Ocean Iron Fertilization

How does it cause depletion in other areas?

FWIW, I think the danger of excessive blooms is overstated. Most of the ocean is a desert nutritionally.

Totally agree: it's filed under "promising but risky" for a reason

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@grok what are some papers supporting this rather negative take and are there other papers that refute the skepticism?

…yet, it is also an excuse for not trying to address problems with technology. “The precautionary principle” has paralyzed Europe, for instance.

Doomberg has this theory that worldwide consumption of a source of energy never decreases, any fossil fuels extracted will be burned somewhere, and green regulations or subsidies just shift around who does the burning. Adding new sources of energy to the mix only reduces the rate of growth in fossil fuel consumption, but it still goes up.

Oil consumption didn't reduce coal consumption, it just added a new energy type. Same for natural gas.

So far they've been right. Decreased coal usage in developed countries has been offset by increased coal usage, of the now cheaper coal, in developing countries. German electric consumers are effectively subsidizing Chinese and Indian consumers.

Eventually that will turn around, if only because we start running out of fossil fuels, and the thesis will fall apart. But it will take far longer than we have, and we have far more fossil fuels than we can afford to extract and burn. That means the ONLY way to address climate change, which is a global problem, is through technological innovation. Regulation is a dead end, and just looking at the track record of regulation so far, it's hard to deny that.

That means making green alternatives that are better, and we're making some good progress on that. Electric cars are better in most ways for most uses except price. Solve that last one and they'll quickly displace combustion vehicles for most uses. Range is already good enough most of the time for most of the people.

It may also mean doing some geoengineering to soften the impact of global warming that will continue for multiple centuries if we don't intervene.

So it was actually pirates all this time:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pirate_Global_Warm...

Being a get-rich-quick alternative to whaling, piracy captured enough of the workforce to slow down the extinction of whales.

I jest, of course, but it's fun to look for ways a mere correlation might be a causal relationship.

Instead of mimicking whale excretes we could ... let real whales excrete. that is doing everything to preserve remaining whale populations and encourage the formation of new populations.

>The hard part is actually measuring how much carbon you can sequester per kg of 'fake' whale poop.

Do we have a rough estimate of this number? I assume the cost of whale poop can be low once it is mass manufactured. But the real cost is the actual deployment?

Valid concern, but it seems like the glide path—continued carbon dioxide buildup and climate change—might eventually be worse than the unknown unknowns. (I suppose how one makes that decision is the challenge, hence the need for further study, per the article.)

This is one of the few carbon capture approaches that appears to be able to approach global scale, so I'm rooting for it. Even enhanced weathering suffers from needing to move billions of tons of rock, but scattering trace minerals seems pretty high leverage. The sheer mass of material that must be removed from the atmosphere is otherwise very intimidating.

I think everybody who has thought much about it has similar concerns. I'd propose we start soon, start small, ramp up slowly, and be thorough about the data collection.

As uncomfortable as it is to experiment on the only planet you have, even worse would be to wait too long and then, in a panic, try to do everything that might possibly work all at once and to as extreme a degree as possible.

I find the attitude of "it's more important to not be blamed if something goes wrong than it is to solve the problem" to be incredibly annoying. It's like the epitome of bureaucracy.

Totally get that. It's got that classic "elegant in theory, terrifying in practice" energy

It's almost certainly impossible to create a species of fish that can take things from the ocean floor all the way to the surface for any significant percentage of the ocean. And we are certainly nowhere near having the ability to bionegineer such complex behaviors, we're far enough that you wouldn't even have a reasonable estimate for how long it might take to get there.

You're actually describing whales

You're not wrong, but I think people also underestimate how out of balance the system already is.

It's not like Earth is this perfectly spinning top that some people want to give a nudge. It's more like it's already crashing about while we keep whacking it harder and harder with billions more barrels of oil injected into the atmosphere every year.

I agree we shouldn't recklessly throw new shit at it, but incremental experiments might be worthwhile.

But humans have already been tinkering (tinkering is not the word to describe large scale disturbances) with delicate systems we barely understand since the industrial revolution. But when it comes to technological solutions like this, somehow people think that's too risky.

We're already tinkering by dumping shitloads of carbon into the atmosphere.

It might, the question becomes "At what cost to other areas?"