Page 267 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

that are as yet unanswered include the amount and fate of carbon from a bloom,
how long it would remain sequestered, and, most important, how all this could
be verified. If the commercial companies are going to try to sell an artificial and
beneficial “rain” of ocean phytoplankton, then all the caveats and all the verifica-
tion and attribution challenges of artificial rainmaking apply. It is similar to the
relationship between cloud physics and commercial cloud seeding; as Kenneth
Coale, director of Moss Landing, pointed out, “iron experiments are about how
nature works; commercial ocean seeding is about getting nature to work for us.” 67
Totally unresolved issues related to all large-scale oIF projects include possi-
ble damage to the ocean food web and the world’s fishing industry caused by dis-
turbing marine ecosystems, production of biological “dead zones,” pollution of
the deep ocean by the buildup of iron compounds, possible destruction of strato-
spheric ozone, and generation of undesirable greenhouse gases such as methane
and nitrous oxide. oIF projects could be undertaken unilaterally by a rogue state
or a group out to make a point; and if the fertilization ever stopped, the carbon
dioxide would immediately begin to return to the atmosphere. Regarding oIF,
68
chemist Whitney King wrote in 1994,

No engineer would consider designing a building which has a less than a 1 percent
chance of standing up and the potential of wiping out a whole city if it falls. Yet
this is probably a good analogy for our state of understanding the carbon cycle and
the role iron plays in controlling it. So why has the iron fertilization theory gained
so much attention? I would suggest that we enjoy the thought of being able to con-
trol global climate. 69

artificial trees or lackner towers

Klaus Lackner of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, collaborating
with Tucson, Arizona–based Global Research Technologies, envisions a world
filled with millions of inverse chimneys, some of them more than 300 feet high
and 30 feet in diameter, inhaling up to 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere every year (the world’s annual emissions) and sequestering it in
underground or undersea storage areas. Picture in your mind’s eye Al Gore’s An
Inconvenient Truth movie logo of a smokestack apparently exhaling a Katrina-
like hurricane; now run the smokestack in reverse and imagine millions of such
giant planetary vacuum cleaners or, more accurately, air filters. Lackner prefers a
different, somewhat greener metaphor: a forest of artificial trees covered in Co -
2
absorbing artificial leaves. Note, however, that trees sequester carbon, not carbon

250 | tHe Climate enGineerS