What is OIF, does it work and should we pursue it?
Let’s start from the beginning...
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“The history of Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF) goes back to the 1980s. The oceanographer John Martin realized that there were parts of the ocean that were low in iron, and that if you add small amounts of iron in the oceans, you would get plankton blooms. He theorized that if you were to stimulate plankton blooms in those areas, the resulted plankton would use so much CO2 that it would change the climate, and he very famously said: ‘give me half a tanker of iron and I will start the next ice age’.”
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“I think that [‘give me half a tanker of iron and I will start the next ice age’] was one of those essentially dramatic statements that doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny, particularly now that we better understand the impacts of spreading iron in oceans. It doesn’t have the kind of carbon dioxide removal effects that earlier advocates thought it would. So, that is really an entertaining exaggeration.”
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“Scientific research demonstrates that dust-rich wind can fertilize the sea. For example, in the Namibian shores, there is a correlation between plankton bloom frequency and sandstorm activity, which carries inorganic particles such as iron to the sea. But, whether or not we can do it on an industrial controlled way, this is another question.”
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Certainly, but can we go into a bit more detail?
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“The idea behind the iron hypothesis is that there are areas in the oceans where there are a lot of macronutrients --nitrate, phosphates... but there is not much growth[...] This has puzzled people for a long time. When people started to make measurements, they found out that there were very low concentrations of iron there. Iron is a very important component of photosynthetic machinery, a micronutrient. You don’t need a lot of it, but very small amounts. But without it, it limits production. So when phytoplankton cells grow, they photosynthesize and they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, it is dissolved in the water, but they bring it into their bodies and some fraction or portion of them will sink to the bottom of the ocean and that carbon will stay there for a long period of time.”
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“In specific places, they were able to test that iron is a limiting nutrient. But, that still doesn’t fulfill all of the aspects of the amount of iron that goes into the ocean that controls the planet, planetary climate. All we know is that we can grow some cells in specific places. It doesn’t negate not cause you to reject this kind of iron control hypothesis and it doesn’t prove it, doesn’t demonstrate that is true.”
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“One of the key reasons it doesn’t demonstrate that it’s true is that none of these early experiments followed a tract on those phytoplankton cells over time. So what we don’t know is how much of that iron induced bloom sinks to the bottom of the ocean. That is critical for any discussion of climatic control because if you have phytoplankton cells that grow on the surface of the ocean, but they are all eaten by little bugs that come along, zooplankton that come along, and the zooplankton breathes all of that carbon, it goes right back to the atmosphere. We don’t know enough about how this system works nor can we ever, with the tools that we have, in order to justify doing this. It is time to give up this idea of geoengineering to iron fertilization because -it’s not that our models are not good enough,[...] they’re just not good enough for the political and social concerns that we would need them to be good enough for.”
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“I am skeptical about OIF. I think we do not know that it works, I think it is potentially quite disruptive and could have a big negative impact on an open ocean system. The main argument would be that we are meddling with, we are trying to design, to take control over large open natural systems. And it is very difficult to see whether we would have enough knowledge and the right governance structure in place to ever do that in a safe manner.”
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“We don’t believe it’s a direction we should take. We would like to see an international ban of geoengineering technologies being deployed and ocean iron fertilization falls squarely to that. [...] The reason why geoengineering and ocean iron fertilization in particular should be banned is because its an inappropriate response to the environmental crisis that we face.
It will give more and more power to a small number of rich countries who ultimately will not use that power to the benefit of the poor and the weak. Geoengineering is a solution that suits more those who want to pollute more. It also is a very risky thing to do, you are gambling with the entire planet and all the environmental functions, you are gambling with matters of national security. Its very dangerous pathway to follow.” |
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“Jim Thomas and I share a lot of the same goals. Yet, when I look at the ETC Group or Greenpeace, what I see is that they are naive. They think someone else is going to do it and governments are going to come together and will come up to this grand great solution. It is not going to happen until we have real, open conversation. Jim Thomas’ deal is that they want to increase small farmers around the world. It is nice and a good idea. But if you have a million small new farmers, how is that not geoengineering?”
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“While a lot of the enthusiasm on OIF has been dampened by the results of some important careful studies, there are still some enthusiastic advocates out there who want to make money out of it and there are some who aren’t interested in money but who think from a scientific point of view that OIF can make a big difference, but I think with all of these kind of interventions, once you look closely at it, you realize you are playing with and extremely complex system, in this case the oceans. The chemistry, the currents, the radical differences in each part of the oceans and OIF turns out to be vastly more complicated that initial advocates imagined. So how long before we learned this lesson of ecology? That when you do something, it always has unintended effects that sometimes overwhelm the original intention.”
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“Should we look at strategies that can accelerate that process [OIF] by increasing the overall productivity at the surface of the ocean in a way that the impacts are acceptable to the natural world? From my point of view, as humans, we are the ones who, for better or worse, are entrusted with the planet right now, because we are the ones that have had the negative impact. Either Mother earth is going to scrub the surface of the planet from us and return to what she was or we are going to straighten ourselves out and figure out a way to live sustainably on the surface at scale.”
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