Iron fertilization experiment

Just a thought, peat bogs?

 

Yep, there are lots of ways to sequester, the problem is the cash to do it, and the question of if it does much good as we continue to burn.

We can pump CO2 into geological formations. The Norwegians have been doing this longer than anyone else at one of their natural gas fields. Doing it large scale gets very expensive right now though. Maybe we can get the costs down.

 

Peat bogs, or any anaerobic place, will sequester wood because the decomposing fungi strictly require oxygen. Soil burial and water burial have both been proposed in the literature. I prefer leaving the wood where it is (no transport costs) because then it can be habitat for a large number of species. This only works if you can modify the fungal communities (experiment in progress) and search as well for unintended consequences.

Apparently, all C sequestration approaches would require funding. This should serve as a good filter, helping us to avoid doing "the wrong things". It is not correct that more sequestration wouldn't matter while the fossil-C burning continues. Terrestrial and marine sequestration is now removing half the fossil C from the atmosphere. More would do more.

 

perhaps reforest the oceans and harvest the fiber for building materials as an alternative to deforesting the land masses.

 

Have we learned nothing about the unintended consequences of poorly thought out environmetal projects? From mega dams to canals to you name it, we have messed up the planet, and our "fixes" are fraught with the potential for serious unintended results.

Not to mention who has the moral authority not to mention legal authority to do large scale geoengineering projects?
Jesus, why don't we realize that the solution lies in recognizing that the planet is a finite place, and we need to stop putting shit in the atmosphere, or qt the very least stop putting so much shit in it! The short term economic costs be damned,, as the long term economic costs are going to be ever so much bigger.

Grow up folks, and stop shitting in your nest,,, if not for yourself, then for your grand children!

Icarus

 

I think there is a pretty good argument that if we don't shit in the nest, we would probably have gone extinct long ago. The record seems to indicate many species go extinct, either shitting in their nest, or something shitting on them.

 

Tochatihu,

Thank you, that was enlightening.

 

If I can interpret nest as ocean, then not only are we shitting there now, we have three good natural experiments to show what that's going to produce. But because this current episode of increased atmospheric C is progressing vastly faster than the three most recent episodes, we don't have a good historical precedent. But it's a fairly good guess that conditions in the ocean, in (say) 200 years under business-as-usual will likely be poor, due in no small part to the acidification of the ocean occurring 10x to 100x faster than prior episodes.

So I think the right way to judge the side-effects from attempts to clean up the shit is by comparing to a best-guess estimate of what the fully-shat-upon nest is going to look like, absent such attempts. Then seeing whether it looks better with or without the attempted cleanup.

If we think we're going to achieve some type of reasonably pleasant equilibrium via efficiency, clean energy, and reductions in end use of energy, then there's no need to consider geoengineering. You'll never hear me say a word against any of those. I just don't think that's likely to happen. Here in the US, we have an entire political party for whom "climate change is a fraud" is a litmus test. In that context, taking geoengineering off the table could be a good thing, but it could also be shooting ourselves in the foot. Hence my proposal above, to dedicate a small carbon tax to determine the lowest-cost currently-feasible method for effectively disposing of atmospheric carbon.

 

Dumping iron in the ocean without any clear idea of what it will do to the plants and animals there is directly, not figuratively polluting the ocean.

The dead zone in the gulf from farm run off pollution, partially caused by a misguided attempt to reduce ghg with corn based ethanol is directly not figuratively polluting the ocean. Another component of the pollution oil spills and other accidental and planned dumping.

The over fishing of many species of fish and shell fish hurts the ability of the oceans to recover.

Dumping a bunch of iron into the ocean in a money making carbon offset scheme is not going to solve the problem. Its likely to make it worse. That is if you consider the problem ocean pollution and species degredation. If all you care about is ghg and making money on selling credits, then it was a good idea. Note any good carbon credit trading scheme will reject these credits, as there is no way to verify it reduced long term ghg at all.

You have to realize many of us against this money making scheme aren't againt geo engineering. We simply want scientific experiments testing what it will do to the eco-system and ghg to be performed, and benefits to be quantified as well as harm to the oceans. Certainly if bp changed 100,000 square km of ocean you'd be upset. This guys pr machine is claiming its all good, but has no data to back it up. The view from space looks pretty bad though.

 

I did not mean the current natural sequestration would not matter, what I meant was some of these activities like iron fertilization may cause statistically insignificant changes to ghg compared to current fosil fuel burning.

The key really is how much is sequestered. That would require some good experiments on how much can be fertilized without causing large damage to the eco-system. For that we need to run some controlled experiments. Those two experiments cited had half of the extra carbon sinking and being sequestered the other had most of it returning. If most of the plant based sequestered carbon simply goes back in the food chain than you can not use this method for sequestration.

 

When I refer to "shitting in our nest" I am infering that we should stop putting (so much) GHG (and other things) into the amosphere! (not to mention other stuff into other places in the environment!

Using large scale geo engineering to solve issues that we know have a much simpler solution is insane. Just stop (or dramatically reduce) what we are doing! But no,,,,,,,,we want the easy,"painless"solution, that doesn't require any change in behavior, nor any sacrifice!

Grow up folks,

Icarus

 

AG@60, most of the carbon sequestered annually does return to the atmosphere. It is about 60 petagrams 'down' and 58 petagrams 'up'. The net annual storage of 2 petagrams can be detected by several independent means. Yude Pan made a nice analysis of this in a paper in Science last year. In the global ocean, it is 92 'down' and 90 'up, but I understand that to be more poorly constrained.

The net effect is easy to see. We know quite accurately how much fossil-fuel CO2 is emitted each year, because such valuable things are counted well. The net CO2 increase is accurate from Keeling's station in Hawaii, and now there are several other remote monitors done continuously. This net CO2 increase verifies biologists' measurements overall.

On land, afforestation and bulking up carbon in soils (especially agricultural soils) could each add about a petagram of annual C storage; those demonstrations seems convincing enough. The question is cost, and how much forest area can be increased without intruding on agricultural land. I agree that the ocean sequestration demonstrations are not yet as certain. last year, I think I mentioned at PC that the 'wrong' algae (toxic red tides) seemed to respond very positively to ironic fertilization

But if we can agree on a monetary value of controlling CO2, more such things will happen. Just now only a few pioneers (or deluded ones if one might prefer) like the Norwegians are spending much money in that way. Energy-conservation things that clearly have negative lifetime costs are being done, but some of us wonder why not more.

Recently I gave a lecture about climate and carbon to an international group of grad students here. One commented after that I seemed less 'alarmed' than others he had heard. The answer, it is not that I doubt that the most extreme consequences of exceeding 2 degrees C (or pick another number) could happen. Rather, it is that the climate models have not yet convinced me that those certainly will happen within the few-decades time scale.

The issue is not that scientists are hoaxing, nor that Al Gore is fat. The issue is that the climate system (particularly the long-scale ocean sloshes) remain beyond our modeling power. This is not for lack of trying; it is down to the incomparable complexity of the earth climate system.

I see no doubt that CO2 doublings cause 3 degrees C temperature rising. I see doubt about how fast that pattern arrives. Put that up against the world's largest industry (fossil fuels) and our current slow-boat path results. As said before, if we are lucky the slow-boat path will not look like a great mistake a few decades later.

Appeals to the great fortunes to be made from energy efficiency, new technologies, etc. may be more productive in the near term. If the Pine island glacier falls into the sea, or if NYC floods enough, or some other 'exclamation point' may turn opinion towards more action sooner than later.

Whenever we choose to turn the corner, there will be a certain amount of CO2 and a certain reduction of ocean pH that will need to be dealt with. Those things will increase for the duration of our inaction.