Global Warming Solution?

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Empty Glass

Well, if this really is a solution, would people take it to mean that it would be okay to still dump ridiculous amounts of carbon in the air?

Yes - its another techno-fix. The attempt to not change what we are doing now, but to find some fix that takes care of the negative effects - at least for a while - and with possible side effects....

From the article:

So far, we've done some minor experimentation with dumping iron filings into the ocean, but unfortunately we haven't produced anything more than some small plankton blooms. The issue may well be one of scale - this might be a solution that we have to commit to completely for it to work - and larger-scale experiments might now be in order. That's definitely risky, but at least it looks like the available evidence has tilted decidedly in its favor.

This is totally insane. Those small scaled experiments, they turned out to not work very well. We had a professor who explained these experiments and the effects (the idea of putting iron in the oceans like that is not exactly new). So that did not work, then of course the solution is not to scrap the idea or to look why it is not working, but rather commit to a large scale experiment that has risks!

Originally Posted by applejuice

Should the proposed solution put in practice, the most likely thing to happen is this:

• Iron is spread to oceans
• Plankton starts to massively proliferate
• Carbon levels go down
• Earth cools
• Earth becomes too cold to support plankton
• Plankton dies
• Massive release of carbon
• Global warming

and so on...

Well the original idea was that the plankton massivley blooms, consumes a lot of carbon and then dies, drops to the bottom of the ocean, gets buried by sand and clay and then that carbon is in the earth, basically that is how oil was originally "made". The thing is, that when plankton dies, it slowly drops down. Very slowly. and it gets carried away by currents. And eaten by other beings. And thus in the end only a tiny fraction of the carbon actually reaches the bottom, wile >99% feeds other animals or bacteria or funghi , which will release the CO2 again, deplete the oceans of other nutrients by their own growth and so on. As a natural process, this takes many decades or probably rather centuries - geoengineering however wants to do things fast and there is the problem.