Sooty ships may be geoengineering by accident

[bloomington-lib]

GEOENGINEERING is being tested - albeit inadvertently - in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed.

Fertilising the world's oceans with iron has been controversially proposed as a way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to curb global warming. Some geoengineers claim releasing iron into the sea will stimulate plankton blooms, which absorb carbon, but ocean processes are complex and difficult to monitor in tests.

"Experiments suggest you change the population of algae, causing a shift from fish-dominated to jellyfish-dominated ecosystems," says Alex Baker of the University of East Anglia, UK. Such concerns led the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to impose a moratorium on geoengineering experiments in 2010

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Can we learn anything from this unintentional experiment? Baker thinks not. "The process isn't scientifically useful," he says, because the uncontrolled nature of the iron makes it difficult to draw meaningful comparisons.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729035.100-sooty-ships-may-be-geoengineering-by-accident.html

[RobertEarl]

1. Many mistakes have been made

Emissions from power plants have been geo-engineering the planet for years. Some people just don't believe that man can do such a thing. They are idiots.

Take nuclear geo-engineering. Please. Take it and put it where the sun don't shine. Radiation from the sun warms the planet. When man made co2 captures that radiation and holds it we have global warming. Now we have many tons of un-natural nuclear radiation in our atmosphere. Surely, along with all the other chemicals even more global warming is being forced.

What we need to do is find ways to scrub the polluted air. Trees and plankton do so, is man not smarter than trees and plankton? Some times I wonder.....

[Nihil]

2. Your subject line is certainly true

> Now we have many tons of un-natural nuclear radiation in our atmosphere

Oh dear ... now Robert measures radiation in "tons" ...

[RobertEarl]

3. Heh

Thanks for pointing that out. It should have been written like this:

""Now we have many tons of un-natural nuclear particles radiating in our atmosphere.""