Okay, I know that climate change is a hot button topic right now.

I understand that talking about climate change is a great way to get elected, or gain funding for some researcher's pet project. I get that.

I am all for reducing industrial and automotive waste and improving our overall energy efficiency.

What I don't approve of is irresponsible tinkering with processes we don't understand. Link As an example, the folks in the link are dumping ("seeding") iron into the ocean near the Galapagos in an effort to encourage plankton to bloom and thereby "speed up" the absorption of atmospheric CO2. There seems to be a blindness to the overall interconnectedness of the biosystem here and a failure to account for the possible outcomes in search of achieving one small goal of improving CO2 absorption.

This is not the only such proposal. A simple internet search will disclose numerous plans to artificially and intentionally affect the CO2 cycle, etc. - or other equally precipitous plans and proposals designed to correct a perceived effect (human caused global warming) - when the causes of that effect are poorly understood (and the existence/extent of which is likely but far from certain).

Having grown up in LA I know that combined government, industry and individual efforts at pollution reduction can be, and are, successful. I think pollution reduction is the right, and responsibe thing to do.

I do not think it is responsible to start trying to 'correct' the problem when the parameters of the perceived problem are so poorly understood. (I also see such efforts as, ultimately, an excuse to not change our polluting processes by creating compensating technology - which, experience tells me, will have unforseen negative consequences.)

Thesis: Responsible climate change efforts should focus on reducing pollution and improving efficiency. It is irresponsible to perform large scale attempts to contain one gas at the possible detriment of an large local ecosystem.

[/Rant]

Thoughts?

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Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
- Goethe

Jump in with both feet!
- Me, indulging my inner eight-year-old

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"Are you a mad-hatter that just types what he wishes, or have you actually any physics training?"
Occam's Ghost to Grant Hutchison.

Nothing new here. There are, always have been, and always will be well-meaning but ignorant and misguided nuts on every side of any issue.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I had a long posting about this in one of the recent AGW threads (and I'm too lazy to search it out). My gut feeling is that humans will not undertake any of these large scale "terraforming" projects (iron seeding, sun shades in orbit, etc.). We barely seem to have the technological ability and political will to do things like increasing efficiency, look at alternative energy sources, and slow down our rate of deforrestation. But that's just my opinion.

I also think, whether we admit it or not, that we are doing large-scale modifications of our planet's atmosphere, by introducing all the CO2 and other polutants. I'm not arguing that this large-scale modification justifies another one, and I agree that if we decided to go ahead and "do" something, we have to be mightly careful that we don't make things worse with our fix.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Generally speaking these schemes aren't science, they are engineering. Science itself can't really be irresponsible, but you can use the results of science irresponsibly. For example, the Haber process can be used to make explosives or fertilzer, but science itself isn't really irresponsible, it's a way of enabling us to understand the world around us and the universe. Science allows us to understand what is causing global warming and ways to prevent it. Economics, or for most part simple accounting, shows us the most practical, cost effective methods (which are almost always simply reducing CO2 and methane emissions).

Most grand engineering schemes to stop climate change are impractical. Many are just silly. Seeding parts of the ocean to promote plankton growth is not and may be cost effective. A considerable amount of responsible study has been done to try to ensure that no unexpected unwanted results will occur as a result of it. While we can't be completely certain nothing untoward will happen, it's a matter of taking a small risk to mitigate a certain danger.

Even if it does work and does get implemented on a large scale, it's still just a band-aid. The sources of the problem-- too many people on one planet, making too much CO2-- will still be there. It's like getting a liver transplant while still binge-drinking every night.

Solving those problems won't happen with a quick fix. It took a couple of centuries to get to this point, it'll probably take that long to get past it.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

To stabilize climate change and prevent further warming, CO2 emissions need to be cut by about half. Australia plans to achieve this by 2050. This seems kind of slow to me. But pretty much all developed countries has expressed willingness to commit to this goal, except the United States and perhaps Canada (not sure of their position). Many developing nations including China have expressed willingness to achieve real reductions in CO2 emissions despite expanding economies and populations.

"Expressing willingness", translated from Diplomatican, means "talk is cheap".

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

It's better than the U.S. A country that is still very poor by developed world standards has offered to sign a binding agreement in 2009 agreeing to real cuts in carbon emissions while the richest nation in the world refuses to commit to any reductions. The agreement is being put off until 2009 in the hope that by then the United States will be willing to participate in the process. When people in the United States use China as a reason to do nothing about climate change they are divorced from reality.

Talking about planting a tree gets you a silver service meal.

Planting a tree just gets your hands dirty. Then the next thing you know there is a silver service meal where complains are made about people with dirty hands.

You just can't win.

So I tried to be an impartial observer and even that is difficult. Who would have thought doing nothing would be such an effort. It plays havoc with the moods and you still don't get a meal.

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

Would it be fair to say that this ocean-seeding project is deliberately small scale? In other words, has the study confined its conclusions to the local effects?

I ask because some might complain that such attempts to manipulate the environment on a large scale - globally, perhaps - are irresponsible when we don't sufficiently understand the global ecosystem.

Note: I inserted the word 'not' in your quote above. Is that correct?

It has been done before on a small scale and what is being done now is also on a small scale. The ocean that is being seeded is basically desert. That is, it doesn't support much life. Seeding with iron is like watering part of the desert, it allows it to sustain more life. Besides removing carbon from the atmosphere it could also help fish stocks, but obviously it would have to be done fairly continuously for this to happen. If negative effects are found it is a simple matter to stop seeding and the ocean will return to desert, much the same as if we stopped watering an area of desert on land. If the current operation is successful, safe and cost effective, it may be expanded. Currently there is a lot of empty ocean, largely empty of life that can be used.

Thanks for pointing that out. It's a little thing, but makes for a big difference in meaning.

Yer welcome.

Well, I applaud the efforts you describe and only wish the US would get on board. I am sure there are many, many global warming research projects ongoing in this country (the US, I mean), just without much support from the current administration.

Even ignoring other issues, I still think it is an open question whether ocean seeding with iron will even help.
University of California website

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

It apparently helps, but exactly how much does it help and is it cost effective compared to say replacing old coal thermal plants with low emission sources of power is a question that needs to be answered.

Again we are talking about seeding the ocean intentionally to attempt to absorb our carbon waste.

Since plankton forms the most basic level of the food chain, I think it is irresponsible to destabilize the entire ecosystem merely to speed up the absorption of our waste carbon.

The possiblity of intentionally taking steps that unintentionally result in "ocean anoxia and resultant methanogenesis" (quoted from link above) doesn't seem responsible to me.

Los Angeles succeeded in cleaning up much of the smog that was a national joke in the early 80's, but faces new threats. The wacky ideas to compensate are not nearly as successful as efforts to reduce the emissions in the first place.

Despite this, particulate emissions are a rising threat.

Reduction of polluting sources is better science and engineering than finding sumps (or excuses) that allow industry and consumers to continue to use less efficient technologies that continue to pollute. The benefits of reducing emissions are proven science:

Link
Bold mine

__________________
Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
- Goethe

Jump in with both feet!
- Me, indulging my inner eight-year-old

*** *** ***

"Are you a mad-hatter that just types what he wishes, or have you actually any physics training?"
Occam's Ghost to Grant Hutchison.

Well yes, I think that would be irresponsible too. Fortunately no one is planning to do that. The areas of the ocean that have been seeded and are going to be seeded are quite small in relation to the total size of the oceans. Currently what is being done is quite experimental in scope. I don't really see any way it could destabilize the entire ecosystem. And even if much larger areas were seeded I don't see how that could destabilize the ecosystem either. What people are trying to do is find out if it is an effective way to prevent or lessen damage to the ecosystem due to global warming.

Maybe we should just put a cork in this thing:
http://www.oar.noaa.gov/research/papers07/venting.html

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Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. ---Cardinal Wolsey (1475-1530)

Here in coastal Florida, we just got over a month or so of Red Tide. That's severe respiratory problems, red, oozing eyes in land mammals; fatal respiratory trauma in aquatic mammals and fish. It was not a fun time. The cause? Iron rich dust from the Sahara, blown across the Atlantic and deposited in the Gulf Stream, eaten by algae, which, in turn, are consumed by animals up the food chain.
Pardon me if I don't think dumping the same thing in such an environmentally sensitive area as the Galapagos is a good idea.

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"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards." Philip K. Dick
No matter how strong, or brave, or pure of heart you may be; sometimes the dragon wins!

People have proposed iron fertilisation of the ocean for two distinct purposes:
(a) to increase the fish yield of the ocean
(b) to sequester carbon
Purpose (a) requires the algae so promoted to be eaten by creatures up the food chain, possibly in more than one step to get to animals that are desirable catch.
Purpose (b) is best served if the algae are not eaten but rather die and sink to the deep ocean floor, since although everything sinks in the end, after it is eaten it may no longer sink in the form of carbonate mineral, but rather the CO2 may be released at some stage. Though at least the carbon is temporarily sequestered.

The wikipedia discussion on iron fertilisation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization suggests that several experiments on fertilisation at modest scales (1000 kg) have been successful in creating algae, but it mostly gets eaten, at least at that scale. It is therefore alleged that carbon may not be sequestered permanently on the sea-floor - though clearly it is sequestered at least temporarily in the eaters. That is possibly good for (a) but may be bad for (b). Proponents of (b) suggest if it were done at a larger scale a large fraction wouldn't get eaten. Though that would defeat the purpose of (a). Kunzig's excellent book "Mapping the Deep" suggests that unnaturally fertilised blooms appear to produce populations of low diversity and different from naturally fertilised blooms; these may not serve the needs of the higher animals we want to eat, rather like nitrate run-off into freshwater doesn't end up as trout.

The book also gives good reason for that thinking that the idea that deep ocean iron fertilisation will produce coastal red tide blooms is demonstrable nonsense, since such waters have abundant iron. Red tide is a problem not just in warm places like Florida, but also temperate waters such as off Scotland, Norway, Patagonia. I suspect it is associated with our various pollutions from fish-farming, agriculture and forestry.