Scientists Want To Dump Iron Nanoparticles Into the Oceans To Save the Planet 123
An anonymous reader shares a report: We know from natural events in the past that increasing the amount of iron in these seas can dramatically increase the growth of phytoplankton. When iron-rich ash from volcanic eruptions has fallen on the ocean's surface, it has triggered phytoplankton blooms large enough to see from space. This knowledge led oceanographer John Martin to put forth something called the "iron hypothesis," which suggests that "fertilizing" the ocean with iron could increase the amount of carbon-sucking phytoplankton -- theoretically enough to cool the entire Earth. "Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age," he famously quipped during a lecture in 1988.
In 1993, shortly after Martin's death, his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories tested the hypothesis by increasing the concentration of iron over 64 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. They then observed the area for 10 days and saw the amount of plant biomass double. "All biological indicators confirmed an increased rate of phytoplankton production in response to the addition of iron," they wrote in a paper detailing the experiment. More than a dozen other ocean fertilization experiments have been conducted since then, but even though they do appear to cause a bloom of plankton, it's still not clear whether the approach could actually help combat climate change.
In 2009, researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tracked the impact of a major ocean fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica by measuring carbon particles 800 meters below the surface of the water in the area for a year -- and their findings were less than encouraging. "Just adding iron to the ocean hasn't been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon," said researcher Jim Bishop. "What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appears not to sink very fast or very far." While researchers are still trying to figure out why that is, there are a number of theories, including ones centered on the feeding habits of creatures that live off phytoplankton and the presence of iron-binding organic compounds in ocean water.
In 1993, shortly after Martin's death, his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories tested the hypothesis by increasing the concentration of iron over 64 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. They then observed the area for 10 days and saw the amount of plant biomass double. "All biological indicators confirmed an increased rate of phytoplankton production in response to the addition of iron," they wrote in a paper detailing the experiment. More than a dozen other ocean fertilization experiments have been conducted since then, but even though they do appear to cause a bloom of plankton, it's still not clear whether the approach could actually help combat climate change.
In 2009, researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tracked the impact of a major ocean fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica by measuring carbon particles 800 meters below the surface of the water in the area for a year -- and their findings were less than encouraging. "Just adding iron to the ocean hasn't been demonstrated as a good plan for storing atmospheric carbon," said researcher Jim Bishop. "What counts is the carbon that reaches the deep sea, and a lot of the carbon tied up in plankton blooms appears not to sink very fast or very far." While researchers are still trying to figure out why that is, there are a number of theories, including ones centered on the feeding habits of creatures that live off phytoplankton and the presence of iron-binding organic compounds in ocean water.
There should be some kind of (Score:1)
international election to vote on this. There's a big potential for unintended consequences.
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Don't worry. It will not happen anyways. It is just part of the efforts to allow the big polluters to pollute a bit longer by pushing some "miracle" cure.
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I see the fuckups have mod-points again. Yes, keep down-modding accurate observations. That will change reality, surely.
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international election to vote on this. There's a big potential for unintended consequences.
Like accidentally wearing something magnetic when going for a swim and then dragging the entire ocean home with you. :-)
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You watched a little too much Gilligan's Island.
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"Those Poor People"
Maybe get China to stop building coal plants? (Score:2)
Go to the source
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Not just China. Australia must be stopped as well.
Then there are the oil wells who are "super-emitters" of natural gas, instead of gathering it.
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Go to the UN and tell the Chinese that they're not allowed to live a middle-class American lifestyle. Tell them that they must continue to live in developing nation conditions forever. Tell them that only Americans are allowed to pollute higher per-capita.
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chicom scum.
Noooo! (Score:1)
More politicians & telemarketers? Oh shit!
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly (Score:1)
...and we all know how that ended!
Us humans and not humanoids shouldnâ(TM)t scr (Score:1)
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Summary does not summarize (Score:2)
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To be fair, the editors sometimes add and adjust submitted summaries.
More messing with nature without understanding.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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You mean like plant life sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is what caused all of the previous ice ages? We're still in an ice age BTW. Pray it doesn't get worse.
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Huh, the first ice ages were before plants and oxygen being present in the atmosphere. The ice age that happened after plants colonized the land, in particular forests, may well have been caused by plants, this was before fungi had evolved to break down the wood and when most of the coal was deposited.
There's a good argument that the recent ice age was triggered by the Indian sub-continent colliding with Asia, creating the Himalayas, lots of new rock to get eroded locking up CO2 in the ocean as rock. Silica
Re:More messing with nature without understanding. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not wrong... but we've kinda been doing that the whole time without realizing it.
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What worries me are unintended consequences of doing something like this. We do it but then something unforeseen happens which then makes things even worse than if we'd not bothered, not for us as we can engineer solutions to protect us from the harm we cause but for plants and species who haven't the capability to adapt or build their way out of trouble.
Yes, we often fuck up things far worse with our "solutions" to environmental problems.
I know it's a crazy concept, but maybe the solution to our pollution and over-extension of resources is, hang on, hold onto your hats, grab you chair, not polluting quite so much and not over-extended our resource usage? I can hear the boos and hisses now.
We'll auto-correct eventually, whether it be through the slowly forming population decline we see looming on the horizon, or a much more "fun" population collapse caused
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but for plants and species who haven't the capability to adapt or build their way out of trouble.
Like covering huge swaths of land with solar panels? Modifying the environments of their native habitat? Those sorts of unintended consequences?
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I'm not convinced we can get the global population to agree to lower its standard of living for the common good - its a "tragedy of the commons" problem on a very large scale
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I know it's a bit pedantic... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but we should stop ascribing single ideas to whole groups of people. "Scientists" don't want to do that. A small number of people do. They don't speak for the collective. It's like pretending Guilani speaks for all Mayors.
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Well, if the preponderance (well over half) of appropriate scientists (i.e. I don't want to hear from a theoretical physicist on climate science) agree, I'm willing to letthat slide a bit. But I take your point.
What would Fritz Haber do? (Score:3, Informative)
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I don't think it was all that accidental.
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Don't worry, AGI will fix it! (Score:3)
1) benevolent AGI, gets fusion power working, CO2 levels drop like a rock
2) malevolent AGI, kills all humans, CO2 levels drop like a rock
Better answer: Grow more paper (Score:1)
If we could find a way to convert grasslands into tree farms, then use those tree farms to grow more fast-growing trees for paper, we could then skip the recycling step and instead bury that paper in landfills, where it would sequester large quantities of carbon. (This assumes that the paper mills have low CO2 emissions, which is a prerequisite for this approach, and probably depends on the energy mix involved.)
Even better, that process is reversible. If, at some point in the future, we realize that we w
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As a bonus, we'd also sequester things like phosphorous, something that we have a shortage of being easily available. Crash the food supply and get population reduction.
Besides, grass is better at soaking up CO2 then trees. Here's a start, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gras... [duckduckgo.com]
Still whatever you are growing and burying means that all the nutrients tied up in those plants are getting sequestered. And when you think of the quantity of coal, oil, etc that we have dug up and burned, a lot would have to be buried.
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As a bonus, we'd also sequester things like phosphorous, something that we have a shortage of being easily available. Crash the food supply and get population reduction.
Not really. See below.
Besides, grass is better at soaking up CO2 then trees. Here's a start, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gras... [duckduckgo.com]
The very first result [earth.com] disagrees with you. "In a stable climate, trees store more carbon than grasslands."
Also, when grass dies each year and rots, that sequestered carbon tends to end up back in the atmosphere (with a lot of it in the form of methane, which is worse). Trees do the same thing when they lose their leaves, of course, but the wood itself is a huge chunk of biomass that doesn't rot nearly as quickly, and thus can potentially sequester carbon over a much longer term.
Still whatever you are growing and burying means that all the nutrients tied up in those plants are getting sequestered.
As I
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Rereading the search results, seems it varies. Most are based on a study in California and take into account things like drought and wildfires and even the earth.com says that in 3 out of 4 scenarios grass is better.
A different site, https://www.permies.com/t/7316... [permies.com] points out that it depends on things like climate, moisture availability and such with once again some scenarios such as boreal where trees are way better and other ones where grasslands are better. Of course boreal forests grow so slow that ha
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If we could find a way to convert grasslands into tree farms
That's already been tried. Digging up existing grasslands to grow trees just releases carbon that was captured by those grasslands. The trees may or may not survive, and uses up a whole bunch of water that wasn't there to be used.
"Kiss The Ground" (Score:2)
A documentary on Netflix.
Watch it.
Natural solutions are the only solutions to climate change.
(Plus, Woody Harrelson)
It won't take just one arrow.... (Score:2)
...but the entire quiver to solve this problem.
So "fertilizer" for the ocean. (Score:2)
What could go wrong? I'm sure it's a simple model. Add iron and good stuff. That's it!
Hasn't Hollywood taught us anything? (Score:4, Funny)
Snow Pearcer
The Matrix
Don't. Fuck. With. Weather.
Humans are too stupid to successfully engineer global weather.
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I suppose someone will tell the poison algue (Score:2)
...that they should ignore the iron?
No (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Worse... it was only a short while ago another group did a study and determined the oceans are self-optimized - cause a bloom in a new location with iron seeding and you will use up nutrients that would have otherwise supported a local ecosystem elsewhere. An area that will now have a die-off event.
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Not nonsense, you lack a full understanding of the process.
Iron is just one component of the situation; the organisms use other resources too. Those OTHER resources are no longer available to be delivered by ocean currents to areas they were previously supporting.
Try not to be so dismissive of things you should know you don't understand.
Re: No (Score:1)
https://core.ac.uk/download/pd... [core.ac.uk]
How would you explain that relative fluorescence increased from 10-15 to 48 microg C l-1d-1 in 1993 enrichment experiment?
Does it matter that the subject microorganisms do not really need iron that much if they thrive on addition of 100 times more iron (than there was) into the water
A good idea anyway to feed fish (Score:2)
For all the fishing that we humans do I think it's only proper. It could do a lot to increase the biosystem.
Another Do-Gooder ... (Score:2)
Titles like that scare the ever-living-shite out of me!
How many times have "scientists" have comes up with some "thing" that will solve a problem or "Save the Planet" and everything goes to hell-in-a-handbasket -- unintended consequences. The more grandiose the claim, the better it is for us. Regrettably, it never works out.
God help us from these Do-Gooders!
Just skip-breathe!
And the seas turned to blood (Score:2)
Revelation 16:3
The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died that was in the sea.
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A Question of Heaven, are you forced to live forever? (Go listen to the song of that name from Iced Earth) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWCdDFkn_-s]
(Fuck, I forgot how to make links on slashdot, someone remind me please!)
I think I woke up too, but that song haunts me.
Be careful... (Score:1)
The wrong scientists (Score:1)
details about 30 years old enrichment experiment (Score:1)
https://core.ac.uk/download/pd... [core.ac.uk]
The enrichment of 64km2 are has been done from 0.06nM concentration to ~4nM, i.e. about 100 times
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Okay, now you're just talking crazy :-( Individual (or even species-wide) responsibility? Phththth!
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Someone played Civilization VI a bit too much.
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Self-sustaining populations are not something that's going to lower current Earth populations by much. In theory you could create a self-sustaining population with just two people to start, though that would require some rather icky cross-breeding in the early years to diversify the gene pool. The more likely scenario is a population of somewhere around a million, where you have enough of a diverse gene-pool up front that, without societal enforced "groupings" within that million, they'd stay healthy enough
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The conventional number for a minimum viable population for space travel has been 160 people. That number can be halved to 80 if people gave up on monogamy. https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
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The numbers given for how many you need for a sufficient gene pool always seem to fail to account for the fact that you can freeze and thaw sperm and it still works. Carrying that on as a thought experiment, if your primary goal is basically a population bomb, then you pretty much want women exclusively as colonists and men are basically detrimental to the process. There are, of course, other reasons to have a more diverse colonist population, this is just if your goal is maximum population growth with the
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Continuing with that thought experiment, it would be interesting to see how society would change when the male children are raised in an all-female environment. Would jobs and roles be assigned by height and strength after a few generations? Without male role models, would the first generation see their contribution to society differently? How about after four or five generations? Assuming a 50/50 ratio of new births, would the original all-female crew have a lasting impact on gender roles or would they
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Well, it may be a moot point since, by the time we're ready for a population bomb on a colonized planet, we may probably be able to do it without worrying about the sex of the colonists due to more advanced medical technology. For example Uterine replicators where children can be grown to birth age without an actual human womb involved. As it stands we have the technology now to actually finish off the last few months of a pregnancy in a device like this though we have not solved the greater technical chall
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You first. Now hold still...
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At last a sane and reasonable first post! Unfortunately no one has yet worked out a way of limiting human population growth. Governments and other organisations continually tap-dance around the simple fact that they don't do anything because they can't. They are powerless. Well, the Chinese were making a little progress for a while - but then it hurt so they just quit.
Ironic, huh? The species that is everywhere tyrannised by dictatorial governments that steal half or more of all their wealth - yet cannot ac
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You make it sound like said small hunter-gatherer group did so on purpose, rather than having a similar rate of attempts and a lower chance of success. Do you have evidence of this?
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We know how to limit population growth, education, wealth and birth control, especially for women. Disregarding immigration, every nation that has educated, made more wealthy, and made birth control available, especially for women, has a decreasing population.
Freaks out the economists and such as our societies are based on growth.
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Re: Perhaps (Score:1)
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True, but over consumption per person is a rich country problem, the population density might be lower however consume about 50
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Define overconsumption? Anyone that isn't heating their food by burning cow shit and eating bugs?
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Needless waste, look I am not saying we need all live in huts, but we also don't need to take 1.5 tons of metal with us to get most places, fly around the world to go on vacations, have 70 inch LCD displays. Burn electricity to syphon away money from others like crypto, or high frequency trading. Have billionaires fly into space on joy rides, hopefully soon it will be affordable so we can all do it.
You don't have to go to insane extremes to reduce power consumption, but plenty of things we can do to reduce
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I suggest we construct robots. And stairs. Then we line up the superfluous humans next to the stairs and let the shover or pusher robots do their thing.
Only then can we protect them from the terrible secrets of space.
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The population is actually going to collapse this century, all by itself purely because of the birth control and women joining the workforce to pay the taxes that their husbands could no longer do while simultaneously trying to maintain the living standard to be at least similar to that of their parents. The USA taking the world off the gold and starting a world wide push towards inflation everywhere.
You can search for various sources on the coming population collapse, there is no need for anyone trying to
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Based on the appalling birth rates in "first world" countries, we're well on our way.
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I just KNOW there's a downside to this whole thing. Just can't find it, but you wait: there's DOOOOM in plankton, I just know there is! Despite this cheery encouraging article:
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Yup.
Rule is: Once you start fucking with things, you have to keep fucking with them.
or
If you don't know exactly what you are doing, sticking your hand in to fix things never helps; it just tempts you to stick your other hand in.
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"there's DOOOOM in plankton"
Of course there is. Just ask Spongebob.
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I just KNOW there's a downside to this whole thing. Just can't find it, but you wait: there's DOOOOM in plankton, I just know there is!
Yep. You can't just turn the oceans into slime without any consequences. For a start they absorb all the oxygen in the water so everything else dies.
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I just KNOW there's a downside to this whole thing. Just can't find it, but you wait: there's DOOOOM in plankton, I just know there is!
Yep. You can't just turn the oceans into slime without any consequences. For a start they absorb all the oxygen in the water so everything else dies.
The amount of iron it would take to remove significant quantities of CO2 is immense. Then it would radically alter the chemistry of the oceans, and make it inhospitable to much/most of present sea life. We could even accidentally trigger a new ice age and kill off most of the land animals.
We screwed up. We don't want to add to it, so the least destructive path forward is to stop adding to the Greenhouse load, and then do what we can to lessen the damage, not add to it.
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But to do that rich Americans would have to consume less. ie it ain't happening in our lifetimes. Hopefully our great grandkids can pick up the pieces of what's left.
Trollareano!
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Maybe try something that doesn't add heat!!!
Did you know that waste heat is supposed to be an issue in the future?
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For a start they absorb all the oxygen in the water so everything else dies.
No... Algae produe Oxygen through photosynthesis. They absorb CO2 and emit Oxygen, which would be the whole point. The only Algae that absorb Oxygen would be dead algae decaying - which also releases CO2. Indeed, with a plan like this, they'd need to manage the application appropriately, So they aren't just dumping way too much fertilizer one day and causing a mass die-off by instantly cutting off the supply (Plants do
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Ok they produce too much oxygen and we all die then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
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At night?
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I just KNOW there's a downside to this whole thing. Just can't find it, but you wait: there's DOOOOM in plankton, I just know there is! Despite this cheery encouraging article:
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Obviously, in order to deal with that plankton we'll just dump a bunch of gorillas in the ocean!
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But then we're stuck with gorillas!
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Maybe it's different with iron fertilizer compared to nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer?
That ultimately will depend on what type of algae are blooming - some variety are harmful, some are not.
Also the location, concentration and duration would be a difference.
Harmful blooms are extremely high increases over a short period - such as a few months. No mere doubling of biomass, but more like a million fold+ increase in algae concentration.
If they're going to seed a patch ocean with iron, then they
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That's because mostly such projects are undertaken for severely practical and selfish reasons. To give scientists "work" to do, for which they will be paid and may win praise and promotion. To give "green entrepreneurs" opportunities to increase their already disgusting wealth. To give the media something to scribble and jabber about.
Nobody ever does anything because it's right, or humane, or even beneficial for our species. That's not the American Way. The slightest hint of altruism sets off shrieks of "Co
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I remember a very similar story from over a decade ago where the big headline was to add lime to the sea to bind CO2, turning the sea more acidic.
It was even here on Slashdot https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Howe often have you heard about that one since then?
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More like a case of sensationalist media, covering a far out idea for it's shock value and acting like there's some kind of scientific consensus about it. I remember a very similar story from over a decade ago where the big headline was to add lime to the sea to bind CO2, turning the sea more acidic. It was even here on Slashdot https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] Howe often have you heard about that one since then?
Quick correction - Lime (Calcium Hydroxide) would make it more alkaline.
But you're right - it was a dumb idea then, and still is. I recall the Ironing of the oceans discussed back in the day as well.
The amounts of either method are staggering, requiring digging up and depleting iron and lime, which are both critically important. And then, we could just end up screwing the planet up in the opposite direction, as in cold.
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Let me find what lead me to believe so. And there I see that I remembered wrong or read that part wrong back then as one of the statements of the proponents was that it would also help combat ocean acidity and not increase it.
In general remember it as one of those suggestions that may have some merit to them if we were in some kind of e
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where the big headline was to add lime to the sea to bind CO2, turning the sea more acidic.
It seems that some journalist didn't do the math on (1) How much lime would actually be required. And while lime is pretty plentiful - it's still ultimately scarce compared to things like rock or water; You basically get it by mining rock containing fossils, and it's the living creatures that had to gather the calcium over millions of years.. This is ultimately in finite limited supply, just like petroleum prod
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I'm trying to figure whether you think this micronutrient fertilization thing is something environmentalists should get behind or not. You appear to think this has been demonstrated to be something that would work at scale and that the consequences of trying it are understood, although perhaps I'm misreading your post.
The demonstration projects successfully show that the proposed mechanism -- iron fertilization of an algal bloom -- does work. They don't establish that it can be scaled to an effective and s
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IThere's a high probability that there was, at one point, a highly advanced human society here prior to the Younger Dryads - for instance.
Weird how they managed to be an advanced society without leaving any trace.
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There are traces, depending on how you interpret them. Also it depends on your definition of advanced, I think the theory is advanced like Inca, or Romans not launching satellites into space.
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Incas and Romans both left plenty of evidence. No need for "interpretation".
I've walked around the forum in Rome and seen the coliseum. There's Roman streets below the city where I live.
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Both the Romans and the Incas were around 1000-2000 years ago, so they haven’t been gone for very long. The evidence left behind is already fairly heavily decayed and quite a lot is missing (ex: households of “common” Incan villages, not just the religious and ruling artifacts). For early human civilizations 10,000-15,000 years ago, there is really nothing except some fossils and primitive tools. In 2.5 million years, I think it is safe to say it would be hard to tell if there was a civili
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Plenty of megalithic structures out there throughout the world with no explicable origin.
Much of the early eg Egyptian structures were built on the ruins of larger megalithic structures. The Romans and Incas did the same, as did many others (eg. look at Manchu Pichu as an example, or even the Jewish Temple Wall. History is replete with such examples.)
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There's more evidence of their existence than there is of AGW (or climate change, or whatever it's being called today).
I guess the pyramids across the globe, aligned with each other, and statues far greater in age to the pyramids (like the Great Sphinx, and similar structures found globally) don't count in your mind?