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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (36348)	12/9/2012 5:11:02 AM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

"The Geographical scale is the fall-out zone downwind from the Volcano spewing the iron laden ash.." Exactly... just a patch of the globe, relatively small. "The Time scale depends upon how long it takes those phytoplankton to consume the available iron before it sinks to the ocean floor of its own accord" Exactly; relatively short time frame in human years. We're now at about 150 years of really pumping out CO2 on a global scale, which in turn has changed, among other things, the temperature, pH, and salinity of all the oceans. That's why plankton are decreasing. You wouldn't be feeling well, either, if we upped your temperature, dropped yer pH, and changed your blood sodium in either direction, even if we gave you a shot of iron. There is nothing to suggest that turning the 7 seas totally into plankton will do anything but make an unnoticible dent in our carbon production, at best. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that there will always be a limiting element in a population bubble. Fertilize the Gulf of Mexico with NPK, fer instance, use up all the oxygen, and create a dead zone. There is also plenty of evidence to suggest that humans aren't any smarter than yeast; we're just a bit more articulate. We're actually able to talk about why we can find reasons to ignore changes in our life support system. Or not; maybe they do, on their micro-level, and we're just not able to detect it. - The Iron Hypothesis is elegant from a global engineering standpoint because a small amount of hematites (micrometre-sized iron particles) could have a considerable effect on the atmosphere. "Give me a half a tanker of iron and I'll give you the next ice age," Martin once said jokingly. The reality may be much more modest: tests in 2002 suggested that between 10,000 and 100,000 carbon atoms are sunk for each iron atom added to the water, which means that it might be possible to sequester 1 billion tonnes of CO2 for as little as 30,000 tonnes of iron. To put this number into perspective, this is about 10% of CO2 humans have produced in year 2011 alone. Furthermore, oceanographers realise that the amount of seeding has to be carefully controlled. Too large a bloom of phytoplankton may cause releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which would not be desirable. Furthermore, algae may be not the only beneficiaries of the added iron: in some ocean fertilization experiments the initial increase in algae biomass and uptake of atmospheric CO2 was quickly reversed by increased bacterial activity, which recycles the carbon back into the surface water and thus reverses any previous uptake of anthropogenic CO2 by the iron fertilized ocean. en.wikipedia.org