ScienceNOW, NYT, SF Chron, BBC, etc: Uh oh – yet another reason to fear geotechnical engineering fixes for climate. Iron fertilization might make the oceans, uh … poisonous.
I’d thought the glop-awful vision of a warmer world’s oceans overrun with jellyfish unsettling enough. Now comes word of an even worse potential scenario that might follow efforts to clean the seas of excess CO2: millions of square miles of algae that exude a chemical toxic to marine mammals, birds, and other creatures (like people).
The notion that a way to help preserve a livable climate is to spread iron dust across large areas of the sea, spurring algal blooms that then die and sink and drain carbon from both the air and ocean, has been having a tough time anyway. It just made a lot of people nervous. The fresh news, from a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is that such measures might well give a special boost to algal species that secrete a dangerous neurotoxin called domoic acid. The authors, from Universities of Western Ontario, San Francisco State, Maine, and from NOAA, say the findings “raise serious concern over the net benefit and sustainability of large-scale iron fertilization.”
I haven’t heard much lately about companies that have tried to raise capital so they could strew lots of iron around the ocean, and have already engaged in a few pilot studies. Looks like they wouldn’t easily pass an environmental impact review now. Not that there is an agency with teeth to rule on such a thing.
Stories:
- BBC – Richard Black: Climate ‘fix’ could poison sea life ; Hits the highlights and gets through to one company hoping to fertilize the ocean. Its official tells Black that it agrees further research is necessary – but holds out hope that marine ecosystems are already adapted to handle such toxins.
- AAAS ScienceNow – Lauren Schenkman: Carbon-Capture Method Could Poison Oceans ;
- Science News – Sid Perkins: IRON FERTILIZATION IN OCEAN NOURISHES TOXIC ALGAE ; Perkins’s well-tempered story does not, in hed or text, imply the case is made. He notes via a source’s quote that while the toxin is worrisome and its appearance in mid-ocean algal blooms runs against previous assumptions, the results “are less a prediction of ecological doom than it is a lesson about not knowing the consequences of our actions.”
- NY Times – Henry Fountain: A Risk of Poisoning the Deepest Wells ; A brief piece, for the ScienceTimes section’s The Observatory roundup.
- SF Chronicle – David Perlman: CO2 study: Plankton fertilization may backfire ; The idea’s history from new the Bay Area – at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory on Monterey Bay – gets a good airing here. One of the strategy’s early proponents and experimenters calls the new study “great,” but holds out hope that a role for iron fertilization may yet prove tolerable should a worse climate come to worst,
- London Free Press (Can) – John Miner: Fertilizing with iron lethal ; Uh, maybe lethal? Potentially deadly? C’mon, why such a hed when nothing in the news is so slam-dunk sure of itself? The lede cuts right to the chase (for sensationalism): “…could trigger an ecological disaster.” But the story itself goes on to stress uncertainty, not sure doom.
- AFP - Adding iron to sea boosts deadly neurotoxin: Study.
Grist for the Mill: U. Western Ontario Press Release ; PNAS article ;
- Charlie Petit
March 16th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Be interesting to see what comes out of the geoengineering self-regulation conference being held later this month in Asilomar. It’s organized by the geoengineering research-supporting nonprofit directed by Margaret Leinen, the former science director of Climos and mom of its president. (FWIW, this potential COI doesn’t bug me — Leinen used to be an NSF official, and is well-regarded … and Climos isn’t Planktos, the now-bankrupt iron fertilization company. Those guys were nuts!) The Asilomar choice is very conscious — it’s where the recombinant DNA conference was held in 1975, when public & scientific concerns motivated the biotech community to develop a code of conduct (a successful one, that eventually was written into NIH regulations.) On a larger scale, the latest would seem to presage pressures to loosen United Nations & International Maritime Organization restrictions on ocean fertilization research, and to make geoengineering research more publicly palatable. Which isn’t something I am judging good or bad — just saying the signs seem to point in that direction.