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

To: Land Shark who wrote (40165)	5/26/2013 11:35:55 PM
From: Sdgla	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Pacific Ocean Hacker Speaks OutIs Russ George a "rogue geoengineer," salmon savior or something else? By David Biello IRON BLOOM?: Satellite images may show the bloom Russ George and his colleagues created by adding iron sulfate and iron oxide to the Pacific Ocean off the coast of British Columbia.Image: Courtesy of NASA MODIS AQUA This past July Russ George served as chief scientist on a cruise to fertilize the northeastern Pacific Ocean with iron—the latest in a long string of similar, and usually controversial, efforts he has led. He has been attempting to commercialize such ocean fertilization efforts for years, including setting up the failed company Planktos. In parallel, he has also been promoting plans to generate carbon credits for companies and governments, allowing them to emit greenhouse gases in exchange for replanting carbon dioxide-absorbing forests from Canada to Europe. The ocean fertilization experiment is similar. The idea is that by providing missing nutrients, a plankton bloom can be created. Such a bloom sucks up CO2 as it grows, like plants on land, and then, potentially, buries that carbon at sea as the tiny corpses sink to the bottom. But at the same time, George is hoping the bloom will trickle up the food chain and feed salmon, restoring their historic abundance. Of course, if the bloom is eaten, then animal metabolism will reemit the CO2, sending it back to the atmosphere and defeating the purpose of reducing CO2 emissions, as prior scientific studies have shown. George says he is convinced that iron fertilization can be a solution to global warming, and he's pitched the idea to everyone from the Haida people of British Columbia to would-be " seasteaders" looking for a business proposition for their floating cities. Given the controversy surrounding George's latest bid—which is billed as an attempt to restore salmon populations but also aims to earn saleable carbon credits— Scientific American spoke with him on October 19. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] How did this Haida Salmon Restoration Corp. project start? This is a village project. They started it, they own it, they run it. It's not the Russ George rogue geoengineering story. You've seen the vile and vehement twisting of this story. You can probably imagine how I feel. I was the faith and trust and hopes and dreams of a village whose environment is dying, whose culture is dying because the salmon are dying. And now the world is saying they were duped. So did the iron fertilization work? We don't know. A really famous scientist once told me: "Russ, keep in mind: you don't know." The correct attitude is: "Data, speak to me." Do the work, get the data, let it speak to you and tell you what the facts might be. Don't assume you have this prescient knowledge of how everything is. But we do know that in 2008 when 450 million sockeye salmon left the Fraser River, the expectation was that fewer than one million would return. More and more baby salmon go to sea and fewer and fewer adult salmon return. But in August 2008 a volcano dusted ash, and the northeastern Pacific Ocean turned into a massive plankton bloom. The plankton bloom was of larger proportion than what we did in the area. So 40 million fish came home instead of a million. That offered some hope. There have been three volcanic events in the last 100 years paired with record sockeye salmon runs. That's pretty good data. Those fish don't do fishy science, they do good science. Their physical bodies are data, you can track where they've been because of the discrete isotopic characteristics of different parts of the ocean. 1 2 3 4 5 Next » Rights & Permissions

To: Land Shark who wrote (40165)	5/27/2013 11:40:02 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 86356

In his defense, he's not a lunatic. Only Very Special People sit on their TV to watch their couch. A Contrary was a member of a Native North American tribal group who adopted behavior that was deliberately the opposite of other tribal members. The Contraries were found among the historical Amerindian tribes of the Great Plains. They were a small number of individuals loosely organized into a cult that was devoted to the practice of contrary behavior. The Contraries are related, in part, to the clown organizations of the Plains Indians, as well as to Plains military societies that contained reverse warriors. [1] The Lakota word heyoka, which translates as clown or opposites, serves as a collective title for these institutionalized forms of contrary behavior of the Plains Indians. When Lakota Indians first saw European clowns, they identified them with their own term for clowns, heyoka. The social role of the Plains Indian clowns was ceremonial since they performed primarily during rituals, dances and feasts. Unlike the clowns, the special role of the Contraries was not restricted to brief performances, rituals or the warpath. It was their everyday life. The Contraries of the Plains Indians were unique and historically unprecedented. John Plant examined the ethnological phenomena of contrary behavior, particularly in the tribes of the North American Plains Indians. [5] The Contraries of the Plains Indians were individuals committed to an extraordinary life-style in which they consistently and continually did the opposite of what others normally do. They thus turned all social conventions into their opposites. On a certain level, the Contrary acted as an antagonist to his own people. [6] Contrary behavior means deliberately doing the opposite of what others routinely or conventionally do. It was usually accompanied by inverse speech, in which one says the opposite of what one actually means. For example, “no!” expresses “yes!” And “hello” means “goodbye”. To say “Grandfather, go away!” would be an invitation for him to come. en.wikipedia.org