Russ George knew how to fight global warming: Grow rainforests' worth of plantlife in the open ocean, plantlife that would suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He had the boat, the money and the team to make it happen. Everything was going according to plan—that is, until the environmentalists mobilized
Posted 07.01.2008 at 11:53 am
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Phytoplankton: Getty Images
As the Sea Shepherds made their threats in midsummer, the Weatherbird was still docked near Ft. Lauderdale, three months behind schedule. Planktos officials blamed the delay on supplies; it was harder than they had anticipated to get hold of scarce scientific equipment, they said at the time. But by mid-fall, the company was concocting a new plan, one that would allow it to avoid an attack at sea and, perhaps, the negative publicity that would evidently accompany any tinkering in the vicinity of the Galápagos. On November 5, the Weatherbird finally left Florida. Due to what the company called "the frontier nature of the research," though, it kept the ship's destination confidential.
The boat stopped to refuel in Bermuda and then cruised east across the Atlantic. By early December, the Weatherbird neared the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory 150 miles off the western coast of Morocco. The plan was to take on final supplies—including a 100-ton load of iron particles and, according to George, a team of local scientists friendly to the cause—and begin the first iron-seeding experiment in nearby seas.
But rather than welcome the self-declared "emergency eco-restoration" mission, Spanish authorities radioed Captain Willcox when the Weatherbird was still 18 miles offshore. The ship was forbidden from entering the country, they said. The "toxic waste" they intended to dump would not be spilled in Spanish waters.
"Give me half a tanker of iron, and I'll give you an ice age." Oceanographer John Martin's quip to a 1988 gathering at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts made plain the potential of iron seeding. At the time the director of California's Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, Martin was the first scientist to propose that carbon might be sequestered by fertilizing the ocean with iron. Martin, who died in 1993, has been proved prescient in his vision that the world would soon want to rid the atmosphere of carbon. And he thought iron could play a major role.
Certain ocean regions, Martin noted, are rich in nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that encourage the growth of phytoplankton, the tiny plant life that forms the base of the oceanic food chain. But those regions are also short on iron, a key micronutrient that phytoplankton need to thrive. Martin predicted that sprinkling iron dust in well-chosen areas, such as the nutrient-rich waters near the Galápagos Islands, would cause huge blooms of plant life that would pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Eventually, microscopic marine critters known as zooplankton would eat the carbon-rich phytoplankton. Their fecal pellets would in turn eventually sink, storing carbon in the deep ocean for hundreds of years or more.
Since Martin's now-famous sound bite (delivered, he later joked, in his best Dr. Strangelove accent), a dozen iron-fertilization experiments have been conducted worldwide. Although Russ George repeatedly cites these studies as satisfactory precursors to his own voyage, in fact only three of the 12 studies conclusively demonstrated that iron seeding sequesters carbon for any considerable period of time, and even those studies made no attempt to track the long-term effects of the iron addition. The longest experiments lasted no more than six weeks, a consequence of the $25,000 to $35,000 a day it costs to keep a research ship at sea. "Every time we add iron, we create more plankton, which take up CO2," says Ken Buesseler, a scientist at Woods Hole who has helped lead several iron-fertilization experiments. "But there's a big uncertainty about the long-term fate of that carbon. You've got to get it deep enough so that when those plants decompose, it doesn't just let the CO2 out back into the atmosphere." Research to track the carbon's eventual fate is "the next step," he says.
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Sounds like the guy deserves a chance. It's doubtful that this small scale experiment will have much effect one way or the other. Seems as if it's worth a try.
As for the noble words that we don't want a 'quick fix' -- well, sometimes science is the answer. Reducing the effects of pollution is as valid as reducing pollution activity.
It's pretty sad that someone's trying to actually DO something about the problem of climate change, and these eco-terrorists who think they know better have to sabotage the effort. Couldn't the Planktos seeding have been treated as an experiment? Let them do their thing and closely watch the results? Data gathered would have validated the technique and calibrated the results for Carbon offset.
An even worse thing is that anyone with a Climate Change solution will now think twice before attempting anything.
While long-term fixes and structural changes are a good thing, quick fixes and band-aids have their place too. We have to fight Climate Change and the energy crisis on all fronts. Every little bit helps.
I live about 3 meters above sea level, and I take every solution, band aid or not, very seriously indeed.
It's pretty sad that someone's trying to actually DO something about the problem of climate change, and these eco-terrorists who think they know better have to sabotage the effort. Couldn't the Planktos seeding have been treated as an experiment? Let them do their thing and closely watch the results? Data gathered would have validated the technique and calibrated the results for Carbon offset.
An even worse thing is that anyone with a Climate Change solution will now think twice before attempting anything.
While long-term fixes and structural changes are a good thing, quick fixes and band-aids have their place too. We have to fight Climate Change and the energy crisis on all fronts. Every little bit helps.
I live about 3 meters above sea level, and I take every solution, band aid or not, very seriously indeed.
As someone who was involved in the Planktos project, I am still surprised by how many people focused on the “profit motive”, which seemed to be main objection of the environmentalists. Profit was never the main goal of Planktos. The goal was to research the huge potential benefit of iron fertilization to help restore the health of the oceans.
The reason Planktos was organized as a for-profit business was it was otherwise impossible to get funding to do the work. Keep in mind, before Planktos and the huge amount of publicity it generated, there was little or no public awareness of iron fertilization as a technique and very limited funding for the ocean science community to study the field.
Above all we need to remember that the oceans are in a very bad state, and getting worse, due to enormous human pressures. There is no political willpower to stop this human impact. Overfishing and pollution will continue. Therefore we need techniques to help restore the health of the oceans…and iron fertilization is our best thing we have so far. It needs to be researched, understood, and developed fully.
For those interested in the continuing saga of Planktos and the quest for ecorestoration of seas and trees you might find the new Planktos-Science (dot) com web pages of interest.
Ecorestoration of our seas has never been more critically important. If we help Mother Ocean she will absolve, as opposed to dissolve, our sins of emission.
Pico
There's still no replacement for cutting CO2 altogether.
Scottar
As physicists and weathermen know, oceans are not heated due to air temperature, It's the reverse. Air temperatures are heating from the ocean's temperature, after all, it's what drives hurricanes and tropical storms.
So what's heating the oceans? It's not CO2! So what is causing global warming-uh, oh, excu'se me, it's now- 'climate change'.
What are they going to call it next, Gore's folly?
jnsmith So if he had gone and got a grant for $10,000,000 From These People That Were Protesting And Shuting him down! He would be in the Ocean now seeding it down with thier blessing. Right!
It's just nut jobs fighting nut jobs. Move along folks. Nothing to see here.