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Non-Tech : Alternative energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (5727)	1/2/2009 1:04:27 AM
From: Gary Mohilner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16955

Sam, That's certainly true as well, but it's isolated to areas near the coast where upwelling is occurring. I've seen many plankton blooms, but they never extended far out to sea. There are millions of square miles of ocean where water depth exceeds 400 or so feet and where upwelling doesn't occur. You have plenty of sunlight, but with almost no nutrients at the surface, almost no photosynthesis is occurring as this sea water is almost completely void of nutrients. I know there's a plan that has planes spread iron filings in these areas to get plankton growing, while I'm sure it could work, and if we were having a CO2 buildup emergency it could be the quickest action possible to reduce the buildup, but I believe we should look at sustaining the capacity of out oceans by developing artificial upwelling units that can bring up the nutrients already in the ocean. I'm certainly no expert, I just think our experts should be looking at all the possibilities. I believe if we start making our oceans more productive now we can learn how to handle the added CO2 we're clearly generating. I'm all for developing green power, fuel cells, etc, but in a world where countries like India and China are building cars for a few thousand dollars that provide basic transportation for it's people. In the next ten years I expect tens of millions of additional cars with internal combustion engines will be on the road. Making things better in the U.S. may be a start, but until it extends to the rest of the world it's a very tiny step. In China, as I understand it, new coal burning generators are coming on line all the time. We all heard about industries shutting down during the Olympic's to make the air more breathable, but they're polluting heavily the rest of the time, we need to overcome that. I live in L.A. and have over all my 65 years. L.A. still has smog problems, but I believe in many ways it's improving, but in the last 40 years I've lived and worked near the beach where it's rarely even noticeable. California is generally ahead of the nation in insisting on higher standards of emission controls, etc, but with ever increasing population we cannot cure the problem. More people driving more cars which each pollute slightly less don't cure the problem, they just keep it under some degree of control. I believe we need to both diminish the number of polluters, but also determine a way to handle the pollution. Things like injecting CO2 into a cave somewhere is a bandage, but not a cure, making our oceans more fertile so more CO2 can become food and breathable oxygen can be a cure. I'd rather see cures than bandages. Gary

To: Sam who wrote (5727)	1/2/2009 2:16:04 AM
From: A.J. Mullen	1 Recommendation Respond to of 16955

Sam, I think we went through this last time Gary advocated fertilizing the oceans. Nutrients do stimulate growth. If you dump agricultural levels of nutrients into a body of water you'll have an enormous spike in the growth of plants. There will not be sufficient herbivores to consume the plants. Most plant cells will simply die and rot. The rot will involve the oxidation of those cells. It will consume O2 and liberate Co2. But the photosynthesis that generated the growth of the plants liberated O2 and consumed CO2. Why doesn't it all balance? It does eventually if the system is closed, but immediately the Co2 is liberated it starts to diffuse away. When the plants die, there's not enough O2 that's immediately available in the locality. Here's what you might find confusing. Gary started this off as a suggestion for removing Co2. This only occurs if the rotting process is stopped by putting the dead plant (or animal) material somewhere oxygen can't get to it. There are oxygen free areas on the ocean bed. These are stinking masses of mud full of dead organic material that you wouldn't want close to your house or on the bottom of your shoe. In fact the nutrients in the open ocean are much lower than those involved in die-offs that are reported in newspapers. Even the relatively highly enriched waters in the deep water are orders of magnitude (10s, 100s, 1,000s of times)lower than those found in agricultural run-off. If we were able to overturn the ocean, an idea I'm sceptical of, then it could boost the biological productivity of an area. I expect most of the increased growth would be consumed by herbivores and go up through the foodweb. Deep ocean water comes to the surface naturally off the coast of Southern California and off the West coast of Southern Africa. These are lovely areas with rich fisheries. Ashley