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)
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.
@ur momisugly 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.