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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
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.
>> (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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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!
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...
They produce oxygen as long as they are alive and near the surface. They sink to the deep waters after they died, and even if they still lived they would have a hard time to produce oxygen down in the darkness of the deep sea.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yup.
Mostly by stripping the Carbon from CO2 atoms. That's actually the entire point of doing it. Problem is it can screw up the local ecosystem in very unpredictable ways.
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.
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.
Just imagine the 'lulz' that could be unleashed on the world, should the creators of malicious computer code, decide to dabble in wetware systems and genetic code.
We release the documentation publicly already you know. Incuding decompiled source, such as it is.
All that is needed, is that the technology becomes ubiquitous, and cheap.
Eventually, someone *will* make something like it. Someone with nothing to lose.
Sorry to be such a joykill, but I don't deny being a misanthropist. I am just not a cold blooded murderous misanthropist. I see the creation of such a horrible thing as being as inevitable as botnets and government malware were.
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.