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Huge Geoengineering Project Violates UN Rules
Baldrson writes "The Guardian reports that a massive geoengineering project has been detected off the west coast of Canada that violates UN regulations. An Amerindian tribe in the Pacific NW that depends on salmon teamed with an entrepreneur and a group of scientists to have 100 tons of iron sulphate spread across a huge area of the ocean in order to spur plankton growth. 'Satellite images appear to confirm the claim ... that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometers. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilization that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.' The entrepreneur, Russ George, hopes to cash in on the carbon credits and the Amerindian tribe on an increased salmon harvest. The situation has sparked outcry from environmentalists and civil society groups. Oceanographer John Cullen said, 'It is difficult if not impossible to detect and describe important effects that we know might occur months or years later. Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation. History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.'"
Amerindian? That's the stupidiest fucking word I've heard in years.
Native Americans are so much more in tune with nature......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
we'll make an artificial coal reef out of automobile tires! It's totally win-win guys!
Always the buzzkills. There is no solution other than to eat tofu and walk everywhere in your hemp sandals. Any other solutions to 'climate change' are heresy.
Someone just needs to let off a few nukes, so that 'nuclear winter' thing can happen. It would mean I can go skiiing more and we could get rd of the carbon tax.
>> (whatever) has been detected off the west coast of Canada that violates UN regulations
Is it Canada waters? Then WTF does anyone care what the UN papershufflers think?
>> The entrepreneur, Russ George, hopes to cash in on the carbon credits
Why not? Start treating silly little "carbon credits" like valuable pieces of paper, and they will become money.
So what happens if this little adventure is actually successful. Obviously there will be some side effects, but what if none of them are negative and the fish flourish and the evil carbon is inprisioned? Will they still seek to crucify this guy? Further, what "teeth" does an international "resolution" have to take legal action against him? he didn't break any actual laws.
It seems like he is swimming in a big grey sea and knows it. And is willing as an entrepreneur to take the risks associated with that swim. Makes sense to me.
That's quite a leap from next to no evidence you are making.
the folks trying to save it.
(To date, my favorite is to pump Co2 underground. The biosphere might be able to adapt to the incremental additions to Co2 we are doing, but if we store a bunch underground and then screw up and release a bunch at once, I'm not so sure.)
Insofar as realistic-scale research on any geoengineering processes are never going to be allowed, maybe this kinds of illegal stuff is the only way to find out what works and what won't. As the writeup correctly said, we just don't know what kind of effect this will have on oceanic oxygen levels. And for another thing, we don't really know what effect this will have on the salmon either. One thing that I'm happy about: Now we're at least about to find out! Since somebody did this, I hope that a flock of oceanologists flock to the site and measure the shit out of it. Yeah, it's not an experiment we wanted or approve of, but we might as well make a bit of lemonade out of these lemons!
So spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is NOT against UN regulations? That, it seems to me, is the REAL geoengineering experiment. At least the fertilization team is going to learn something that might be useful.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
It's funny when one group of moonbats get pissed off with another group of moonbats.
> History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.
History is full of hundreds of thousands of times more (probably a gross underestimate) of politicians interfering and making life worse.
"You must get government permission before doing things" leads to more deaths than anything this side of a major asteroid strike.
Downside? Small compared to overbearing government, thanks for asking.
OP likes history? Go fucking learn some!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
TFA says that it violates two UN rules/moratoria with mention of one that limits ocean fertilisation projects... and probably something about not doing this sort of thing for commercial gain.
Can anyone else shed some light as to what was actually violated? Especially with the business man (George) in charge of the project claiming that such moratoria are "myths" and don't apply.
If carbon credits werent involved, would the same people be in an uproar?
"His name was James Damore."
Hard sci fi figured it all out a long time ago. Read KSR's red mars with special focus on the guerrilla geo/aero/engineering project. Given a lot of thought its all pretty predictable.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I say sequester carbon in plankton. Then salmon can sequester the plankton. Then sequester that there salmon to my plate, forthwith!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
And North Americans are breathing Chinese smog.
I want to know who gpt paid off to import this foreign made smog when we have plenty of good old American Made Smog right here in Los Angeles!!!
I think we need a Congressional investigation! With blackjack! And hookers!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
See, carbon credits are sooooooooooooo great y'all!
This is the kind of problem that's created by adversarial politics, we almost always end up choosing a single bad guy to blame all the ills in the world on, but in the end, it's a systemic issue that creates these problems. We'll never find a metric that tells us what is right and wrong to do with regards to the environment, and any solution that seems to offer such a measurement is disingenuous at best.
I don't pretend to be an expert in this field, but my understanding was that phyto-plankton and algae produce 50% of the world's oxygen. Wouldn't a bloom produce more oxygen in the nearby waters?
> Amerindians
In Canada, they know where the fuck India is. The people you are referring to are called “First Nations” not Indians. Maybe you should look at a map also.
is the sound of people wanting to know what the outcome is, to know that we are not doing more harm than good, before we do something like this. Don't f*ck the world by accident or by ignorance. Preferably don't f*ck it at all. I do not mind experimenting and learning, but something on this scale that has such huge potential ramifications, all on someone's belief rather than proven science, backed with long term studies - Nahh, that I do not like. Too much of it already in the world we live in. Let's learn from humanity's mistakes, please!
Yeah, my melons are more on the pink side.
The important thing is that we live in a world where "rogue geoengineer" is a profession. I assume he's got an icecave where dude hangs out with Julian Assange and the rest of the League of Gray-hat Supervillians.
If carbon credits werent involved, would the same people be in an uproar?
Well being from Ontario(Cdn), his comment about watermelons, is pretty much spot on. Especially in relation to the disastrous "green" projects that the now ex-pm of the province has going. $24 billion and counting at the cost to tax payers.
Om, nomnomnom...
You need more GMO.
oxygen production. plankton are the foundation of the ocean ecosystem. i'm a lefty, but this seems like a win win. change will happen. but no more than when we make hydroelectric dams that drastically change the water temperature so all of the indigenous fish die and have to be replaced with colder water species. and these types of changes are justified every day. I really don't see a problem with this. let's do a study to see what happens when we offer fish more food. you get more fish.
Mark Anthony Collins
since everyone is already bashing liberals and government regulations, let's look at it from the other side.
what's the libertarian take on this, or, hypothetically, any project where the risks are in the $billions (ignoring effects on human life and welfare)? if things go wrong, then even if this guy goes into a private debtor's prison for life and somehow works at maximum capacity, there would be practically zero chance of him taking full responsibility for his harm. but the state shouldn't be able to stop him preemptively, so what's the deal? how will the open market take care of this (assuming for the moment that he has property licensed the property rights he needs to execute this project).
i guess he could take an insurance policy in theory, but even if an insurer were willing to cover this, the premium if correctly computed would probably be more than he could afford, so he would just go ahead and do it anyway.
what would happen in the real world is, of course, that private interests would have this guy arrested and maybe worse. but that's initiation of force (and libertarians would have to admit that private prisons would still exist in their paradise), so how do you solve the problem without initiating force?
you could say that the entrepreneur is "initiating force" by doing something very risky, but that's a definition which would admit many of the government regulations we have today.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The UN has made its decision; now let it enforce it.
Seriously: there is nothing the UN can do about actions undertaken by private parties. They don't have any police force, much less an army. Now, if the actions violated Canadian law, that might be something that Mr. George actually has to worry about. But violating a resolution of the UN has no more effect than violating a resolution of your local university faculty senate. They are a talking shop, nothing more.
The plankton will bloom creating a huge boom in population for the species that eat the plankton, and the species that eat the species that eat the plankton.
Every year we take 100 million tons of biomass from the oceans (mostly as pelagic fish, 70m tons). And each year, we dump 6 million tons of garbage in the oceans, 2 million tons of waste oil, and discharge about 450 cubic kilometres of waste water into rivers (about 450 billion tons, so even ppb chemicals release more than 100 tons).
But lets worry about 100 tons of iron sulphate dust.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
How do you earn carbon credits by dumping iron sulphate in the ocean?.
I find it hard to believe you'd get the by doing something against the rules.
Can I claim carbon credits by killing someone? It means they'll produce less carbon dioxide.
The UN is nothing but a incredibly huge joke, waste of money, time, energy and resources. Why anyone even pays attention to them is beyond me.
They need to be disbanded and forgotten.
The UN is not (yet) a world government. There is a voluntary moratorium on geoengineering among the small number of governments that could afford to attempt such a thing, but that hardly qualifies as "UN regulations". In any case, small-scale experiments such as this, no matter how ill-conceived, are not going to have any global impact and so do not qualify as geoengineering.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What a bunch of cry-babies. They cry about global warming and then when someone tries to do something about it, they cry about that. Either fish or cut bait. Whining is the wrong option.
Dear UN:
Go fuck yourself until you come up with your own plan. Difficulty - No "strongly worded letter"s.
Baldrson made the front page.
Jim Bowery is a racist piece of crap. This is where my journey with this website ends.
There are no other nations involved here, so there's no reason not to use the name they call themselves.
If carbon credits werent involved, would the same people be in an uproar?
Does it really matter? I thought carbon credits were supposed to encourage this type of, er, entrepreneurship.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Has science fiction taught us nothing?!
I seem to be hearing the sound of UN flunkies screaming that this wasn't the way it was supposed to work? "AIIIIEEEEE!!! You can't just MANUFACTURE carbon credits!! That defeats the whole purpose of redistributing North American wealth!! Oh, wait, I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that. My bad."
You're all wrong! They are "indigenous peoples"! More power to them for trying to replace all the fish killed off through overfishing by greedy Russian/Japanese/Norwegian super ocean-vacuums. May they cause the dying seas to bloom! At least somebody still has balls on this planet! Who gives a damn about the UN anyway? They are the most screwed up of all...
carbon credits are a scam.
nothing more,nothing less.
create fake company,that makes nothing.
sell your carbon credits to a company that actually makes something.
thats all they are.
regards,
mike
And in the end, the Greens realized that it was their own efforts to prevent environmental degradation that spurred it.
Foreign species brought in to repair the damage to local environments became invasive. Carbon markets, to tax and control pollution in the atmosphere, were soon gamed by every lawyer who had a creative mind. Even their attempts to depopulate or cull humanity only resulted in a population explosion, as stress + humans = sex.
I am John Hurt.
Tiny Experiment in Reducing Carbon Dioxide Pollution is Success
By putting a nutrient for plankton in the the ocean, a 60x60 plankton bloom will provide food for a Native American tribes salmon stocks. Moreover, the solution might work on a large scale to reduce the Earth's manmade carbon emissions. The inital venture was an amazing success, and any possible harm from implementing this long ago proposed geoengineernig activity can for the first time examined with real data.
Why would an "Amerindians" give a flying F about UN Regulations? Did the UN sign a treaty with their tribe?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Talk about this and generally about China's lack of involvement in CO2 emission standards--and the US using such as an excuse not to act--makes me realize something rather non-profound but possibly relevant. It would seem clear to me that the US has a rather serious management problem. You see, China is a lot like Google and the US is a lot like Microsoft.
By that I mean, China is a developing country which is still working out just what sort of economic form it will have in the future. As a result, it is not only experience a lot of growth as it learns what it does well but it also wastes a lot of resources on a lot of projects that end up as dead-ends.
Meanwhile, the US is a developed country with a rather stable--overall--economic form. Growth ends up being rather incremental and spurts are usually rather limited in scope to the few success stories where the "US ingenuity"--ie, the perceived actions of a startup company/country--sees a wasteful project that actually goes somewhere. In the end, though, a lot of the economic form is controlled through a network of treaties and implied if not outright acted acts of force against not only enemies but also allies. The focus is, of course, to solidify power but it comes at the cost of exerting a lot more resources per capita as so many resources go towards just maintaining the power base.
Now, the real problem in all this is way too many Republicans and Democrats think the US is still a startup. They function just like a manager or a CEO who wants to do slash and burn policies--like cutting wages, benefits, etc to be more competitive against other countries--because they see those very things that make the US a developed country as also the main impediment to growth. The truth is, of course, that those sorts of actions --just like massive loans/stimulus packages--do have a short term benefit but obvious long-term harm. And if next quarter thinking and CEO golden parachutes make one's blood boil, then the very nature of the electoral process and the absurd compensation package offered to federal politicians would seem to be the very framework of which corporate executives must have cribbed their playbook.
So, yea, way off-topic to the point at hand. But, then, given the UN is all about trying to provide a forum for countries to talk to avoid war, I really don't see how the geoengineering project really falls under their purview any more than the CO2 issue, especially given how little teeth the UN has to enforce anything and certain how unwilling any country, even those who have made pledges, are inclined to explicitly force their citizens to comply.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
'It is difficult if not impossible to detect and describe important effects that we know might occur months or years later."
Wait..what? How do you "know what might"? Is that any different than knowing what might not?
And I thought the models the climate scientists were using were beyond reproach? Why wouldn't those models, or same methodology work here? Is it because the system is large and complicated and any model would end up being simplified to the degree that the assumptions are more important than the inputs?
No way.
You overstate a basically correct case. Some carbon credits actually do work to generate offset. Some do, but not as much as they claim. Many are, indeed, pure scam.
There is no way to properly regulate carbon credits, and the people who designed the system knew it, and intended ti. A carbon tax was the correct approach. It is reasonably enforceable with only a small bureaucracy needed. But it didn't provide as many opportunities for hidden (and obscured) corruption. Guess which passed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, they're big enough...
Why can't all those people with the computer models that so conclusively prove AGW use those same models (or ones just like them) to model this complex system and predict the results with a high degree of fidelity? Is this system that much more complex than global climate?
Impossible.
Have him eat a pound of the shit he sprayed, seems fair enough.
Yes, those poor ignorant savages, always getting taken advantage of by the bad whites. Only the good whites can guide the poor ignorant savages on the path to enlightenment.
Infuriate left and right
You too can experiment on our planet, with crazy ideas...
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It's kind of funny to read this after having been called a crazy conspiracy theorist for months while this stuff is actually happening..
mod parent up.
In France we have one such dead zone, consecutive to huge pork sewage dropped at sea. ;-)
Enormous algae blooms result in beaches covered with thick rot algae (instead of sand), which sucks so much oxygen out of the air (or produces so much other gases, I don't remember exactly) that this kills animals passing by the beaches (wild boars, horses recently). Mind you, how this helps tourism there
Needless to say bathing is forbiden.
Local politicians respect the numerous pork farmers, so nothing at all was done until the recent animal deathes made headlines. But I'm not sure anything will result, since that's all the local economy that should evolve.
At least in the OP the locals haven't evolved too much dependency yet.
Herve S.
Are probably not members of the UN so I cannot see how they can be constrained by it's treaties.
What is the tangible difference from pouring huge amongst of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
That's quite a leap from next to no evidence you are making.
[cue levar burton Voice]"But you don't have to take my word for it." Let's ask Dr. Otto Edenhofer of the IPCC, "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
"History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.'"
Uh... can you name a few thousand? How about ten?
I have no problem with them finally getting something from the worthless land they were shifted onto - some tribes multiple times; others they are just robbed and spend decades in court. But I draw the line at international level environmental crimes. The UN should sanction them and the USA should also.
a documentary film entitled "what in the world are they spraying" presents some very compelling evidence that the 'chemtrail' phenomenon is in fact a unapproved geoengineering project dumping tons of (highly toxic) particulate aluminum into the atmosphere. this is supposed to reflect light away from the planets surface and help to cool it. but increasing soil toxicity is now forcing many organic farmers to buy aluminum resistant gm seeds from Monsanto. are they trying to save the planet? or poison the natural world so we become dependant on nutrient deficient gm foods?
Its less than 32,000 litres of iron sulphate.
There are 1,386,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water in the ocean.
That's 0.0000000000000023%