be necessary for the plankton bloom to get started, and the cyclic ocean greening to start back up again.
The “CO2 pollution”, “iron deficiency status”, and “overfishing” discussion needs to occur in concert with desert or green oceanic conditions. It is my hunch, and it seems to be coaberated by fish counts as a condition of oceanic oscillation, that decreased marine life is more a natural condition of season. Me thinks we blame ourselves too much. So for marine food source discussion, the only relevant topic should be fishing regulations under desert conditions, and regulations under green conditions .
The only pollution discussion I see that is relevant to both desert and green oceanic conditions would be liquid effluent emission. We should not be using the ocean as our mixed substance toilet, as in the case near Ensenada, Mexico, where untreated mixed substance sewer effluent is piped right out to the mid-tide beach area. Were it JUST made up of untreated, paperless human excrement and urine, that would be one thing (all marine life uses the ocean as their toilet). But our effluent has things in it that are man-made and highly toxic. We mix this gray water effluent, whether from households or industry, with human body waste at our planet’s peril.
Pamela Gray (09:08:08) :
We should not be using the ocean as our mixed substance toilet, as in the case near Ensenada, Mexico, where untreated mixed substance sewer effluent is piped right out to the mid-tide beach area.
I would add the dead zone extending out from the mouth of the Mississippi river into the gulf of Mexico.
http://www.tulane.edu/~bfleury/envirobio/enviroweb/DeadZone.htm
–Mike Ramsey
Correction; In an earlier post I see the juxtaposition of the rapid decline of sharks next to Professor Jackson’s quote was probably a little too much.
I was not saying that the such rapid decline in an of itself would produce the following, was just saying it is part of the cascade to the apocalyptic scenario he paints for the oceans, when one includes habitat, apex-species, and food-staple species destruction, pollution and fertilizer run-off and dead-zones, ocean acidification and other factors, some of them man-made or at least man-exacerbated.
“Taken together, these problems [in the ocean] risk “transforming once complex ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified, microbially dominated ecosystems with boom and bust cycles of toxic dinoflagellate blooms, jellyfish, and disease.”
Have some of the jellyfish blooms worldwide attributed to the oceanic oscillations? To a degree, no doubt.
But are jellyfish blooms also indicators that these undesirable, opportunistic, simple, and fast-reproducing predators have rushed in to fill a vacuum because so much of the valuable marine life has been strip-mined from the oceans? This is a sizable, if not majority part of the equation.
Now we can’t control the ocean’s temperatures or their salinity or their cycles. Rather, they control us and our weather and shape everything we do on land.
But we CAN control habitat and species destruction. That is one thing we can tackle, in an effort to not end up with the cartoon on the right at the head of this thread article.
Interesting reading:
http://seaaroundus.org/magazines/2007/TheRiseOfSlime.pdf
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Mike Ramsey (09:17:04) :
Pamela Gray (09:08:08) :
“We should not be using the ocean as our mixed substance toilet, as in the case near Ensenada, Mexico, where untreated mixed substance sewer effluent is piped right out to the mid-tide beach area.”
“I would add the dead zone extending out from the mouth of the Mississippi river into the gulf of Mexico.”
And the very large dead zone in the Chesapeake Bay…..
Eventually, nano-technology is going to make diamonds the size of boxcars out of airborne CO2 using sunlight. We will then drop these diamonds to the ocean floor off of barges. Then we will all congratulate ourselves as the new ice age begins.
The problems vexxing the oceans are as complex as the food-web that laces them.
Here’s a good read: The Most Important Fish in the Sea. The Rutgers prof and avid fisherman who is its author, chronicles in detail the lowly menhaden, the east coast staple fish that many other fish depend on. We use ’em for bait…and they stink to high heaven. They are oily and bony, so not good eatin’…but other fish love em. One author describes the menhaden as “born to be eaten.”
Well the menhaden, once overfished before to the point of near extinction, until states began outlawing their catch, are in decline again.
Now, my lovely home state of Virginia, the last state to not make menhaden fishing illegal in its waters, hosts the second highest-grossing fishing port in the nation, the tiny Chesapeake Bay town of Reedville (population 2000). That town is made possible by a Texas-based company named Omega Protein (started as the Zapata Corporation years ago by the bush family).
Omega Protein has a monopoly on the national menhaden catch, and through their vast reduction fishing fleet and plants at Reedville, annually grinds up 250 million pounds of menhaden to become your catfood, omega 3 vitamins, fertilizer, and so on.
http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=1901
Other predatory species such as the striped bass, who depend upon menhaden as their food, begin to turn toward other food sources and deplete them as the the overfishing begins to cascade throughout the food web. In some cases, the striped bass starve, and develop bacterial lesions from lowered resistance….
http://www.chesbay.org/articles/striped%20bass%20study(1-09).asp
Ironically the fertilizer produced from the ground-up menhaden, finds its way back into the Chesapeake Bay Watershed through fertilized lawns, golf courses, and corn farms.
Such helps produce the hypoxic and anoxic dead zones that now reside in the Chesapeake Bay water column.
Last summer brown and red tides were common, and I remember watching on the news camera shots of the normally benthic Blue Crabs becoming semi-pelagic, as they were swimming to the surface trying to get oxygen (but the water had become anoxic) so they died.
Last year, shortly thereafter, the Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab industry (after lasting for 100s of years) was declared a disaster.
Keep in mind that, the Chesapeake, as one of the largest estuaries in the world, used to yield the highest per capita volume of fish in the world. Not anymore.
In the days of Capt. John Smith, one could see to the bottom, and there were oyster shoals that were so big, they formed little islands.
Now menhaden and oysters have one thing in common: they are both filter feeders. They filter out impurities from the water column that no other fish want to eat.
Ahh…the oysters. Used to be the Lynnhaven Oysters were as big as a plate and considered the best in the world.
Not anymore. Every time a new crop is set out, they are gobbled up by swarms of voracious cownose rays.
The reasons the cownose rays are proliferating out of control?
There are no sharks to eat them.
Similarly, the 100+ year bay scallops fishery in North Carolina which at one time was very productive….was finally wiped out by those little devils (the cownose rays), who now that there are no sharks, are reproducing out of control.
http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/mar07/petersonshark032807.html
The recent Chinese catapulting of one billion people into the middle class….has given rise to the increased demand for the useless concoction of shark-fin soup which is helping deplete the world’s shark populations…
(Remember…sharks, having evolved over 450 million years in the oceans, with no natural predators up until homo sapiens, reproduce very slowly).
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2616156&page=1
Now the 97% decrease in tiger and scalloped hammerhead sharks in the northwest Atlantic
99% decrease of the smooth hammerhead, bull, and duskys in the same…those percentages are quite alarming.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/29/AR2007032901963.html
But its not just happening in my corner of the ocean:
Sharks pronounced “functionally extinct” in the Mediterranean.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3344301/Sharks-functionally-extinct-in-Mediterranean.htm
Points to ponder:
1) In the event the availability of valuable marine life cycles with the natural oscillations of the oceans, as ocean flora and fauna has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, the introduction of anthropogenic forcing over the last few hundred, hardly qualifies homo sapiens as being part of that natural oscillation.
Here is a good presentation that looks into the ebb and flow of bluefin tuna, including the natural oscillations, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal, and finds that the real problem is just plain overfishing.
http://www.iccat.int/Documents/Meetings/Docs/BFT_SYMP/pdf/BFT_SYMP_018.pdf
2) And so some American corporations [with the support of lobbyists to downplay and suppress the truth] are strip mining the local waters of the staple foods that other fish depend on, and ironically, turning them into fertilizer where they back up in our waters to create dead zones.
3) Some Chinese and Taiwanese corporations [with the support of lobbyists to downplay and a huge multi-national black market] are emptying the world’s oceans of sharks and large predatory sharks [the biggest fins get the most money!].
savethesharks
Care about the extinction of homo sapiens in NH. As far as WUWT data transpires you will be under a mile of ice in the next 30 to 50 years.
By the way, we eat sharks down here, specially the more delicious “baby shark” (here called “Toyo bebe” -after Toyo=shark) 🙂
4) Both world powers allow these corporations to treat the oceans as a sort of free and endless supply of goods on which to make a profit and without oversight because most of what happens in the water, we never see.
NOTE: If someone went through a forest with a giant net and captured every living thing….bears, birds, all the wildlife…there would be a great outrage. But this occurs daily out in the oceans and not much attention is given because we are not there to see it.
NOTE II: Omega Protein can just as well manufacture those omega-3 vitamins from soybeans. But they don’t want to do that, because doing so would mean that they would have to spend more money. They would rather rely on their cheap, “free lunch” caught with giant purse-seine nets at sea.
And…there are several sharks (adult ones) lurking around over there: Global warmers..:)
5) So in light of all this, in terms of pollution, nutrient runoff, and overfishing, it can not be said that we as a species are not having a material adverse effect on the oceans.
And, unlike the myth of AGW and the broken Mann hockey stick, the buffonery of Al Gore and James Hansen ad nauseum…THIS is a problem that we can and should do something about.
Yeah I saw that remark Adolfo. And I am not saying that sharkfishing should be banned. it just needs to be regulated.
Natural ebbs and flows of fish populations are to be expected. But we have exacerbated the situation to an almost irreversible degree.
Watch the award-winning movie Sharkwater.
http://www.sharkwater.com
You will be glad you did….
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Shavethesharks:
You know I was just kidding. I have always thought oceans like being earth´s blood and sharks as the leucocites in it…predating bacteria that otherwise would kill us.
Nevertheless “those climate change predators” are like cancer cells, eager to destroy all the social organism through increasing their number
I have just seen a few seconds of the movie http://www.sharkwater.com , beautiful indeed.
Good analogy, Adolfo.
When you get a chance, watch the whole film. I have seen it about seven times (as my screen name might suggest lol).
Chris
Thank you, Chris-savethesharks, for all your posts. I have just sent for “Sharkwater” from Netflix. The ratings were excellent and Aldofo’s recommendation adds to my anticipation. More science for the oceans and seas and more global protection from two-legged predators, whether capitalist, communist, or otherwise — but not the UN’s version of PROTECTION. Your ideas represent what environmentalism used to be about.
Absolutely, pyromancer76.
We live in interesting times. The problems vexing the oceans [some of them] are solvable and the solutions are not driven by some utopian agenda.
They are driven by good science.
The sad part about it is that even some of the terrestrial arguments about coal pollution and otherwise are true (and so Hansen has a point). I am reminded of some of those towns in China where coal dust is around the air 24/7.
Thanks to the IPCC, the UN, and Al Gore on one side, and on the other side, the Oil Lobbies, Omega Protein, and Haliburton et.al….the wholesale GUTTING of the public scientific trust with utopian-driven or special-interest-driven agenda is the REAL tragedy [from both sides of the political aisle].
Meanwhile…in the dust of these behemoths….the real problems that WE have created, go unsolved.
Thanks for checking it out. One of the most important films ever made no doubt.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
And your commentary pyromancer76 (08:26:36), was SPOT ON.
The link that I presented above in relation to “Sharks Functionally Extinct in the Mediterranean: was a dud because it was truncated. Here is the actual link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3344301/Sharks-functionally-extinct-in-Mediterranean.html
Roger
One more thing I forgot.
Wave energy devices off shore have a possible benefit-protecting the shoreline against waves- Especially useful where there is vulnerable infrastructure. Where I live there is a railway line runs along a sea wall which since the day it was built in 1850 has been affected by waves. I suspect it is the only one in the country where the locals consult a tide table before the time table!
More to the point, such devices are also thought to be capable of affecting sediment, currents etc and would reduce the wave power that creates surf! That might be a consideration in California.
I think studies on both the above are few and far between so if you can just arrange say $10 million in research we can do a joint project 🙂
Tonyb
As the AGW scare morphs into ‘climate change’ .. and cools by degrees(!) into mere ‘weather’… it seems we need a new scare. So, is it possible to make one up?
A cursory look at all the Global Warming fuss reveals the IPCC claim that man is putting up about +4 ppm/year of CO2 into the atmosphere; and this will increase the temperature at the earth’s surface by 1 degree C over the coming century.. causing untold havoc, melting icecaps, floods, & co., etc.
Now this seems to be junk-science of a most entertaining kind, and so I thought I’d produce some of my own, that would produce exactly the opposite prediction, but based on the same premises, and with simple conversion factors availalbe to everybody.
In this way, my junk-science unlike the IPCC stuff would be repeatable and reproducible by everyone and everyone at home … even by Gran and the Kids. DIY Climatology! Hours of scary fun and entertaining anxiety for all the family! Here are the steps for my ‘end-of-the-world.alt’ scenario:
a) Man-made CO2 = + 4 parts-per-million(ppm) per year. Over 100 years this amounts to + 400 ppm
b) Henry’s Law indicates that the oceans absorb co2 from the air at a ratio of about 50:1. So for the additional 400ppm in the air, there must have been 50 x this amount absorbed in the oceans. So, the actual extra Co2 produced was 400 x 50 = 20,000 ppm over the 100 years
c) Now of this 20,000 PPM, roughly 15,000 ppm was oxygen taken from the atmosphere, so we can say that the atrmosphere must have been depleted by 15,000 ppm ….. or 1.5% over the 100 years
d) A 1.5% reduction of the atmosphere equates to a 15 millibar drop in atmospheric pressure at the surface of the earth … or an equivalent 500 ft increase in pressure altitude at the surface.
e) This average pressure drop/increase in effective height will cause adiabatic heat-loss, and so GLOBAL COOLING at the surface, of around 1 degree centigrade …. which will lead to global cooling, untold havoc, freezing icecaps, sea-level dropping, desertification, & co., etc. ….
f) “Except of course it won’t!”, I hear you cry… “because it will exactly counterbalance the IPCC’s 1 degree warming over same the period!”. And of course you will be kinda-sorta right.
Desert Dust Enables Algae To Grow
Dated Dec 22d, 2003
Maybe they should have tried this in, say, the dead zone south of the Mississippi river delta. Although there, it may be that just oxygenating the water would do the most good.
savethesharks, here is an article about shark population and PDO. They appear to be linked, but the authors then go on to say that global warming could mess the link up. I suppose that is how the study got funded.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/02/020218094758.htm
Huh???
Is that the best that you can put forth Pamela? LOL
There is a whole slew of posts before this that addresses all of this.
Something that I am sure you are NOT doing Pamela, is READING my posts.
(and my name is Chris by the way….and I think you know that)
And if you are, then you are doing the trick of just not responding to them.
Answering with another sub-argument “I suppose that is how the study got funded” is not at all sufficient.
If you did bother to read the posts…you will see that….the problem is complex….and probably a blend of natural/oscillation AND anthropogenic forcing [Ha….that term can DEFINITELY be applied to oceanic species depletion]
(How many times do I need to repeat and shout from the housetops that it is not either/or??)
And if you can not respond directly to the posts….then perhaps there is no use conversing here?? That’s cool. If you want to avoid my questions…then i understand.
But, curiously, if you don’t want to respond, then why are you now??
Go back (or anyone interested) and please read the posts beginning 11:58:33….and decide for yourselves.
Its pretty easy reading….
CHRIS
NORFOLK, VA
Also the quote from this article: “Sharks, being the more efficient eaters, just may be able to take greater advantage of changes in the food that’s available,” he says.
Heh heh this is very telling. These 450 million year old bastards have evolved a very strong ability to survive whatever crisis is presented before them.
Well they have survived 5 mass extinctions….and they will hopefully survive our overfishing of them…but that still begs the question:
Why are you [and an Obama voter card carrying progressive at that! 🙂 ] trying to prove me wrong when there may actually be issues of entire species destruction here??
Is it for the sake of the argument? For the sake of the PDO? [Hey the great thing about WRITTEN records in this blog is that once written….it is immortalized in words. And I agree about oceanic forcing!]
So I know none other reason as to why you are becoming so EMO here in relation to shark depletions other than….you have been one-upped.
Would be happy to debate this with you in person.
Answer for me (since you seem to know it) the REAL causation of ninety-nine percent depletion (99%)…..[the highest percentage before total depletion… that is NINETY-NINE PERCENT DEPLETION…..]….of some shark species depletions in the NW ATLANTIC??
If you can not….and if you can not take the time to view Sharkwater http://www.sharkwater.com [for you and for your students]…then there is no point in speaking any further on this.
Chris
(that’s my name)
Norfolk, VA
Chris, my only point here is that statistical analysis of any theory should be robust and take into account all known variables when examining complex systems. Then, correlation coefficients should be generated as to the variables at play. Movies just don’t do it for me. Nor do most media reports of scientific discoveries. And neither do studies that simply assign over-fishing without fully examining all conditions present.
Newer studies are beginning to re-discover that oceanic oscillations have tighter correlations to fish counts than fishing practices do. The fact that I can site only a few related to sharks is because the majority of studies that statistically examine fishing practices and oceanic oscillation do not focus on sharks. However, a reasonable mind can deduce that theoretically, based on studies of other fish, shark populations more than likely follow oceanic oscillations tied to the food web more closely than they do fishing practices over the long term.
Fishing regulations should be based on oceanic oscillation with the understanding that as plankton blooms become less frequent, the food web begins to tighten its belt. It will then be up to us to reasonably determine when and where it will be time for humans to tighten their fish take.
Most of the studies you site do not rise to statistical rigor (or the media report is light on said rigor). But again, that does not mean yours are wrong and mine are right. However, at the very least, shark studies discussed here should rise to a level that we wished CO2 studies would, and we should discuss them in a detached objective scientific manner, not with emotional subjective beliefs coloring our posts (as in “It’s the Sun stupid!”).
The ball is still in your court. Let’s discuss a study, pick one, that is of stellar caliber and leave the movies and media to those gullible enough to believe anything that rolls with credits at the end, such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.
So you say that a population of shark has nearly died out. Are there other populations somewhere else? Where does this shark range? Where does it mate? Where does it pup? What kind of food does it prefer or is it a predatory scavenger? What do you know about the particular current temperature and layering of the water it lurks in? What oscillation is its range most tied to? What do you know about the weather patterns in this area? How is it being caught and where?
Sorry Pamela but you are answering more questions with the questions i have raised.
GO back please and address point by point my posts beginning at 11:58:33…and answer those questions first (with real and direct answers) and then I will answer your set of rheotricals in the paragraph above.
It is astounding that you would avoid so much data that i have put before you? And whay will you not address the data set forth in “Sharkwater”?
Is it because it is a movie that you would blacklist it with the same “Inconvenient Truth” label? Ewwww…LOL
But….in the interest of fairness I will attempt to answer the questions you raised….and I am not yelling…but for the sake of clarity they are in CAPS.
So you say that a population of shark has nearly died out. CONTACT DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY AND THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA FOR STARTERS. DON’T ASK ME. THEY ARE THE ONES WHO ARE THROWING OUT 90 to 99% DECLINES:
http://www.lenfestocean.org/publications/Med_Sharks_PR_Canada.pdf
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/0116_030116_sharks.html
http://www.livescience.com/animals/070329_shark_decline.html
Are there other populations somewhere else?
“Large sharks have been functionally eliminated from the East Coast of the U.S., meaning that they can no longer perform their ecosystem role as top predators,” said study team member Julia Baum of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
OK lets look at the Mediterranean:
http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=26157394010
HOW ABOUT THE WHALE-SHARK SIGHTINGS IN THE FAR EAST? 97% DECLINE (INTERESTINGLY…THE BIGGER FINS…FETCH MORE MONEY. WHALE SHARK FINS FETCH $10,000 ON THE BLACK MARKET)
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=9E7918BE0E91CDABF8EA9F8CBEC83FD7.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=467947
AND IN THE INDEAN OCEAN…
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0960982206023761
OR LET’S JUST TAKE ONE EXAMPLE….PICK AND CHOOSE HERE…POINT AND CLICK: THE DUSKY SHARK
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/species/duskyshark_detailed.pdf
Where does this shark range? WHICH ONE? THERE ARE SO MANY TO CHOOSE FROM. POINT AND CLICK PAMELA.
Where does it mate? Where does it pup? YOU KNOW AS MUCH AS ME THAT WE KNOW LESS ABOUT THE OCEANS THAN WE DO THE SURFACE OF THE MOON. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A GREAT WHITE BEAR FORTH LIVE YOUNG IN CAPTIVITY? THEN DOUBTLESS WE KNOW MUCH ABOUT THAT.
What kind of food does it prefer or is it a predatory scavenger? COME ON…PAM…. PERHAPS YOU SHOULD ASK THE NEXT GREAT WHITE (NOW ON THE ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST BTW) AS TO WHAT HE/SHE PREFERS??
What do you know about the particular current temperature and layering of the water it lurks in? WELL DEPENDING ON THE SPECIES. BUT A GOOD GENERAL RULE: THEY ARE GOING TO BE WHERE THE FOOD IS. AND WHERE THE FOOD IS THOSE GREAT FISHING AREAS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, AT THE CONFLUENCE OF COLD/WARM CURRENTS. YOU KNOW THE DRILL…
What oscillation is its range most tied to? WELL MY GUESS IS THAT IF YOU WERE ABLE TO TAKE A VOTE TO ASK THE SHARKS IF THEY PREFERRED THE THE WARM CYCLE OF THE ATLANTIC MULTDECADAL OSCILLATION, THEN YOU WOULD PROBABLY GET “HANDS-UP” FROM THE TIGERS. THE COOLER PHASE: THEN THE GREAT WHITES WOULD CHIME IN
What do you know about the weather patterns in this area? NOT TOO SURE ABOUT THE CHANGE OF FLUCTUATION OF THE NAO OVER THE PAST FIVE MASS EXTINCITONS, BUT ONE THING WE ARE SURE OF IS THAT SHARKS SURVIVED ALL OF THEM (THE EXTINCTIONS).
How is it being caught and where?
MORE LIKE….HOW IS IT NOT BEING CAUGHT.
GOOGLE IT, PAMELA.
And I will say again….that you (and your students) would benefit viewing Sharkwater. Please do not relegate it in the same “Inconvenient Truth” category.
You are a scientist. And you owe it to yourself to digest the data.
I tried to respond in CAPS for clarification but it did not work…..so please allow me to respond point by point to your questions:
The ball is still in your court. Let’s discuss a study, pick one, that is of stellar caliber and leave the movies and media to those gullible enough to believe anything that rolls with credits at the end, such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Well it would seem, after many posts on this thread, that the ball would be in your court to address them.
Nonetheless I forward to you a few studies. Take your pick because there is a whole array:
Northwest Atlantic:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5605/389
http://mhest.com/spotlight/underthesea/pdf/SN_TooFewJaws.pdf
Carribbean:
http://www.physorg.com/news3688.html
South Atlantic:
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/species/duskyshark_detailed.pdf
Pacific / Sea of Cortez
http://www.bbc.co.uk/oceans/locations/cortez/el_bajo.shtml
Pacific (near Thailand) RE: Decline in Whale Sharks (the biggest fins fetch the most money…..a fin of a whale shark is worth $10,000!
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=467947
And on and on ad nauseum ad infinitum…
So you say that a population of shark has nearly died out. Are there other populations somewhere else? Where does this shark range? Where does it mate? Where does it pup? What kind of food does it prefer or is it a predatory scavenger? What do you know about the particular current temperature and layering of the water it lurks in? What oscillation is its range most tied to? What do you know about the weather patterns in this area? How is it being caught and where?
“So you say that a population of shark has nearly died out.”
You tell me if 99% depletion in some NW Atlantic Species or “functionally extinct” in the Mediterranean is a good definition of “died out”!!
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2008/06/30/Sharks_disappearing_from_Mediterranean/UPI-69901214880387/
“Are there other populations somewhere else? “
If a species has been functionally eliminated from the Atlantic and Mediterranean, then you tell me if other poplulations in other oceans really matter in the short run?
I supposed that we could transfer new specimens from other oceans, but tell me when the last great white you ever heard of, surviving for any time during captivity??
Where does this shark range? Where does it mate? Where does it pup?
We know less about the oceans (and their inhabitants) than we do about the moon.
One thing is for certain is that the Chinese shark-fin industry WASTEFULLY harvests about 100 million of these creatures. THEY ARE SLOW TO REPRODUCE. DO THE MATH.
What kind of food does it prefer or is it a predatory scavenger?
Ask a Tiger and he doesn’t care what he eats….but some or more picky. Which one ot single out here??? They all have fins.
AND THAT is the demand that is throttling their rapid decline.
What do you know about the particular current temperature and layering of the water it lurks in? What oscillation is its range most tied to?
The simple (and logical) answer to that is the sharks will be where the food supply is.
The Gulf Stream meeting the Labrador Current is good fishing grounds….and thus good shark grounds. NOT rocket science.
Sorry for the repeat answers here. i thought my first reply in CAPS was lost becuase it did not register…so I started typing again.
Well anyway, Pamela….alot of good information for you to digest.
I have taken WAY more time than I should stating the obvious here. And it is late 3:15 in the AM EST and I have to go to work tomorrow.
If you do not get anything else from the content-filled and thoughtful posts….then watch Sharkwater.
If you are a teacher….you owe it to yourself….and then to your students.
One of the most eye-opening documentaries….ever
Don’t relegate it to a “movie.”
In so doing you are missing the point…and i KNOW you are smarter then that Pamela.
I have said so in other posts.
Thanks for your time.
CHRIS
“However, a reasonable mind can deduce that theoretically, based on studies of other fish, shark populations more than likely follow oceanic oscillations tied to the food web more closely than they do fishing practices over the long term.”
I am not in disagreement, Pamela, with this in principle, except for the fact that some pretty damn over-the-top and significant forcing has DIRECTLY caused the shark (and other fish and whale species) depletion.
And that forcing is from what cause? The A word, Pamela. As much as I hate to hear that word in terms of climate and Al Gore ad nauseum….the A-word hits the blankety-blank nail on the blanking head when it comes to overfishing.
WE…..(even if there are natural ebbs and flows which I am inclined to agree) have CAUSED the great marine life depletion we have before us…..stariung us in the blankety-blank face today!!
And yes if you sense some emotion you’d better damn believe it because this is a problem WE have caused and WE SHOULD FIX!!