Comments davidk has made

  • Iron math and malicious spin

    Regarding the iron source: we're primarily depending upon natural hematite deposits, which if you google the word, you will see are available everywhere. We are even reaching out to a French company that has developed a process that removes the tons of it that accumulate (like inorganic cholesterol) inside the pipes of public water systems. Since the only processing is essentially running the material through a modern version of a ball mill, very little energy is used in its preparation. Transport is the primary emission producing factor and in total each ton of hematite delivered should entail something like 10~ 20 tons of CO2 emissions. Once distributed in iron-depleted pelagic waters, each iron molecule can fix approximately 100,000 molecules of carbon in plankton biomass. (The enduring authority on these ratios is "Iron uptake and growth limitation in oceanic and coastal phytoplankton. Sunda W.G., Huntsman S.A., 1995. Marine Chemistry 50, 189-206 which reports Fe:C uptake ratios of 1:40,000 to 1:400,000 with a 1:119,000 average). We expect approximately 20% of this to sink below 500 m where it will be isolated from the atmosphere for centuries, which means that by weight each ton of iron replenished will sequester approximately 20~25 thousand tons of CO2 or roughly a thousand times more than the iron preparation/delivery generate. The other 80% of the carbon biomass is contributed as a free soup kitchen to the local surface critters and fisheries, so most will eventually get respired and end back up in the atmosphere.

    Regarding etcgroup's disingenuous replies and debate response: so as not to prolong "poisonous squabbling" here, will contact them privately to determine the possibility and utility of such an exercise, but do feel obliged to point out a fourth egregious distortion in the title of their press release "Geoengineers (#1) to Foul (#2) Galapagos Seas (#3)  - Defying Climate Panel Warning (#4)  

    Well, unlike the release's claims that this report would "pour scorn" and "thumbs down" on geo-engineering solutions (which plankton restoration is still sadly and erroneously lumped with): here's all the IPCC finally said:

    Summary for Policymakers IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III, Page 20

    "17. Geo-engineering options, such as ocean fertilization to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere, or blocking sunlight by bringing material into the upper atmosphere, remain largely speculative and unproven, and with the risk of unknown side-effects. Reliable cost estimates for these options have not been published (medium agreement, limited evidence)"

    The appended "medium agreement, limited evidence" comment was also the lowest consensus/certainty level of any of their evaluations, most of which rated "high agreement, much evidence".

    So it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of ocean work, but neither is it a scornful rejection or even a warning. In fact, it pretty fairly defines the challenges we face - to prove out this tech, discover & control possible side-effects, and publish reliable cost estimates. Those are reasonable demands and indeed the prime objectives of our pilot projects...
    On Putting iron in the ocean posted 2 years, 6 months ago 47 Responses

  • Inconvenient facts & ETCGroup lies

    I just wish more of you had read through the research I cited and grasped the implications. The Royal Society looked at the data several months ago and predicted the loss of ALL marine fisheries by 2048. No fish = no penguins, no sea birds, no seals, no polar bears, no dolphin, no whales, no...

    Just can't understand the persistent resistance to recognizing what havoc we have caused in the sea by depriving it of vital micronutrients and the unwillingness to make the relatively minor effort it would take to make it whole again. Except for the bacteria, absolutely everything living in the sea depends on these little guys as well as nearly 60% of our oxygen. You kiss them off at your/our eternal peril...

    And while we support CO2 source reductions as ardently as anyone, anyone looking clearly at the evidence knows it just cannot happen fast enough to make the difference that we desperately need. This is an all-hands-on-deck emergency and every effective benign solution must be invoked right now!

    And plankton restoration (if you hold it to that) is benign. "Robbing" nutrients to feed plankton will not impoverish any other food webs, because plankton are the base of the only ocean food web there is.

    As for a 10,000 sq km pilot project bloom being too large: it is exactly the size many veteran ocean scientists have been calling for. Previously the largest seeded bloom was nearly 1000 sq km in size, but oceanographers claimed it was an order of magnitude too small to understand the real trajectory of speciation and bloom dynamics (for one thing many of these smaller blooms were quickly "grazed" by other critters into near extinction). 10,000 sq km sounds like a lot of territory in terrestrial terms, but it is actually only about 2~3% the size of a natural wind-borne dust seeded bloom.

    Most of these questions are the result of honest misunderstandings of what the current state of the oceans is and what we are proposing to do in this pilot project series. Most, I say, because Mr. Thomas' press release is willfully dishonest in the extreme and contains countless charges he himself knows are untrue, but apparently thinks you won't recognize their falsity and they will help to sell his argument. Examples:

    Outed deception #1 - Nothing will be occurring in "Galapagos waters" as I pointed out above before he even posted the accusation. The Galapagos islands have their own coastal shelf iron sources and thus harbor one of the healthiest ecosystems in the Pacific. It is the open ocean or pelagic waters that are anemic and lifeless and in need of a little help.  

    Outed deception #2 - We don't use nano-scale anything. I told him directly and correctly that our iron hematite dust is ground to between 0.7 and one micron sizes, approximately the same dimensions of the iron oxide molecules in your standard red pigments in the art supply store and equally scary. (The four-year-old quote he pulled from our old website was using the word loosely and colloquially just meaning really really small. Thomas' knew that but it was just too good a scare word to let go.)

    Outed deception #3 - Thomas loves to wield provocative bs buzzwords like "foul" and "pollute" though he knows perfectly well that we are adding the same material and in roughly the same quantity that Mother Nature had been delivering for the past few million years. Besides if parts per trillion iron dust additions to the sea are called "pollution" adding parts per million lime amendments to organic farm fields would constitute apocalyptic blizzards of toxicity.

    Outed deception #4 - Ulf Riebesell, the one naysaying voice Thomas quotes regarding the Nature iron fertilization report (the same report I recommended above by the way), is not "one of the scientists" as Thomas claims. Ulf had no connection whatever with the experiment and was just included to impart a negative spin. For more on this particular flavor of bullshit, see: http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/05/the_iron_shore_. ...

    Outed deception #5 - Thomas also tries to smear Planktos CEO Russ George as involved in "nuclear fusion" and thus part of the dread eternal radioactivity cartel, when he or anyone who reads the D2Fusion.com website understands that this company is part of the ongoing rebirth of "cold fusion" which is both totally harmless and promises one of the few truly hopeful supply-side solutions to our climate and energy crises today. For those brainwashed by the early "voodoo science" media smears, would like to point out that tinfoil hat groups like the American Chemical Society ("the world's largest scientific society") are also now signing on: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-03/acs-fr0312 ...

    Outed deception #6 - Thomas then goes on to recruit misinformed allies like the Ecuadorian woman who is led to believe we are doing this in her waters and that bringing the plankton back will harm fisheries when exactly the opposite is the case. In fact, Japanese fishermen set up a grapevine alert system to alert them to the location and harvest the fishing bounty that appeared when blooms where conducted near Hokkaido back in 2002. Indeed fishermen's logs throughout the last century regularly note the plentiful catches when they were fishing near large plankton blooms.

    Outed deception #7 - he even then apparently deceives Greenpeace's Dr Paul Johnston about our plans because the latter blurts "Planktos is intending to conduct this reckless experiment in waters around the Galapagos Islands which are globally significant in biological terms and should be designated as fully protected marine reserves." We couldn't agree more about the latter part of course. We are concerned with the deep seas beyond which have recently and perilously become totally biologically insignificant. And there is just nothing reckless in attempting a pilot project to restore a relatively small number of plankton in an area where they have been literally decimated five times over.

    Outed deception #8 - Finally Thomas says we are simply trying to win Branson's $25 million CO2 reduction prize when he knows full well that we issued a press release the day that Branson issued the challenge that said, "we ask him to pass the prize money on to any charity that will help the world's disadvantaged kids learn new ways to preserve, protect and restore our planet when their turn comes." This isn't really all about money, but that's where Thomas seems fixated.

    In short, Thomas' and etcgroup's deceit-ridden argument has nothing to do with science, truth or integrity, let alone a sincere desire to solve our climatic and ecological woes.  It is the ecological equivalent of the anti-intellectual faith-based rants that one hears from fundamentalists for whom the only acceptable answer to AIDS, teen pregnancy and the population explosion is abstinence pure and simple. Birth control is an evil technical fix that prolongs abhorred behavior. Similarly planting forests or healing the seas are morally unacceptable because they may lessen the punitive pain inflicted on sinful human polluters. You cannot even discuss the ocean facts with him, because all his crowd cares about are their own dread-building/donation-attracting campaigns and damn the global consequence.

    Nevertheless in the spirit of comity, Mr. Thomas, we shall offer you a chance to defend your fabrications in an open public debate. How about it, Mr. Thomas?  The ball is in your court...
    On Putting iron in the ocean posted 2 years, 7 months ago 47 Responses

  • Iron restoration critics should check the science

    The big story missed by both reporters and commentators alike on this subject thus far is that plankton restoration is not just about carbon credit economics or the threat of global warming. It's about an already ongoing catastrophic die-off in the sea. The establishment science community studies cited below are only a sample of recent research indicating that the ocean phytoplankton which produce nearly 60% of the planet's oxygen, sequester an equal measure of its CO2 and feed every higher form of ocean life are disappearing at a shocking rate. Just since 1980 we have lost 6~12% of these vital plants globally and according to Behrenfeld's 12/06 Nature report there are now 50% die-offs in huge areas of the equatorial Pacific.

    (The knock-on effects of this decline are immediate and tragic. The phytoplankton-dependent krill populations in the Southern Ocean which are the staple food of all the great baleen whales are now down by 80% and the shortfall is now also starving local fish species, penguins and seals.)

    Restoring open ocean plankton populations to known 1980 levels of health would not only annually sequester at minimum 3~4 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 (or half our global warming surplus today), it would regenerate tens of billions of tons of missing nourishment for fisheries, seabirds and marine mammals.

    And this restoration can be quickly and affordably accomplished, just by replenishing missing iron micronutrients to the sea. The iron was traditionally delivered to the open ocean in wind-borne dust from arid lands which has now been depleted by 30% or more by modern agricultural practices and the increased levels of atmospheric CO2 (which allow grasses to live longer, spread further, and anchor more iron-rich topsoil dust).

    Each molecule of iron returned can fix over 100,000 molecules of CO2 and generate a proportionate amount of nutritive biomass. While nearly 80% of that is recycled in the marine food web, 20% or more disappears into the deep ocean for centuries or millennia.

    In other words, at maximum efficiency it would only take several hundred thousand tons (or about two supertankers full) of iron dust to restore the lost plankton to 1980 levels and solve half our global warming surplus, too. More likely until the technology is perfected, it will take a small fleet of research ships working with several times more dust to accomplish this task, but still we are talking a very feasible challenge that would at most be reseeding less than 2% of surface ocean waters.

    If we undertake this for the benefit of sea life and the climate and stop at the known 1980 baseline, where is the harm? Iron restoration simply replenishes a vital micronutrient that human activity has dangerously diminished.

    We have caused these crises and to attempt to resolve them in most natural and benign way available is not geoengineering, it's generally known as restitution, healing or just merciful common sense.

    It's gratifying that the carbon credit market has arisen to underwrite the needed restoration activity, because no one was lifting a finger or spending a cent to address these die-offs before. If you oppose restoration now simply because it may finally be both possible and profitable, you might as well also oppose the practice of medicine, environmental law and public health.

    And by way of full disclosure, I do work with Planktos and came to the firm not for carbon credits, but for all the reasons noted above. And to answer the Galapagos question, we will be conducting our pilot project in international waters, hundreds of miles to the west of the Galapagos, and the iron applications are in parts per trillion concentration so it's far closer to homeopathy that fertilization or amendment addition on an organic farm.

    OCEAN PLANT LIFE SLOWS DOWN AND ABSORBS LESS CARBON
    NASA News, September 16, 2003
    "This research shows ocean primary productivity is declining, and it may be a result of climate changes such as increased temperatures and decreased iron deposition into parts of the oceans. This has major implications for the global carbon cycle," Gregg said. Iron from trans-continental dust clouds is an important nutrient for phytoplankton, and when lacking can keep populations from growing... the amount of iron deposited from desert dust clouds into the global oceans decreased by 25 percent over two decades. These dust clouds blow across the oceans. Reductions in NPP in the South Pacific were associated with a 35 percent decline in atmospheric iron deposition.
    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2003/2 ...

    [IRON STRESSED] PLANKTON FOUND TO ABSORB LESS CARBON DIOXIDE, BBC, 08/30/06
    The amount of carbon absorbed by plant plankton in large segments of the Pacific Ocean is much less than previously estimated, researchers say. US scientists said the tiny ocean plants were absorbing up to two billion tonnes less CO2 because their growth was being limited by a lack of iron.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5298004.stm

    ANEMIC PHYTOPLANKTON ABSORB LESS CARBON THAN THOUGHT
    By JR Minkel, Science News
    Phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean are starved for iron, and as a result these microscopic plants soak up less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than was previously thought, researchers have found.
    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&article ...

    PLANKTON KILLED BY OCEAN WARMING
    SYDNEY: Plankton - the vital first link in the food chain of the seas - will be hugely affected by global warming, a new U.S. study suggests. Plankton forms the main food of many ocean species, and fisheries could be badly hit by the loss of these micro-organisms as a result of warmer waters, according to the paper, published this week in the British journal Nature... Other factors that influence phytoplankton growth include [iron] dust blown from the land, and variations in solar radiation.
    http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/908

    EFFECT OF NATURAL IRON FERTILIZATION ON CARBON SEQUESTRATION IN THE SOUTHERN OCEAN
    Nature, Vol 446|26 April 2007| doi:10.1038/nature05700
    The efficiency of fertilization, defined as the ratio of the carbon export to the amount of
    iron supplied, was at least ten times higher than previous estimates from short-term blooms induced by iron-addition experiments. This result sheds new light on the effect of long-term fertilization by iron and macronutrients on carbon sequestration, suggesting
    that changes in iron supply from below--as invoked in some palaeoclimatic and future climate change scenarios11--may have a more significant effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations than previously thought.

    OCEAN GOBBLES CARBON AT DIFFERENT RATES
    NewScientist.com news service
    26 April 2007
    Dead plankton does not sink at the same rate everywhere in the Pacific Ocean, say researchers. The new findings will boost our understanding of the supply chain to the world's biggest carbon sink - the bottom of the ocean. [Shows 20~50% of dying plankton take their carbon below 1000 meters into the millennial sequestration zone.]
    http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11725 ...
    On Putting iron in the ocean posted 2 years, 7 months ago 47 Responses