Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

There is serious testing going on of dumping iron into the ocean to reduce carbon dioxide. See “Plan to Dump Iron in Ocean Criticized”, which also seems to me to imply that an important cause of global warming is a decline in plankton:

A controversial plan to dump iron dust into the open ocean near the Galapagos Islands to induce the growth of phytoplankton met with opposition from an environmental group today.

The plan, from a company called Planktos, Inc., seeks to grow the tiny creatures in an attempt to suck up excess atmospheric carbon dioxide. …

Russ George, the CEO of Planktos, Inc., counters that the very reason why the Galapagos Islands have the rich array of life that they do is because of the iron that drains from the islands into the ocean.

?The Galapagos bloom is one of the most famous features on the planet,? George said.

He says that the Galapagos bloom is much larger than the one his group will be creating, and will actually serve as a control for their experiment, which will be conducted several hundred miles west of the island chain. George adds that they will be putting far less iron into the ocean than what comes from the Galapagos to create the famous bloom. ….

Far from harming marine life, George says, the plans of iron enrichment will actually revitalize phytoplankton, whose numbers have been steadily dropping over the last couple decades, as was reported in a Dec. 7 paper in the journal Nature.

?The plant life in the ocean is collapsing at a rate of 1 percent per year,? the same amount of decline as is seen in terrestrial rainforests, George said.

But the total amount of decline in phytoplankton biomass is equivalent to the disappearance of all the rainforests on Earth, George said, and which he describes as ?an absolute cataclysmic state of collapse.?

Could this be causing global warming more than human emissions?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.