A team of Indian and German scientists have started a 70-day ocean expedition to find out if pouring iron powder into ocean can trap greenhouse gas, CO2 from atmosphere and can keep it long enough under water to make a difference in global warming situation, according to a report by Times of India.
The scientists leaving from Cape Town, South Africa in a research ship towards a region near Antarctica plan to pour 20 tonnes of iron powder in an ocean area of approximately 300 sq km.
The idea is to stimulate a rapid blooming of phytoplankton, a microscopic algae that grows on the ocean surface.
Like all plants, phytoplankton sucks up CO2 from air and converts it to carbon-based compounds like carbohydrates.
The plant quickly dies and starts sinking, taking the carbon with it.
The team plans to observe if the dead plant sinks down enough in the ocean to make the process scientifically viable.
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7 users commented in " Pouring iron powder into ocean to fight global warming "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackAl Gore has really stepped in it this time. He could have spent the rest of his global warming career collecting money by spreading fear over events that were a century or at least half century in the future. Oh, but that wasn’t good enough for Big Al. He’s now told the biggest global warming whopper of his alarmist career:
AL GORE HAS PREDICTED THAT THE NORTHERN POLAR ICE CAP WILL BE COMPLETELY GONE IN FIVE YEARS!!!
When I heard this I assumed it was a rumor started by skeptics to make Gore look bad. It wasn’t until I viewed the video that I realized what Gore had done. Gore has started a five year credibility countdown timer ticking and it’s up to all of us to make sure that he is held accountable and proven to be a fraud when his dire prediction aimed at drumming up support doesn’t come true.
The mainstream media isn’t going to let this video see the light of day because they, unlike Al, understand the precarious position in which he has placed himself.
It is therefore up to us to spread the word about Big Al’s prediction. He must be exposed for the fear mongering opportunist that he has become.
To view the video, please visit the following site and click on the picture of Big Al holding up five fingers.
http://www.hootervillegazette.com
While visiting this site, you might want to watch a preview of the film “Not Evil, Just wrong” or watch “The Great Global Warming Swindle” which is found in the video section. Happy Viewing!!!
it might work…on the other hand, what happens if it removes too much and we end up in an ice age?
Nancy,
An ice age is one possibility. We have less than 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere today. That is extremely low in the history of the Earth - evidence shows it has usually been in the thousands of ppm.
Let’s hope they are not wildly ’successful’ and reduce atmospheric CO2 by half or more. Then the levels would be below 200 ppm.
When they fall under 200 ppm, plants can not photosynthesize and all life dies.
It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.
jtom:
Extremely low CO2 levels compared to normal in the history of the earth? Where do you get that? It’s been about 650,000 years since they were last this high.
That means that for the majority of the evolution of homo sapiens it’s been much lower than it is now. From a purely selfish point of view I want CO2 levels to provide the environment we have evolved for.
By the way, the fear you’ve got about CO2 levels getting too low is just absurd: first, the seeding can stop (the iron will sink relatively quickly), and second, if CO2 levels start to get low enough to reduce the photosynthesis, the photosynthesis of the algae stops sooner (because it’s in water with less CO2 than in the air).
The real fooling with Mother Nature that we’re doing is the massive increase in CO2 levels.
Nancy,
if the seeding is wildly successful, then the CO2 levels would start to reduce. A small study like this one would give an estimate of how much CO2 would be removed. The estimate would have to be wrong by about a factor of 1000 before we would have to worry that CO2 levels would even start to reach levels they were at before the industrial revolution.
If that happened people would stop seeding the ocean with iron. The iron sinks, so very quickly it wouldn’t be an issue. A number of other reasons exist for why CO2 couldn’t drop too fast:
1) the CO2 would be removed at a higher rate than normal only in a localized area of space (the southern oceans), and the atmosphere doesn’t mix much in one season, so only one part of the atmosphere would be very depleted
2) the northern oceans already have considerably more iron in them (from dust blown off the Sahara) and so they have more algae already, but they don’t remove such huge amounts of CO2 that this is a significant worry
3) hey, we can always burn more fossil fuels if CO2 gets too low.
In 2008, both the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the London Convention of the International Maritime Organisation – the treaty that governs the dumping of wastes at sea – enacted a global moratorium on ocean fertilization activities because of the ecological risks to the oceans and climate. Civil society groups are now calling on the German and Indian governments to respect the international moratorium on ocean fertilization and to recall LOHAFEX, the third Antarctic iron dumping expedition led by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute since 2000.
>> http://www.etcgroup.org/_page24?pub_id=710
Seems like everytime human beings try to “mess with mother nature” they screw the Earth even worse. Look at places where learned scientists have introduced species to try to fix something else we’ve screwed up.
Sericea lespedeza was first planted in the United States in 1896 by the North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station has taken over in a major way. Now an invasive noxious grass, even major heribicides or hand pulling have been able to reverse the spread of it. Serious Problem….caused by humans.
Another example, in the Southern United States, where kudzu has been introduced with devastating environmental consequences. While kudzu is used to make soaps, lotions, jelly, and compost and it has even been suggested that kudzu may become a valuable asset for the production of cellulosic ethanol.
At present, it is growing at a raveous rate in America’s southeast. Kudzu growing on trees covering the forests. Kudzu was introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and ornamental. From 1935 to the early 1950s the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the Southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion as above, and the Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years. Steps to eradicate or control it have been futile.
The iron dumping experiment will be another example, no doubt. While we are releasing iron to capture the carbon dioxide on the other side, we are freeing up released carbon everytime we dig, manufacture, and cover the earth’s surface with more concrete, releasing more of what the earth had put away.
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