CLIMATE CHANGE: Time For Some Slightly Mad Ideas?

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Sep 28 2007 (IPS) - Lack of governmental action on climate change is forcing scientists to consider radical climate geo-engineering schemes such as giant vertical pipes in the ocean and growing vast blooms of plankton to try and prevent the worst from happening.

Companies backing some of these schemes hope to profit from the rising public clamour for action and politicians desperate to avoid serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

“I wasn’t in favour of geo-engineering before, but we haven’t done well in reducing emissions,” said Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum in London and former head of the British Antarctic Survey.

In fact, the global community continues on the “business as usual” path in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), thus increasing the chances of catastrophic climate change, Rapley, a climate change expert, told IPS.

“Just look at how incredibly quick the Arctic sea ice is melting,” he said.

This month, the Arctic sea ice shrank 20 percent more than the previous melt record set in 2005. Many scientists now believe that the Arctic region will melt completely during the summer months in a few decades – far sooner than previously estimated.

Rapley and co-author James Lovelock published a paper on their geo-engineering “tool” – giant vertical pipes in the ocean – this week in the prestigious journal Nature.

The idea is to place a series of vertical pipes 10 metres in diameter and 200 metres long in the ocean so that wave motion would pump up water from 200 metres below the surface. This would encourage algae to bloom and push carbon dioxide back down, said Rapley.

He credits James Lovelock, an independent research scientist affiliated with the University of Oxford, with the original idea. Lovelock, who first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth as a single highly complex organism, believes the climate change tipping point has been reached and drastic measures are needed to avoid the worst.

“We’re not sure that pipes will actually work but it looks like it would have low unintended consequences,” Rapley said, meaning that at least the scheme is unlikely to do more harm than good.

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson has reportedly offered to fund research on the idea.

A company called Atmocean in Santa Fe New Mexico has already begun trials of a very similar technology in the past year, Rapley has since learned. The company says placing three-metre diameter pipes, two kilometres apart in 80 percent of the world’s oceans would sequester, or trap, two billion tonnes of carbon per year, according to the company’s website. Global emissions are currently 8 billion tons annually, up from 6 billion in 2000.

“That shows it’s not a completely mad idea,” said Rapley.

Not completely mad – but it won’t work, according to Scott Doney, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the United States. While the deeper water would bring nutrients to the surface and algae might bloom, the deeper water also brings more carbon to the surface.

“There is a misunderstanding of how the oceans work,” Doney told IPS.

Wood’s Hole is hosting its own geo-engineering conference this week by reexamining ocean fertilisation schemes and experiments. These involve seeding the ocean with iron filings to stimulate plankton growth. A U.S. company, Planktos Inc., has plans to dump 100 tonnes of iron dust into the ocean near Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands this fall. Another U.S. company called Climos is also looking at this idea.

“We wanted to bring people together from all sectors to look at the potential, the risks and challenges,” said Doney.

Adding iron to the ocean in hopes of stimulating plankton blooms has been tested in several small experiments over the past 20 years. Most have shown that adding iron to ocean waters with an iron deficit – like the Southern Oceans – will promote growth of plankton, which need this nutrient to live. And since the plankton absorb carbon, this boosts the amount of atmospheric carbon taken up by the ocean.

“The next question is how much carbon is stored and for how long,” he said.

There hasn’t been any research on the potential impacts for marine ecosystems yet. It is not known what will happen to fish or birds, he said.

The growing market for selling carbon credits is what’s driving companies like Planktos to invest millions of dollars in looking at sequestering carbon deep in the oceans, acknowledged Doney.

“We want to make sure that if these projects are going forward that there is enough science done to know it if is okay,” he said.

And that’s going to take a whole lot more research because the oceans are complex and very different from place to place, says Eric Vetter, an oceanographer at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

“I’m surprised people are still looking at this,” Ritter told IPS.

No one knows if iron fertilisation traps carbon deep in the ocean for long enough and there many questions about potential impacts on marine life from the surface all the way down to the deep ocean, he said.

“Desperation and profit potential are behind these geo-engineering ideas,” said Kathy Jo Wetter of the environmental organisation ETC Group. ETC Group issued a report last winter called “Gambling with Gaia” warning that countries are increasingly looking for technologic fixes for climate change.

The Joint BioEnergy Institute funded by the U.S. Department of Energy is working on developing synthetic lifeforms – microorganisms created from bits of DNA – that can be used to make celluosic ethnanol. And genome pioneer Craig Venter has proposed to create an another new lifeform that would produce CO2-free energy, Wetter told IPS.

Desperation levels are rising with the realisation that current biofuels are not going to reduce emissions of GHGs, she says.

“That’s all the more reason that a precautionary approach should be taken with any of these new technologies since they could make things worse for the environment,” Wetter argued. “These may be desperate times, but governments can act to set mandatory reductions in (greenhouse gas) emissions.”