Thursday, May 29, 2008

why "ecohackers" are fucking stupid

Paul Crutzen, professor emeritus at Utrecht University's Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, suggested a project to use balloons or artillery shells to put 1.9m tonnes of sulphur into the atmosphere to cool the Earth. The model for this idiocy was the eruption of Mount Pinatubo (see the article for an awesome photograph).

Punkscience would like to remind this fuckwit where acid rain comes from. Yes, its sulphur in the atmosphere. And this twat is advocating adding 1.9 million tonnes of it (equal to the annual sulphur emissions of Canada, or 10% of US emissions)??


Phil Kithil, chief exec of US firm Climos, wants to exploit the phenomenon of iron-limitation in the surface waters of the Southern Ocean.

Punkscience thinks: 'Obviously he rather idiotically failed to look at the detailed scientific evidence from previous attempts to make this crock of shit work.' -To save you a lot of digging through peer-reviewed science (I did a review of a couple of the papers from the SOIREE experiment which followed up the IRONEX one from the previous link) I can tell you that it doesn't work. To elaborate, because I like to think I know what I'm talking about, production- and carbon sequestration- does increase in surface waters as a result of iron enrichment. However, this sequestration is short-term and the carbon is released again within a few years. For sequestration to work over meaningful time-scales of centuries that would help mitigate climate change the carbon has to be exported to depths greater than ~500m in order for the carbon to not be returned to the surface in the short term and released again. This doesn't happen.


As for the third idea for the floating tubes; it sounds great but the numbers there should tell you whether it will work: 14400 of these tubes (60km x 60km with one every 500m) is a LOT. This screams BLAG!!! to me at a very loud volume. His proposal to cover 80% of the earth's surface is a little infeasible as it implies a number of the tubes in the billions. Who is going to manufacture them in the next decade when oil prices are screaming upwards and resource wars are already breaking out?

Ditto for Peter Flynn's idea of 8000 floating platforms. I imagine there are less than 8000 in the whole world right now- there's only 450 in the North Sea.


If those ideas are infeasible then the ones about putting shit into orbit are the product of minds which resemble large bags of mixed fruit and nuts. -FYI, it costs a little over £3000 per kilogram to put an object into low earth orbit and several times that for geostationary. And that was before oil reached $135 a barrel.

My point is that dream-uber-techno-solutions simply aren't practical or workable. The only solution is George's: Reduce emissions now and pump all that money into expanding renewable generation capacity.

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