Fertilizing the Ocean with Iron (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Fertilizing the Ocean with Iron (2007)

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38 pointsastrobase_go50 comments

It seems more and more likely to me that the general approach to climate change is going to simply be adaptation. We'll have to figure out ways to live and grow food in a hotter world that has more dramatic weather events. I think this will be expensive and could tragically lead to the deaths of many people who cannot afford to live in this new world.

If a large country with many poor people are faced with this situation, maybe it's likely that they might try one of these geoengineering efforts as a last resort? The environmental effects are unpredictable, but if it could save a lot of lives...

Yes, we will have to adapt. That doesn’t change the fact we also must try to slow and minimise it as much as is possible. Adapting to two degrees is probably an order of magnitude easier than adapting to four or five degrees.

We rich westerners will most likely only be inconvenienced. We have our AC and we can afford more expensive food. If you live close to the coast or a river you might need to move.

The greatest problem we will have to face is probably the huge waves of refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Not only from starvation, but from conflicts about e.g., water.

The problem we face is the rise of Fascism in response to those waves, and the bad government and, most likely, war, always instigated by Fascists.

It is already starting.

>always instigated by Fascists

Not really, just look at the US..oil/money

You seem to be confused. A counterexample would be a Fascist government that did not instigate a war, given ample time.

>given ample time.

That's the problem....any government instigate in a ware given enough time, i think your problem is that you have no clue what fascist means.

You are still confused.

Numerous governments have never instigated wars despite ample opportunities.

Fascists do not need your defense.

That is only one of the problems.

>We rich westerners will most likely only be inconvenienced.

For how many generation will that be?

Adaptation will happen for sure. Here are some examples of things that we should expect to see in the coming years:

* No more building in flood-plains or low-lying coastal regions.

* Flood insurance in those areas will lose their subsidies and will become expensive.

* Areas in Florida, Louisiana, etc will become poorer as those who can afford to relocate do so.

* Farming will slowly move north; southern areas that are currently farms will dry out and become non-viable.

* Alternative energy might take the place of farming in the south. Solar farms? Wind Turbines?

* Inland cities will become more popular because of their reduced risk of climate-related events. Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, Washington, will likely all get net-positive migration.

* Conversely, the big coastal cities will become more expensive and cause people to start leaving. NY, LA, San Francisco, Boston, etc.

If you're interested in adaptation in food systems I really enjoyed The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.

I'm currently working through Whole Earth Discipline which calls for work on three different fronts: Reduction (of emission), Adaptation (to unavoidable change) and Geoengineering (to prevent the worst of it).

Without significant government ran/funded geoengineering projects we'll be living with at least ~1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. We'll need to do some adaptation as is.

> The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.

One of my favorite quotes in this vein is "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton", referring to overfishing and climate change changing Americans' seafood diet. From http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/30/local/la-me-ocean30j....

Of course, many cultures have always eaten and enjoyed jellyfish, but that's beside the point. The ethnocentrism is what sells it to the conservative American audience.[1] ;)

[1] Well, older conservative audience. Many younger conservatives grew up only eating trash fish, at best.

> Of course, many cultures have always eaten and enjoyed jellyfish

From my brief search it looks like most edible jellyfish is sold heavily salted. Like higher than average beef jerky salty.

You'd need to change preservation techniques to really use jellyfish a lot of your daily protein intake.

Jellyfish: > Protein 6.67 g > Sodium, Na 2081 mg

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/396504/n...

> Beef jerky > Protein 33.2 g > Sodium, Na 2081 mg

> Those headed for the table have their tentacles cut off; it is their upper dome, dried and preserved in salt, which is used in cooking. These jellyfish arrive at the restaurant in stacks of parchment paper, doused in rock salt

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/jan/27/foodand...

At least in Chinese cuisines, alot of seafood and other foodstuffs are still preserved with salt. But you normally soak it first, like with salt cod in European cuisines.

> and could tragically lead to the deaths of many people who cannot afford to live in this new world.

We don't care about the billions who can't afford to live in the current world.

But we do care about the ones who can't afford to live in the new one!

Why is this? It took a rich silicon valley dude to care about polio. But every layperson wants to destroy the current economy for future people.

Being from the future they are super rich compared to us, like every new generation now, so perhaps they just are better at writing Twitter hash tags?

There are so many lower hanging fruit for reducing emissions of and sequestering existing carbon.

If you simply restored the majority of the US great plains back to a bison centered ecosystem instead of cattle, you'd produce a similar resource (bison meat) in large quantity while reducing emissions, and the tall grass would sequester an enormous amount of carbon.

Would it though? I don't see how because if it did sequester a lot of carbon (not just a one time chunk but over time) then the world would have way less carbon in the atmosphere than it did before industrialization.

Most of the effect is just that plants are mostly made out of carbon, so having more plant mass means more carbon in plants and less in the atmosphere. It's the same for trees.

It's a sink of fixed size, not a bottomless barrel we can dump infinite amounts of CO2 into. That doesn't make it useless though.

I was about to say most of the plains are used for growing corn and not grazing land but I was wrong, partly. Its mostly cropland in the Northern/Central plains, but mostly grazing/pasture land otherwise.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/maps-...

Worth noting also is that major crops grown there, like corn and soybeans, are primarily used as animal feed [1][2]. A decent chunk of corn is also used for ethanol additives to gasoline. The best thing we can do for the environment by far is reduce consumption of beef and dairy products.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgra...

[2] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...

If you are interested in the environmental impact of what you eat this resource is great:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#you...

Note that you don't need to go vegan or vegetarian to reduce the impact, e.g. replacing any beef with pork or chicken is huge! It's way more important than cutting out milk.

If you primarily eat ground beef consider trying impossible, there are good vegan butters at this point and some okay attempts at cheese. All of those reduce the impact.

  The best thing we can do for the environment by far is reduce consumption of beef and dairy products.

This is very false.

Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Maybe not the best overall, but definitely the cheapest and easiest thing a consumer can do, right now, today, is eat less red meat.

There are already subsidies which incentivize the production of cattle. Just like with corn, if demand goes down, they'll just find a way to use cattle for something else (like turning it into feed or some energy source). The average citizen has very say in macro-economic supply chains.

I highly doubt ranchers would turn to grinding up beef herds just to make more feed. They would just grow more forage/feed crops. But they really wouldn't since it's the beef that needs the absurd volume of feed, so ideally they would just go out of business.

Yes I should have pointed that out too. Thank you.

"simply"

This has been done, I think most people know this.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-...

You can track down the 8 years of followup articles and research papers.

There is no evidence it didn't work. There's evidence it did.

The trick is, tie it to fishing and it might make a difference. Or it might just take pressure off fisheries.

You have billions yet to eat more meat, so hurry up with your lab grown meat or start doing things like this, that also should get the same subsidies as things like solar power.

Every time I read something like this, my hubris alarm goes off. We couldn't even get trans-fats right, so I don't see how we're going to cover all the contingencies for something like this.

'Terraforming' earth has never been easy but it has long been necessary to feed humans. Bulk addition of soluble/leachable nutrients (naturally depleted by rainfall, fractionation by gravity, and chemical transformation) is the primary novel intervention in modern agriculture. We've learned that biological systems can be made to cycle much faster by turning the crank in this way. The rewards are great-- used in land, 7 billion fed. Use of similar intervention in the ocean suggests proportionally larger rewards.

Further, we've already destabilized the global system by injecting carbon. It is now our responsibility to find a way to stabilize it again.

Yes, this is all true, and yet it’s the unknowns that will get us. There was a time where burning coal seemed like a good idea.

Whether the unknowns will get us is.. unknown. We are going to learn about whole-planet ecology in the next century whether we intervene or not. Pretending that we know less than we really do is kind of a trademark regressive-right tactic, so you'll forgive me when I say it's quite disengenuous and harmful to compare coal combustion to iron fertilization.

The negative externalities of coal combustion have been known in broad strokes at both the macro and micro levels for centuries. The benefits of fertilization have been known for much longer.

More likely we will fall to what we thought we knew that was not, in fact, true.

It happened in Iraq, to the tune of $5T.

We thought saving the Ozone Layer by switching from CFCs to HFCs was a good idea.

Joke's on us! The HFCs currently in use in systems worldwide, if vented and not carefully incinerated, will trap as much heat as all the CO2 in the atmosphere, for centuries.

Specify propane or ammonia systems, and make sure existing systems have their fluid extracted professionally.

The original hubris was thinking we could put all these greenhouse gasses in the air and do climate change and fk the consequences.

False dichotomy, my friend.

I agree with your statement, too.

Our species has repeatedly been really clear: we're not going to do anything about climate change. Stop pretending lack of interest is lack of options.

Eurpoe + common wealth + USA + Canada has seen declining CO2 per capita since ~2002, many of them earlier than that.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=chart&xScale=li...

Just because it's not enough and it's been slow doesn't mean it's nothing.

A few counter points:

* rate of World co2 emissions continue to rise.

* we don't just need rate to stop rising, we need rate to fall to pretty much zero.

* and if we could magically get rates to stop rising, and fall to zero, tomorrow, we'd still have about 2 degrees of warming from all the emissions already up there.

People have completely missed the point: the rate of growth of rate of emissions might have improved in some places. But the problem is total amount emitted.

Oh, and you don't avert climate change with per capita cuts if population keeps growing. Which it will, till about 2100.

There is no chance of stopping this. The challenge is massive even if there were political will, and there is no political will. We need to plan for climate change as a near certainty and start preparing now.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Move to land on a hill. Travel north. Buy up some tundra that will be futile farm land in 50 years.

We should also pause for a minute and not the silent beauty of this consensus. No major leader, no scientist, no religious figure ever said Fuck it, let's not bother. But that's what our species have decided...

Is "it's a hoax, invented by the Chinese" (that's a direct quote) somehow substantively different from "fuck it, let's not bother?"

There's been a pretty concerted effort by the oil and gas company to just say "There's no problem"

There have also been the luke warmers who say that climate change is happening, but whos to say that is bad.

That has been achieved largely by outsourcing heavy manufacturing that requires a lot of cheap energy to China.

China one of the highest carbon emission rates per GDP of any large developed nation, but China can't exclusively be blamed for that. China is the "workshop of the world." It's where other countries send their polluting industries to get that pollution out of sight and out of mind, as well as to exploit cheaper labor and a high concentration of manufacturing expertise. China is blasting out CO2 to manufacture products that are exported back to the US, Canada, Europe, and so on, making the latter's carbon emissions look better than they actually are.

I'm not saying China couldn't be cleaner, just that the economy is global and so is this problem. If China switched to cleaner but more expensive energy and took other steps to reduce CO2 emissions, their costs would go up. This would just push manufacturing to whatever countries are willing to ignore climate change.

Seems to me that an all of the above strategy would let us learn the most. We are part of nature, so it wouldn't surprise me if we need to get good at cultivating these feedback loops...

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