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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

The basic theory is the plankton grow, turn CO2 in to plankton, which get eaten. The result is less CO2 in the air. How much less is an interesting question.

What I find amazing is how controversial this is. If you can actually pull a significant fraction of CO2 out of the atmosphere and return it to the sea, why wouldn't you do that? It would seem to be potentially a huge weapon to wield against global warming and relative to other ideas is both actionable and hugely less expensive. And yet even modest experiments are fought tooth and nail.

Its a strange dissonance that conspiracy theorists love but I write up to a more generalized fear of change. It will be interesting to see how this one turns out.

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If you can bring in toads to eat a significant fraction of the beetles that are destroying the sugar cane crops, why wouldn't you do that?

(Because: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia . These are complex, poorly understood systems, and the results will almost certainly not be what you expected. This isn't engineering.)

Exactly. Algal blooms drastically change the composition of the water that they are in. Fresh water algal blooms from run-off are incredibly damaging for local ecosystems, producing chemicals toxic to local flora and fauna.

Done over a large enough area, it can change more than just the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Iron sulfate doesn't reproduce.

The point still stands - although you are in control of one variable in this equation ("iron sulfate doesn't reproduce"), it would still be impossible to predict the consequences.

Iron sulfate does indeed lack reproductive capability. But it attracts plankton, which is a wide category of organism - some plankton can reproduce.

So long as the end result of all these extra plankton is not worse than "climate change threatens human civilization", I think we'd have a net gain.

"We need to do something. This is something we can do. Therefore we need to do this."

It's a false dichotomy. There's probably a wide range of things we can do, and picking an option just because it happens to be there & feasible, regardless of evidence of merit, doesn't seem like a winning strategy.

Put another way, you could cut off your hand to treat an infected wound. It's "feasible." But is it anything remotely approaching the best way? Furthermore, what if it turns out that artificially seeding the ocean with plankton is approximately as disastrous for the health of the ocean?

Obviously I do not advocate doing something for which there is no evidence of benefit... We shouldn't do it because it is merely "something", we do it because we can demonstrate that it does more harm than good.

If there are demonstrable benefits, then "do the benefits outweigh the risks" is something that we must consider. To categorically strike out broad classes of solutions because something might go wrong, without even considering the severity of the possibility, is to advocate inaction.

Any solution to this particular problem is met with this nonsensical "something non-descript might go wrong, so we better sit on our asses instead" mentality. What we should be asking ourselves is "What solution has both the greatest good/bad ratio, and can be scaled enough to actually solve the problem". Things are going to go wrong; to stop exploring a possibility as soon as we learn that something could go wrong is naive and if universalized will lead to our downfall.

"do the benefits outweigh the risks'

But that's just it: we have no way to answer that question. We can't say if it's a good idea because we don't even know if it's even going to yield good results, let alone what cost those good results come at.

I agree that we won't hit on some perfect solution which has no trade-off. But making a decision without even knowing what trade-off you're making could actually make things worse! Imagine if this does approximately nothing substantial for climate change, yet it kills off a ton of species. Now we're on a planet with an destabilizing climate and a substantially more destabilized ecosystem.

High stakes cut both ways. You can win big by doing something bold just as you can lose even bigger or sooner. And having people unilaterally try out their pet theories seems like a recipe for disaster. They'll likely be long dead before the effects of their actions are realized anyway.

Neither do CFCs, CO2, nitrous oxides, sulfer oxides, carbon monoxide, radioactive iodine, arsenic, mercury, dioxins, BPA, or any of tens of thousands of other toxic and/or harmful compounds we've released into the biosphere over the years.

The attribute of non-replication doesn't equate to "safe for the environment".

The trouble could come from numerous angles.

As others note, not all plankton is created equal; just as in human bodies a balance between bacteria and fungi create healthy conditions, getting a dramatic boost to one kind of plankton may throw things out of whack far down the road.

Perhaps an iron-hungry form of plankton (or algae) suddenly gains a foothold in the region, depleting other nutrients and sunlight from the existing balance of critters. As the iron levels go back to baseline and the opportunistic plankton gets absorbed into the food chain, now the existing food base is gone, just as a huge population spike of higher-on-the-food-chain species is ready to chow down.

You see this sort of effect in gulf "dead zones" where fertilizer (iron sulfate is definitely fertilizer in this case) has killed the existing balance and will take many years to reverse.

That said, perhaps some good could come of this type of practice. It's too bad this sort of vigilante experimentation is the only kind that can go on- if scientific bodies would endorse more research on limited scales, we'd have a lot more data for the potential damage.

Its an interesting conundrum. It isn't like the plankton aren't native to the ocean, there already exists a food chain that dines on them. And doing this experiment is no more or less 'dangerous' than re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone.

So what I don't get is when people propose even modest iron farming experiments they get the crap sued out of them or otherwise targeted. Why? Why not start small, measure, and move up? We're over fishing the ocean anyway, and nobody is doing anything about that. That is killing fisheries in the name of sushi. So why is this project so dangerous?

Its very curious. One of the risks of this investigation is success. Lets say we develop a way to moderate the CO2 content in the atmosphere to what ever level we want using iron (very abundant) and the oceans (also very abundant). Is that a horrible outcome some how?

vigilante experimentation is a good term for it. I don't know, I kind of respect it. I'm doubtful it could have the same level of negative effect as sustained fertilizer runoff, and if does a lot of good (i.e. effectively reduces CO2 and increases salmon numbers) can you really complain?

"Does a lot of Good" is a subjective term, and even if it weren't, the ends typically do not justify the means.

The oceans are already absorbed enormous amounts of atmospheric CO2, and it's messing up marine ecosystems by changing pH levels, among other things. It's a major cause of coral loss and possibly of jellyfish population growth. The reason IMO, for fighting things tooth and nail is that the systems we are dealing with are complex and interconnected, sort of like the world economy - which has billions of dollars of modeling yet still can't predict effects of simple changes. Major changes in any ocean system will have unpredictable effects in others.

And coral is a great CO2 absorber...

Coral is a great CO3 absorber. CO2 can acidify the ocean water, which lowers calcification rates affecting the ability to grow carbonate skeletons. Combined with an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere contributing to a global increase in temperature, which coral is extremely sensitive to, and an increase of CO2 anywhere is bad news.

Source: http://people.uncw.edu/szmanta/BIO%20585%20CoralReef%20Field...

I think people are afraid of messing things up worse through unforeseen consequences. If my web app tries something new and crashes, no big deal. If you try something new in the planet's atmosphere and it crashes, well...big deal :) I am not in that group, but I can sympathize to some degree. Humans have a history of overrating our own competence.

But it's not established at all that atmospheric CO2 will be significantly reduced, and while a reduction would be good, it has to be weighed against the possible negative effects of the algal bloom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algal_bloom

In particular, I find it odd that it seems rather more controversial than pumping much much larger quantities of CO2 into the air.

CO2 dissolving does help with climate change, but causes ocean acidification instead. If it gets bad enough, the lower pH will interfere with a lot of marine life with calcified structures like shells and coral. The full impact of that on the ocean's food chain is difficult to estimate, but it won't be good.

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