However you feel about climate change, we’re dumping a lot of crap into the atmosphere and it’d be nice to remove said crap before it does some form of damage. But how?
It turns out all we really need to do is put more iron into the ocean.
It works like this: various forms of microscopic sea life need all the iron they can get. They also tend to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, seeing as they’re basically plants. So, if you grow a lot of them and let nature take its course, you have huge numbers of microscopic sea life corpses floating to the bottom of the ocean, and taking all the carbon dioxide they are with it.
The problem was testing the idea: the sea tends to move. But new experiments using an eddy in the ocean’s current show that the idea works, at least on a small scale.
Of course, there’s also the question of whether we should be knocking the natural order of the ocean out of whack just because we can’t stop driving Hummers, but that seems outside the scientific method.
image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
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“However you feel about climate change…”
Ah, the American discourse on AGW in a nutshell. Scientists state fact and well-funded oil shills muddy the waters with indefensible bullshit like, “the science isn’t settled!”
Not to crap on you, Dan, I’m just curious as to what led to the phrasing? Why even give the “controversy” room to breathe, especially given your readership?
you should listen to yourself. You sound like a quack.
How, exactly?
Has anyone considered the possibility that the earth, which is in one of it’s normal climate cycles, does NOT want climate change “solved?” If doing something like this indeed had any effect on the climate, the results could be horrific.
Be Reasonable … and ignore all (well, not all, roughly 98%) of Climatologists, the people who dedicate their lives and careers to becoming experts in this very subject. No no, let’s all listen instead to irrelevant statistical misinterpretations, misrepresentations and idiotic, pseudo-scientific fairy tales instead of listening to the people who know the most about the topic we’re discussing. BE REASONABLE, indeed.
Getting into the article itself, iron seeding is an interesting concept, but the last paragraph is the one to really hold on to. Biological systems are incredibly complex and the scale with which we would need to introduce iron in order to sequester enough CO2 has the potential to introduce an enormous number of unforeseen problems potentially worse than planetary warming. Massive poisonous algal blooms or huge oxygen depleted zones could devastate local ecosystems if this attempted. Engineering of this order requires firm understanding and control. Researching things like this help us understand our planetary system better and I’m all for that, but thinking that this could actually work is problematic at best.
Iron dumping has been shown to promote small-order growth but has not yet conclusively been shown to fix carbon to the seafloor. Careful when hitching your wagon to this one.