Under the Iron Sea: YES, tech and science could SAVE the planet

Iron is not enough

1. You need a whole laundry list of microelements and some of them are even higher on the "naughty" list than Ferrous Sulphate. The regulations unfortunately are not taking into account fact that you are dumping them in micro-quantities (if not nano-quantities) and to an exact measured spec. They just say no. There is also a way around it - agriculture has already done that for microelements.

2. The guy who dumped it off British Columbia is probably full of it. That is not a part of the ocean that is anywhere near being a marine desert so the benefit of seeding it with extra microelements should be NIL.

Temperate oceans are regularly stirred by winter storms so they do not go into a desert state. There is an excellent proxy for ocean desertification - visibility. The visibility off British Columbia is is usually sub-5m dropping down to sub-1m during the algae growth season. That is _NOT_ a desert, no point to seed it. Now, bang in the middle of the Indian ocean, visibility is 30m+. Now that is what I would call a desert.

Additionally, the whole thing should be controlled in a very careful manner - if you overseed the algae will bloom too fast and the fish population will not catch up resulting in a Black Sea or Mexican Bay style "overfished sea" style bloom.

You are probably right Tim... sadly.

V.Similar to the carp about "vaping"...

Same sort of people, same sort of objection...

Not... Oh deep joy, we've solved that problem... Let's go and do something else...

Oh no... Rather.... Get your BALLLS off of my green!

It's a complex issue

The whole climate change and man-made global warming issue must be like any large thing. Its big and scary but there are lots of sides to it, lots of angles. Some see it as a threat to their existence, others want to worship it as some kind of vengeful natural spirit. Some see it as an opportunity to eek out a living or something to pin their own political agenda to. Some want to address it as a series of technical or organisational problems that may be solvable.

I hate to burst your bubble but ...

I hate to burst your bubble, but the story about the guy who dumped iron off the coast of BC in 2012 is full of holes. We can start with his claim about the size of Fraser River salmon run. Reputable news reports put it at about 21 million, not 72 million as he claimed. There were 72 million was for all of BC, but that is quite a different matter from claiming 72 million for the Fraser River run alone.

The other hole is that the area he dumped the iron in is not nutrient poor. Ocean currents carry nutrients from land and produce phytoplankton blooms, and he dumped his iron right in the middle of one of the richest of these.

There was an exceptionally large salmon run for BC in 2014, but it was due to two factors. One was that salmon populations go in cycles, and 2010 (two years before the iron dump) was an unusually good year. They laid a lot of eggs and the 2014 run is their progeny returning. So in other words, it was due to events which took place 2 years before he dumped iron in the ocean. This larger return was predictable based on existing records, so it should have come as no surprise. I'm getting the feeling though that claiming credit for predictable natural phenomenon is part of his business plan.

The other cause was that unusually warm waters in the Pacific drove the salmon north from US waters into Canada. Salmon don't like warm water and are sensitive to changes of even a couple of degrees. The Americans were left with empty nets while the Canadians got all the fish. Normally, half of the run would go to the US, so warmer ocean temperatures effectively doubled the size of the BC run without actually increasing the total number of fish in the ocean, aside from the above mentioned increase due to the good year in 2010.

Oh but wait, warmer ocean temperatures disrupting fishing? Am I allowed to mention that here?

As for seeding the oceans with iron as a solution for global warming, the Quirks and Quarks podcast (highly recommended, by the way) had an interview with one of the scientists a while ago. His or her (I can't remember which) conclusion about it was that while it may possibly be worth while for increasing fish yields (more research is required to answer that), as a solution for locking up CO2 to prevent global warming it was a drop in the bucket. Very few areas of the ocean are actually limited by lack of iron, and those are mainly near Antarctica. When they did add iron, there was a limited effect because there are so many other bottlenecks to ocean phytoplankton growth.

So a guy dumps some shit in the sea and next years salmon run is huge

so did he have a tardis - these buggers live at least three years and nearer 7 for most of them

And did he compare it with the run on the asian side to see if that was different? The amount he dumped couldnt have affected more than a miniscule percentage of the pacific so any claims he makes are pretty much bonkers in terms of wildlife effects.

You must also remember that if we start fertilising then we will seriously change the balance of power amongst the various species - see the current jellyfish swarms and red tides around the med etc - and may wipe out a huge food source.

Its funny how all the unseen problems with this can be solved whereas the technically easy problems associated with green energy are too complicated to even consider!

i'd wait a bit

whoa there big fella ..why would you go and upset a natural cycle ? C02 is not bad ..check the extra tonnes of farmed food over the last 5yrs guess what caused it ? then we have the next 35+yrs of cooling ohh yes natural cycle what go's up must come down .. by 2025 earth temps will be 3.5 deg c cooler and hopefully al gore and friends will be in jail ..

C02 whats left of this will help warm the planet after 2050 when the sun wakes up and the cycle will continue . until the next big glacial event (read Pleistocene )

No dumping required!

When I first heard of seeding the oceans, the proposals didn't involve any dumping. Rather the deployment of big tubes, that would (powered by the waves) draw up sufficient nutrients from the ocean depths to seed algal bloom, which would then grow on sunlight. For example, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070926-warming-solution.html.

This plan, like any other, has a downside: algal blooms are hugely damaging to existing marine ecosystems. It could also precipitate large-scale climate events of its own if, for example, ocean currents are affected. But it appears nevertheless likely to be of net benefit on balance.

Of course, if it were to happen, it will only be a matter of time before someone proposes harvesting the algae for biomass energy. And then it gets burned ....

"British Columbia, Alaska,"

Since when has British Columbia been part of Alaska?

Cooking is simple, science is not

So, 2 + 2 is 4 ? It depends on the context of those numbers. If using base 3 maths then 2 + 2 is 11. If it is 2.3 + 2.4, that is 4.7, and by rounding to integers 2 + 2 is 5. Research is funny in that experiments can be constructed to try to prove this or that, or to quantify something, but the results can then be viewed, analysed or fiddled in different ways to give different conclusions. It is important to have GOOD research that has a controlled environment and peer review, to mention just two things. It also needs funding - give me loads of money and I'll do some research, but there is no guarantee of any results, certainly not a return on that money. Anyone likely to offer anything?

Having a simple stance makes it easy to get the message across, on both sides of the argument. Sadly, that stance may not be valid but still gain unstoppable popularity. The complexity gets lost but the call for a solution grows; do this, do that, do nothing - if the stakes are high we risk picking the wrong one in our haste, perhaps making things irrevocably worse

We're doomed!

All we need to do is...

Wait, once the lights go out people will change their minds:-)

Anyway on a different note, does anyone have any experience of products that rejuvenate flooded cell lead acid batteries? Mine are just not cutting it anymore, but 12 110Ah batteries do cost a bit, so a cheaper solution would be nice.

PS the lights went out last night and the generator is f%^&ed at the moment, hence the need to get off my arse and do something about it :-)

molluscs?

I've got some "organic" slug pellets whose active ingredient is iron sulphate. I think that it's supposed to work on them (ie, kill them) by doing something to their stomach/gut. Not sure what sort of concentration is needed, but depending on how much we need to dump overboard isn't it possible that there may be an unintended consequence of killing/harming the mollusc population in the area with all the resultant knock-on effects to the ecosystem that that might have? I know you said "desert zone" and all that, but most deserts are not devoid of life and it seems prudent to do research into what actually does live there before blanketing vast areas with something that could destroy unique ecosystems and species.

PS interesting to read that iron sulphate is a waste product. Those slug pellet manufacturers must be really minting it.

A plan with no obvious drawbacks

Changing the ecosystem of millions of cubic miles of seawater will no have no unexpected side effects - like say toxic algea blooms migrating to kill the fishing crop of a whole continent - because sudden giant man-made changes to ecosystems have always worked well.

Then of course it also means we can up our CO2 production because now we have a solution. If this can absorb 2x Britain's usage then Britain can obviously double its CO2 output, and since the solution isn't just Britain's - so can every other country in europe. And as this is in the Pacific then China and the USA can both increase their use of coal as well.

Fortunately this will be decided by economics - one group who are experts in the accurate long term prediction of complex systems and spotting unforseen side-effects.

" It's only..."

"...an increase in the occurrence of a natural process".

So is the hydrogen bomb...

Wow. How to fuck the planet big time!

Messing with an eco-system without understanding it is a recipe for disaster. What if, for example, fish move there to eat these plankton and populations drop elsewhere. Or the poo from all these extra creatures provides nutrients for things we didn't want to see explode in population.

Has myxomatosis taught us nothing?

Wait a Moment

I do remember reading a credible news article with what seemed to be good science that came to the conclusion that iron, unfortunately, wouldn't really do much good. I wish I could recall the cite, so I could point people to see it.

Ah: before the ban, according to Wikipedia, there were nine or so serious scientific studies. The current reason this is considered not worth trying is because it seems more likely to promote the blooming of harmful algae than to genuinely spur photosynthesis.

Oh: limestone is calcium carbonate, so, yes, it does remove carbon dioxide from the air when you make it.

What happend between @1940 that might have pumped up the iron concentration in the sea?

... fair number of huge iron concentrations dumped in the mid-Atlantic around then by way of unfriendly torpedoes... and 'Iron-Bottom Sound' in the Solomons only earned its name in 1942/43....

Given that it is much shallower than Atlantic I wonder if anyone has tried to measure how much new rock has formed around Savo as a result of all that corroding metal...

Hair shirts.

They wear the hair shirt to assuage their guilt, not because it achieves anything.

More FISSION! More! Now!

The answer is more fission plants. If these guys wanted a solution they would admit that they already have one and be done with it. They want the issue, not a solution. They are all misanthropes.

Nice idea, but it's looking a bit doubtful

There’s a fair bit of research going on. It’s not generally being done by actually dumping large volumes of iron in the ocean and seeing what happens, though. Geoengineering can be quite controversial so scientists often keep things reasonably quiet. The episode off Canada was a bit of a stupid stunt tbh; it was done without anything like enough monitoring in place to let us draw any very confident conclusions.

What’s generally being done is more modelling work and relatively small-scale experiments in mesocosms etc, mostly aimed at the weakest link in the chain from iron fertilisation to long-term carbon sequestration, which is (as you note) getting the carbon to sink to the seabed and be mineralised rather than rotting on the way down and ending up back in the atmosphere within a few months.

Basically creating a plankton bloom is the easy bit and nobody really questions our ability to do it. But long-term carbon export to the deep sea depends on a lot of complex biogeochemical interactions in different parts of the water column, and we need a lot more research to understand whether it’s even remotely plausible at an interesting scale. There’s limited point doing more large-scale trials until we understand the basic biogeochemistry. There have been a lot of papers on this over the last few years and my overall impression is that the results are pretty mixed, certainly not the catalogue of triumph that the boosters of the idea of iron fertilisation would have you believe.

There’s also been some interesting oceanographic work going on to try to understand how ocean circulation might affect the prospects for long-term C storage at depth. The authors of this paper http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL058799/full ran an ocean circulation model, assuming that the above problems had already been overcome and the carbon had made it a kilometre down and then seeing how long it stayed there. Their results suggested most of the carbon was brought back up to the surface by upwelling water pretty quickly - far too quickly for there to be much effect on the climate over a relevant timescale. (They were looking only at the Southern Ocean, though, which is one of the main areas where phytoplankton growth is known to be iron-limited, though not the only one, and so is often the main target for armchair geoengineers.)

My personal view is that iron fertilisation may be able to provide some benefits but is looking increasingly unlikely to have a decisive impact on anthropogenic climate change in itself. But it’s not my field and I could well be wrong.

And another thing

What's all this garbage about environmentalists == hippies?

Environmentalism may have emerged from the hippy culture (of the Whole Earth variety), but that was over 40 years ago. Today's 'environmentalists' fit no particular stereotype. They're as likely to wear Armani as tie-dye, as likely to smoke herring rather than splifs.

Time to join the 21st century, you anti-environment stalwarts!

I dont see what the problem is here...

Given that no-one's given any real evidence to suggest that research is actually being suppressed by the big bad hippies, then surely, if there's a realistic chance that this stuff should work then, in accordance with Tim's very own theories about how economies should operate, shouldnt some bold thrusting go getting venture capitalist types just leap up and offer all of the required funding?