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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (6882)	4/4/2009 1:27:56 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Well, FWIW, he includes the following essays in his bibliography: 1988 John H. Martin and S.E. Fitzwater, "Iron Deficiency limits phytoplankton growth in the north-east Pacific Subarctic." Nature 331: 341-43. 1990 John H. Martin, "Glacial-Interglacial CO2 Change: The Iron Hypothesis." Paleoceanography 5: 1-13. 1996 Kenneth H. Coate, et al., "A Massive Phytoplankton Bloom Induced by an Ecosystem-Scale Iron Fertilization Experiment in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean." Nature 383: 495-501. 2000 Philip W. Boyd, et al., "A Mesoscale Phytoplankton Bloom in the Polar Southern Ocean Stimulated by Iron Fertilization." Nature 407: 695-702. aip.org No one can include everything--there is just too much. I know that you believe that the Iron Hypothesis is one simple and potentially very effective answer to the carbon problem. I've encouraged you in the past to write to places like Woods Hole and a German group (I forget the name offhand) that has done some experiments on it to find out more about why that approach hasn't been pursued more and what problems have been encountered. I can't claim to know the answer myself. It does seem on the face of it like an elegant way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere and to the bottom of the ocean. I just know what I've read--that people have done experiments with it and have found it to be problematic.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (6882)	4/4/2009 7:34:55 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Phytoplankton normally help with the drawdown of CO2, as you've mentioned before. This is an important function, because if there is too much CO2 then the oceans start to acidify, which is exactly what we're seeing. Acidic oceans kill off marine life, which ultimately threatens human life as our food sources disappear. As CO2 levels increase and the earth warms, it has another insidious effect. It warms surface level water and disrupts ocean layer mixing, which is critical to pulling key nutrients up to surface level, which stimulates phytoplankton growth. If levels of phytoplankton are plummeting due indirectly to rising CO2 levels, then we have two problems. CO2 drawdown doesn't occur as rapidly in nutrient-poor oceans (which occur due to lack of cool and warm water mixing) as we'd like and marine life continues to be adversely impacted by lower levels of phytoplankton and continued ocean acidification. So yet another reason to be concerned about rising CO2 levels. Turns out excess CO2 is causing all sorts of nasty things to happen.