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 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/