The proponent of the iron dumping off Haida Gwaii last month, Russ George, claims to be a hero who is trying to fight climate change. Most other observers see him as a businessman hoping to raise money selling carbon offsets or carbon credits.
It is hard to see how this could ever become a credible business. In order to sell carbon credits, you'd to:
a) need to prove fertilizing the ocean with iron does lead to long-term storage of carbon in the deep ocean, an open question discussed in my previous post,
b) be able to measure how much carbon was stored
Even if (a) is proven correct, the accounting problem (b) remains.
This is where the Willmers et al. paper comes in. Kelp forests, common on the west coast, are among the most productive marine ecosystems, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere at high rates. You haven't been diving until you've had to unravel yourself and your gear from metres long strings of kelp. Willmers et al. calculates that kelp forest store about ten times more carbon is sea otters are present, because without the otters eating the urchins, the urchins eat all the kelp. As such, there could be a carbon incentive, and potentially a market, to maintaining healthy otter and kelp populations (no easy feat).
The problem? Just as in the iron case, it's really hard to measure how much of the carbon taken up by the kelp gets exported to the deep ocean, where it would be sequestered long-term. Since there's no precise data, the authors provide estimates of carbon export over a range of 1% to 50% of the kelp carbon uptake. This no fault of the authors: deep carbon export from productivity on the surface is hard to measure and predict, so they've chosen an uncertainty range. The huge range is reasonable for the discussion section of a paper on carbon uptake in kelp forests. But it won't fly with accountants who need to sell the carbon credits.
(Photo credit: Monterey Bay Aquarium)
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The ETC group which is cited in The Guardian and in Nature reports as a credible voice opposing geoengineering, has this page on Geopiracy, posted on their website.
ETC, on that page, says that the most respected scientific institutions in the world, i.e. the US National Academy and the UK Royal Society, ("joined by their counterparts in other countries such as Canada, Germany and Russia") are acting as a front, along with "conservative think tanks (the very ones that used to deny climate change)", to deliver the "shock" that geoengineering is now required because climate change is upon us and it is too late to do anything else, for the real villains, i.e. "major energy, aerospace and defence industries" who are going to geoengineer the planet.
Its absolute gibberish.
How many millions of tonnes of fertilizer are applied annually to Canada's arable land, never mind to the entire world, a lot of which runs off into the oceans to create havoc? Wouldn't that be a better candidate for last month's environmental scandal?
How many billions of tonnes of CO2 was emitted by civilization last year? Would that qualify as a scandal?
How about having some perspective on this?
The tonnage of CO2 emitted just by the 18 board members of ETC last year most probably exceeds the 100 tons of material the Haida deposited in the ocean as a one time experiment.
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