I watched a video a couple days ago, by
Freethink. They make pretty good videos — interesting, and relatively short. Here's the video:
The Highly Controversial Plan to Stop Climate Change. It's about the idea of putting iron (the mineral) into the ocean as a kind of fertilizer for plankton.
The idea is that plankton is the base of the food chain in the ocean, and there would be more plankton if the ocean had more iron. The lack of iron is the main thing that limits their reproduction. So when you add iron, the plankton multiply like crazy, which provides food for the next biggest animal that eats them, and that provides food for the next biggest animal, etc., all the way up the food chain.
Whale poop contains a lot of iron and there used to be a lot more whales in the ocean pooping.
Plankton is the world's most abundant life form. The plankton in the ocean make about 70 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere. That's way more than the Amazon rainforest and all other forests combined.
One important possible consequence of adding iron to the ocean is carbon sequestration. When the plankton die, a percentage of them would sink to the ocean floor and get buried for hundreds or thousands of years. So CO2 would be pulled out of the atmosphere by the plankton and then sequestered under the ocean floor.
This is, of course, a very controversial idea because we don't really know what the long-term consequences of it would be. Several experiments have been done on a small scale, and it seemed to do exactly what they thought it was going to do, but what they tested was limited.
But one entrepreneur took the idea and ran with it. He was hired by some indigenous people living in a village called Old Massett to try it. The people in Old Massett rely on salmon, and the salmon runs were getting smaller, so they paid Russ George to put iron in the ocean near their village, and sure enough, the next two years, the salmon yield was record-breaking.
More plankton equals more of everything up the food chain, which equals more salmon surviving.
Rush George got in trouble for doing this, and environmentalists were up in arms around the world about it, justifiably feeling frightened by the thought of a lone actor or even a lone country feeling they had the right to put something in the ocean that may affect life in the ocean or even affect the whole world's climate. Who gets to decide whether or not something like that can be done?
The idea, however, seems to be a good one, it seems to do what people think it's going to do, but what if there are negative consequences we're unable to anticipate until it's too late?
The reason I wanted to write something about this is that the topic of climate change is covered everywhere. You can't really watch much of anything or read much of anything without hearing about climate change and the impending doom it will bring. And yet I have never heard of the idea of putting iron in the ocean. And it's not even new. It's been around since the 1980's. In the description below the video, I found three articles about it. They're all good — long, detailed and authoritative — explaining how and why this idea has merit.
Scientists aren't one hundred percent certain it would reduce CO2 in our atmosphere, but it seems likely it would, and it could do the job on a large enough scale to make a real difference. And a side effect would be an increase in yield for the fishing industry, which would be good for all of us. So it looks like something worth experimenting with (in a way that's safe until we are sure about what we're doing).
Any viable idea that might help reduce the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is worthy of our attention. So check it out and share it with your friends. Here are the three articles I mentioned:
The Complicated Role of Iron in Ocean Health and Climate Change
The Climate Renegade
Engineering the Ocean
Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcasts, The Adam Bomb and Talk to Klassy. You can email him here.
