As I recall, while it does cause significant blooms in the areas that you seed, it also induces nutrient depletion in other regions, suppressing growth there and potentially damaging ecosystems that developed around the natural nutrient gradient. It became apparent that the “free lunch” wasn’t actually free and it was mostly just rearranging where things grew based on the interaction of various nutrient gradients. The net effect is therefore much smaller than originally thought and there is a risk that it inadvertently reduces the output of important fisheries due to complex oceanic chemistry interactions that are not fully understood.
I don’t think much has changed with respect to our understanding of it. It is currently filed under “probably a bad idea” as far as I know. But that’s why we do the science.
FWIW, I think the danger of excessive blooms is overstated. Most of the ocean is a desert nutritionally.
Iron fertilization may still be pointless since the effectiveness is being debated afaik. On the other hand if it does work well for a competitive price compared to other methods, I would rather have a fish in the middle of the ocean full of algal neurotoxins and lower global temperature than the same fish cooked. No need to at it though.
If iron is the rate limiting ingredient, then when you seed an area with iron a bunch of other nutrients are consumed in the process that currently are not being consumed. This changes the chemical equilibrium driving those other nutrient flows in the ocean and may stop critical nutrients flows into areas that rely on them. Any major local change to nutrient balance changes the equilibrium and thermodynamic gradients of the entire system.
In hindsight this is kind of obvious. There are similar equilibrium problems in large chemical reactors too and the ocean is just a giant reactor vessel to a first approximation. I think the original assumption was that the ocean is so big that no one would notice but long distance effects on local nutrient balances were observed such that increased sequestration productivity in one area was at least partially offset by losses of productivity in other areas due to new nutrient bottlenecks.
In principle modeling the entire system would allow one to inject the right nutrients at the right handful of spots to maximize aggregate sequestration performance with minimal risk. Building such models is still very much beyond us.
suppose there's a flow of nutrients of type A from area one to area two. Currently, iron is the chokepoint in nutrient consumption of A, so that A is never completely consumed while going from one to two.
By adding excess iron into area one, or in the middle of the region between this flow from area one to two, you now have the possibility to consume A completely as iron no longer limits A's consumption.
So what happens to area two's consumption of A, if it became more scarce? May be nothing - or may be you now have another choke point of resources that wasn't there previously, leading to a change. If you weren't sure if this change would occur, or dont know, perhaps adding iron to area one is not a good idea, until such outcomes have been studied and acertained first.
I am starting to think China will be the first to experiment with this in large enough scale.
Second aren't we already doing large scale iron fertilization of the oceans? Not "intentionally" but simply rivers with human economic or residential activity along them.
aren't we already doing large scale iron fertilization of the oceans
1. Incredibly cost effective 2. Mimic natural effects 3. Could pretyy easily cause anotger ice age if miscalculated
I wonder at what point the potential benefits will outweigh the potential risks for using these geoengineering techniques. Cant be far off, right?
Sulfur dioxide injection could halt global warming in its tracks for a measly $18 billion a year. I wonder if a vigilante billionaire climate activist gonna take a try in the next few decades..
I think other nations will demand they stop - with threats of sanctions - simply because there are other nations who now depend on the higher temperatures and increased agricultural output.
Could they? At least for stratospheric aerosol injection it would be easy to just stop doing it if things seemed like they were tipping. It doesn't happen _that_ fast, we'd have time to notice and react.
I'd say that things are not bad enough for anyone with the means to take the risk. When the things get bad enough for the Overton window to admit geoengineering, it may be too late for simple and affordable solutions, as usual.
(It would be ironic if the world's response to fossil CO2 emission is to mandate extra high sulfur jet fuel, but nothing would surprise me)
The hard part is actually measuring how much carbon you can sequester per kg of 'fake' whale poop.
Recent Bloomberg video: https://youtu.be/ZnXHJD0UI5U?t=812
(Disclosure - I am peripherally involved.)
Do we have a rough estimate of this number? I assume the cost of whale poop can be low once it is mass manufactured. But the real cost is the actual deployment?
Later .. 200 litres of 'aqua food' for one tonne of sequestered carbon.
Our Annual CO2 emission is about 40B tons. In order to be Carbon Negative we need to capture 60 - 80B tons / year.
That is about 80B x 200 Litres of Aqua Food. Or 16 Trillion Litres. Roughly 3 to 4 times the amount of soft drinks Coca cola sold per year.
And doing it continuously for 20 years we would revert back to about 80s.
I'm no ocean ecologist, but it seems like there might be several consequences to adding billions of tons of plankton to the ocean
Carbon capture is for offsetting historical emissions, and the few niche ones that are so hard to replace that we'll need decades of research.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pirate_Global_Warm...
Being a get-rich-quick alternative to whaling, piracy captured enough of the workforce to slow down the extinction of whales.
I jest, of course, but it's fun to look for ways a mere correlation might be a causal relationship.
It has lots of niches where it's actually cheaper anyway. It just can't be the dominant form of energy generation.
The Western mind will think it is "unnatural" and playing God with nature on a completely unprecedented scale but large-scale geo engineering like this is probably the few options we have left.
But there are wobbly second order effects and the curves finally settle in the third order, often further away from our initial imagination.
Iatrogenics is the branch of science studying outcomes where interventions make the situation worse off.
Not a judgement on this or any other method, but a recurring pattern to be aware of.
A lot of modernity problems would be solved if those in power learned to sit on their hands and do nothing.
Very, very few animals can handle the pressure differential between the top and bottom of the ocean. It's pretty much just whales, and they can only do it because they're so goddamn big
It's not like Earth is this perfectly spinning top that some people want to give a nudge. It's more like it's already crashing about while we keep whacking it harder and harder with billions more barrels of oil injected into the atmosphere every year.
I agree we shouldn't recklessly throw new shit at it, but incremental experiments might be worthwhile.
Human's have been geoengineering for millenia via clear cutting of forests, bio engineering of crops, fertilization of fields, damming of rivers, and other activities. While there will certainly be consequences and side effects, even a partial sequestering of ~20B tonnes of CO2 per year would meet the Kyoto protocol.
Are the consequences of Geo Engineering so disastrous that we should accept the worst case scenarios of global warming.
Oil consumption didn't reduce coal consumption, it just added a new energy type. Same for natural gas.
So far they've been right. Decreased coal usage in developed countries has been offset by increased coal usage, of the now cheaper coal, in developing countries. German electric consumers are effectively subsidizing Chinese and Indian consumers.
Eventually that will turn around, if only because we start running out of fossil fuels, and the thesis will fall apart. But it will take far longer than we have, and we have far more fossil fuels than we can afford to extract and burn. That means the ONLY way to address climate change, which is a global problem, is through technological innovation. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that.
That means making green alternatives that are better, and we're making some good progress on that. Electric cars are better in most ways for most uses except price. Solve that last one and they'll quickly displace combustion vehicles for most uses. Range is already good enough most of the time for most of the people.
It may also mean doing some geoengineering to soften the impact of global warming that will continue for multiple centuries if we don't intervene.
Mistletoe•14h ago
ryandamm•14h ago
This is one of the few carbon capture approaches that appears to be able to approach global scale, so I'm rooting for it. Even enhanced weathering suffers from needing to move billions of tons of rock, but scattering trace minerals seems pretty high leverage. The sheer mass of material that must be removed from the atmosphere is otherwise very intimidating.
__MatrixMan__•13h ago
As uncomfortable as it is to experiment on the only planet you have, even worse would be to wait too long and then, in a panic, try to do everything that might possibly work all at once and to as extreme a degree as possible.
baruch•10h ago
pfdietz•12h ago
ErigmolCt•9h ago