second comment: It is lots better to grow plants in the ocean for c02 drawdown than growing trees-- the ocean plants grow tremendously more quickly, and you don't get forest fires in the ocean. Bravo! Let's do i!!
Golly, what a good article-- thanks! However, you are leaving out one potential problem, as we see
when river effluence puts too much fertilizer into the ocean, it accidentally producing deadzones. This should not be a show stopper, however and it is definitely better to fertilize the ocean and drawdown a goodly amount of c02, than neglect an useful drawdown technique.
My brother observed that iron dust levels falling into the Pacific are at their highest level in the last 93 million years (https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/09/04/iron-earth-climate-history/). What does this mean (if anything) for phytoplankton seeding? Is the high level of iron dust too diffuse to make a difference?
Well humans do have a catastrophic history of intervening in their environments, think how many times you've been told about the evils of communism when Mao ordered people to kill the sparrows, but sure do it, don't expect polluters to ever stop polluting once we start with geo engineering, and we will have to keep this up for several 100 years. I'm also sure the polluters will pay for it and the burden won't be put on the tax payer.... I'm not anti geo engineering, but it also needs to come with changing the status quo and restoring nature.
Hi Quico, this is a great article, but I disagree with your theory that the problem preventing ocean iron fertilization is that "unfamiliar ideas make people uncomfortable." I have a much more political theory to explain the irrational opposition to ocean fertilization.
My view is that the opposition arises directly from the fact that the climate establishment around the IPCC has fixed on the idea that opposition to the fossil fuel industry is the primary agenda for climate policy. They therefore seek to build a united front around this ideological stance.
As a result, anything at all that undermines this policy must be derided and prevented by all means possible. This harmful ideology is largely overt, through the incoherent concept of 'mitigation deterrence'. However, it also has a conspiratorial element, in that its advocates try to get the public to believe the opposition to fixing the oceans is scientific rather than political.
In fact, all the alleged scientific risks are just cover for the political ideology that dominates UN climate circles. This ideology is expressed most forcefully in the futile AR6 call to halve world emissions by 2030. The UN has the power, through corrupted bodies like the Convention on Biological Diversity, to effectively use its social authority to derail wide public discussion of essential climate repair methods.
To assert that adding iron is bad for biodiversity is an ethically and empirically bankrupt claim, but that is the dominant view in UN circles.
By chance have you read Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline? His book was fairly prescient, in my opinion. But I don't really get to discuss it with many people because they hear geoengineering and treat it almost like I said eugenics.
I am convinced. Let’s do it.
A bunch of us are working on it:
https://oceaniron.org/
https://www.growingoceans.org/
join us!
second comment: It is lots better to grow plants in the ocean for c02 drawdown than growing trees-- the ocean plants grow tremendously more quickly, and you don't get forest fires in the ocean. Bravo! Let's do i!!
Golly, what a good article-- thanks! However, you are leaving out one potential problem, as we see
when river effluence puts too much fertilizer into the ocean, it accidentally producing deadzones. This should not be a show stopper, however and it is definitely better to fertilize the ocean and drawdown a goodly amount of c02, than neglect an useful drawdown technique.
Fertilizer runoff from land inevitably hits coastal areas, which are the only areas of the ocean that already have enough nutrients!
But then, coastal areas are like 1-2% of the ocean’s surface!
The idea is to fertilize the areas that don’t have enough nutrients, not the ones that have too many.
My brother observed that iron dust levels falling into the Pacific are at their highest level in the last 93 million years (https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/09/04/iron-earth-climate-history/). What does this mean (if anything) for phytoplankton seeding? Is the high level of iron dust too diffuse to make a difference?
Your brother’s research is awesome!
It seems like iron deposition was even lower in the past, but it remains very low compared to the Atlantic.
That is not my brother’s research. He just pointed me to it.
Well humans do have a catastrophic history of intervening in their environments, think how many times you've been told about the evils of communism when Mao ordered people to kill the sparrows, but sure do it, don't expect polluters to ever stop polluting once we start with geo engineering, and we will have to keep this up for several 100 years. I'm also sure the polluters will pay for it and the burden won't be put on the tax payer.... I'm not anti geo engineering, but it also needs to come with changing the status quo and restoring nature.
Hi Quico, this is a great article, but I disagree with your theory that the problem preventing ocean iron fertilization is that "unfamiliar ideas make people uncomfortable." I have a much more political theory to explain the irrational opposition to ocean fertilization.
My view is that the opposition arises directly from the fact that the climate establishment around the IPCC has fixed on the idea that opposition to the fossil fuel industry is the primary agenda for climate policy. They therefore seek to build a united front around this ideological stance.
As a result, anything at all that undermines this policy must be derided and prevented by all means possible. This harmful ideology is largely overt, through the incoherent concept of 'mitigation deterrence'. However, it also has a conspiratorial element, in that its advocates try to get the public to believe the opposition to fixing the oceans is scientific rather than political.
In fact, all the alleged scientific risks are just cover for the political ideology that dominates UN climate circles. This ideology is expressed most forcefully in the futile AR6 call to halve world emissions by 2030. The UN has the power, through corrupted bodies like the Convention on Biological Diversity, to effectively use its social authority to derail wide public discussion of essential climate repair methods.
To assert that adding iron is bad for biodiversity is an ethically and empirically bankrupt claim, but that is the dominant view in UN circles.
Quico, how can people who want to support this help out? (Other than restacking this post, I mean...)
How does such a project move forward? What scale would be required to have a meaningful impact? Why aren’t the
Oil companies jumping all over this?
Excellent. And clever!
How do you control for plant blooms that are a detremint to the environment? https://youtu.be/4WPUbZdb2WI?si=DHzKL1R_aNAf1lvD
By chance have you read Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline? His book was fairly prescient, in my opinion. But I don't really get to discuss it with many people because they hear geoengineering and treat it almost like I said eugenics.