To say that George has shocked and angered much of the scientific community is an understatement. Indeed I found many who were profoundly concerned by the increasingly popularized notion that scattering iron in the oceans could help solve global warming.
“This is madness. It’s totally insane,” says Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil, an expert in global nutrient cycling and author of “Enriching the Earth.” “Why use something like that – when we can just drive a car that gets 45 miles per gallon. In science, you’re looking for the elegant and simple solution. Well, that’s it. I know that I cannot regret driving a car that gets twice as much per gallon.” Smil, who has spent his life studying how humanity has changed natural cycles, says he’s not surprised. “Hey, we’re a dysfunctional society, so why shouldn’t the nutrient cycles be dysfunctional, too.”
Oceanographer Mark Lawrence, an American currently with the Max Plank Institute in Germany, explains: “phytoplankton produce gases which directly affect the climate and atmospheric chemistry. For instance, one gas known as dimethylsulfide ends up causing clouds to reflect more sunlight, which cools the oceans’ surface, while other gases produced by phytoplankton can…affect other aspects of atmospheric chemistry.”
Other scientists have completed work that points toward what is already obvious – if not iron, then some other nutrient will eventually be lacking. New Zealand researcher Tom Trull recently co-authored a paper that explained that, in the Southern Ocean, silicate may become a limiting factor. “In short,” Trull wrote me in an e-mail, “it is not obvious that iron can stimulate carbon sequestration, and it is likely that it will lead to a different phytoplankton community than normally present (rather than just a faster growing normal community), the composition, properties and desirability of this new community is unknown.” Sequestering carbon in these parts of the global ocean via iron fertilization “would require significant ecosystem change,” Trull’s paper said.
MIT’s Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, one of the world’s top biological oceanographers, finds the idea of geo-engineering the earth’s atmosphere through oceanic iron fertilization to be anathema. When two Mitsubishi scientists visited her lab in the summer of 2001 to discuss the idea, she delivered her “no-free-lunch” lecture. Iron fertilization just won’t cut it, either scientifically or ecologically, she warned, adding that the best solution is simply to stop producing CO2.
Following that visit, Chisholm and colleagues Paul Falkowski of Rutgers and John Cullen of Canada’s Dalhousie University, published a letter in the journal Science formally stating their scientific objections. Falkowski wrote a long article in Scientific American further explaining his caution. Chisholm’s graduate students authored papers on the problem, available on the web.
Other scientists, watching from the sidelines, were equally put off by the idea. In one on-line discussion, Oklahoma State University botanist William Henley wrote that “large-scale ocean fertilization is a classic example of the traditionally favored ‘end of the pipe’ approach to environmental problems, as opposed to eliminating the source of the problem.” University of Michigan algologist Eugene Stoermer was even more outspoken: “Two of the world’s major curses,” he wrote, “are engineers that want to screw around with the environment, and ‘environmental entrepreneurs.’ It would perhaps be more helpful if they employed their energies to mitigating past and ongoing disasters, rather than creating new ones.”
But perhaps the most significant statement comes from Duke University’s Richard Barber. Barber had co-authored a paper with engineer Mike Markels in 2001 that proposed a 5,000 square mile “technology demonstration” in the equatorial Pacific. (Scientific studies using iron fertilization are generally small, about 50 square kilometers or so.) In that paper, Barber and Markels suggested that as much as 2 million tons of CO2 could be disappeared into the ocean depths in 20 days, perhaps at a cost of only $2 a ton.
At a time when some were claiming that carbon-control strategies could cost up to $300 a ton, this was truly Balm in Gilead to nervous corporate souls. Markels took out at least seven patents on iron fertilization strategies and set up a company now called GreenSea Ventures. Markels, whose company Versar founded in the 1960s is now fabulously successful in both the field of environmental cleanup and the field of homeland defense, wanted to clean up atmospheric carbon, and, in a sort of two-for-the-price-of-one, feed fish with the extra phytoplankton to increase harvest numbers.
The 5,000-square-mile demo never did occur. Some say the Department of Energy feared the inevitable furor. So the GreenSea team turned to computer models. Dalhousie University oceanographer and computer modeler John Cullen finds that particularly frustrating. “We really don’t have enough scientists to be working on all the problems. Is this how we want to be tying up four or five scientists who do this well?” he asks. “I don’t feel that any of us, with confidence, can predict what’s going to happen. It’s the only ocean we have. Maybe the point is that we just shouldn’t do it.”
Damning with faint praise, Barber says today, after the latest research: “On the basis of the modeling that we have done, the model predictions suggest that this is not a method that will reduce atmospheric co2 very much, even if you did it on a massive scale.”
A few scientists do say that, as we improve our understanding of marine ecosystems, iron fertilization may provide a small part of the total solution. Right now, says German expert Ulf Reibesell, we lack adequate knowledge of the ocean and “are therefore not able to reliably assess the risks possibly involved in iron fertilization. Nevertheless, in view of the serious risks we are presently taking with our global climate, I feel that considering iron fertilization as a possible means for purposeful co2 sequestration can not be entirely dismissed at this point.”
loe.org
Then there is another problem; how well wil ocean life cope with pH changes from the CO2?
The Acid Ocean – the Other Problem with CO2 Emission
realclimate.org |
