This is an interesting and urgent perspective, but it oversimplifies some key challenges. Ocean fertilization may be a viable carbon removal strategy, but it’s far from a risk-free “only game in town.” Large-scale interventions could disrupt marine ecosystems, trigger dead zones, or result in carbon quickly re-released into the atmosphere. Past experiments have shown mixed results, and international regulations exist for a reason.
Dismissing emissions reduction as too slow is also misleading—removing carbon while continuing to emit at current rates is like bailing out a sinking ship without plugging the hole. A diverse approach combining emissions cuts, ocean and land-based CDR, and responsible climate interventions is far more realistic than betting everything on one high-risk method. Urgency is crucial, but so is scientific caution.
This is the kind of terrified-of-itself discourse that's left marine CDR research 20 years behind where it ought to be. While you're busy revising the 32nd version of your environmental impact statement the AMOC is going to collapse.
Caution — obviously!
Caution as rhetorical cover for sitting on our hands for another decade while CO2 builds up in the atmosphere? Hard no.
At Anthropocene a lot of what we do also aims to reduce emissions and avoid increasing the emissions while allowing human development. We understand that this is a complex problem that cannot be solved with a single approach.
Congrats on your new job! Good luck with all that work, it sounds like you have that sweet spot of 'productive, but rewarding' to dig into. Whenever it's ready, I wish you all the best in getting whatever government buy-in you'll need.
The thing that's killing the coral in the Gulf of America is mostly human fecal material. If we want to restore the former abundance, we have to get the nutrients in balance. We are not talking about dumping something in a pristine natural environment. We're talking about treating a ocean sized cesspool to make it less toxic And become again a productive part of the environment.
Every ecosystem has one nutrient that gets depleted and limits life. It's not always iron. But when it is, that's an easy one to fix. It's not a reactant. It's not a food. It's a vitamin! A micronutrient. We can afford that! Let solar powered self-replicating nanobots grow exponentially to clean all the pollution. By that I mean phytoplankton!
The wild recklessness of the electrification push and the crazed sadism of net zero sets a pretty low bar for responsible risk taking, so this sounds like a comparatively promising project worthy of serious investigation! All the best in your new adventure!
I'd say we need to balance what we take out with what we put in, because we don't want to accidentally trigger an ice age. Given that we are probably due for one that would be bad.
But the idea of using the sea as a CO2 store is excellent and, as you say, uses many well understood natural processes that work just fine. If some of the additional plant life can then be used for pisciculture that is a major bonus because there's a lot of over fishing.
Love this initiative. Drug development offers a model for how to scale within a regulated industry. Phase 1 - small safety study. Phase 2 - efficacy (and dose), and Phase 3 - multi site, looking at scale
Congrats on the new gig! I think demonstration projects for ocean fertilization could be relatively small and easy to do without massive budgets or crazy international treaties. Need to evaluate what nutrient mixes work best, how to atomize/disperse them over a large area with the lowest cost, what kind of frequency/nutrient dosing schedule works best, etc.
Marketing Ideas: Use this tech to make more delicious tuna. Or- we are building the next Grand Canyon for 1000 generations from now… 🤔
Congratulations! I sincerely hope that you get to feel the satisfaction of seeing real projects happen. For the sake of all of us.
I try talk about your writings to the people around me, as I find it very exciting stuff. Most are interested, but find it hard to believe that real solutions might exist while they never ever heard of it. If this were true, wouldn't it be all over the news ? Isn't this like the repeated 'invention' of room temperature super conduction, just too good to be true ?
But at least it is starting to dawn with most that rapid reduction of CO2 production is probably not realistic, which is the first baby step...
Unfortunately our news media has very few people who are trained in arithmetic. Editors e worse. They're looking for clickbait.
They want to be buzzword compatible. So everybody writes about the hydrogen economy, even though it can't possibly work.
You don't really have to be very smart to know what's important if you have a sense of proportion and can judge relative magnitude. Numerical critical thinking skills let you tell big things from small things. But so-called science writers don't feel qualified to do a proportion. They asked two experts what they think and present both to the reader without bias.
There is a really nice old book by James Fallows, _ Breaking the News_, that explains why the news media prefers to not convey useful information with the numbers.
Even critical thinking classes rarely mention your responsibility to do a tiny bit of arithmetic.
This is an interesting and urgent perspective, but it oversimplifies some key challenges. Ocean fertilization may be a viable carbon removal strategy, but it’s far from a risk-free “only game in town.” Large-scale interventions could disrupt marine ecosystems, trigger dead zones, or result in carbon quickly re-released into the atmosphere. Past experiments have shown mixed results, and international regulations exist for a reason.
Dismissing emissions reduction as too slow is also misleading—removing carbon while continuing to emit at current rates is like bailing out a sinking ship without plugging the hole. A diverse approach combining emissions cuts, ocean and land-based CDR, and responsible climate interventions is far more realistic than betting everything on one high-risk method. Urgency is crucial, but so is scientific caution.
This is the kind of terrified-of-itself discourse that's left marine CDR research 20 years behind where it ought to be. While you're busy revising the 32nd version of your environmental impact statement the AMOC is going to collapse.
Caution — obviously!
Caution as rhetorical cover for sitting on our hands for another decade while CO2 builds up in the atmosphere? Hard no.
At Anthropocene a lot of what we do also aims to reduce emissions and avoid increasing the emissions while allowing human development. We understand that this is a complex problem that cannot be solved with a single approach.
Congrats on your new job! Good luck with all that work, it sounds like you have that sweet spot of 'productive, but rewarding' to dig into. Whenever it's ready, I wish you all the best in getting whatever government buy-in you'll need.
The thing that's killing the coral in the Gulf of America is mostly human fecal material. If we want to restore the former abundance, we have to get the nutrients in balance. We are not talking about dumping something in a pristine natural environment. We're talking about treating a ocean sized cesspool to make it less toxic And become again a productive part of the environment.
Every ecosystem has one nutrient that gets depleted and limits life. It's not always iron. But when it is, that's an easy one to fix. It's not a reactant. It's not a food. It's a vitamin! A micronutrient. We can afford that! Let solar powered self-replicating nanobots grow exponentially to clean all the pollution. By that I mean phytoplankton!
"Gulf of America"? Where is that.
The wild recklessness of the electrification push and the crazed sadism of net zero sets a pretty low bar for responsible risk taking, so this sounds like a comparatively promising project worthy of serious investigation! All the best in your new adventure!
I'd say we need to balance what we take out with what we put in, because we don't want to accidentally trigger an ice age. Given that we are probably due for one that would be bad.
But the idea of using the sea as a CO2 store is excellent and, as you say, uses many well understood natural processes that work just fine. If some of the additional plant life can then be used for pisciculture that is a major bonus because there's a lot of over fishing.
“we need to balance what we take out with what we put in”
That’s also a way to sell it. We restore the organic material we take out with our fisheries and guano harvesting.
Love this initiative. Drug development offers a model for how to scale within a regulated industry. Phase 1 - small safety study. Phase 2 - efficacy (and dose), and Phase 3 - multi site, looking at scale
Congrats on the new gig! I think demonstration projects for ocean fertilization could be relatively small and easy to do without massive budgets or crazy international treaties. Need to evaluate what nutrient mixes work best, how to atomize/disperse them over a large area with the lowest cost, what kind of frequency/nutrient dosing schedule works best, etc.
Marketing Ideas: Use this tech to make more delicious tuna. Or- we are building the next Grand Canyon for 1000 generations from now… 🤔
Congratulations! I sincerely hope that you get to feel the satisfaction of seeing real projects happen. For the sake of all of us.
I try talk about your writings to the people around me, as I find it very exciting stuff. Most are interested, but find it hard to believe that real solutions might exist while they never ever heard of it. If this were true, wouldn't it be all over the news ? Isn't this like the repeated 'invention' of room temperature super conduction, just too good to be true ?
But at least it is starting to dawn with most that rapid reduction of CO2 production is probably not realistic, which is the first baby step...
Unfortunately our news media has very few people who are trained in arithmetic. Editors e worse. They're looking for clickbait.
They want to be buzzword compatible. So everybody writes about the hydrogen economy, even though it can't possibly work.
You don't really have to be very smart to know what's important if you have a sense of proportion and can judge relative magnitude. Numerical critical thinking skills let you tell big things from small things. But so-called science writers don't feel qualified to do a proportion. They asked two experts what they think and present both to the reader without bias.
There is a really nice old book by James Fallows, _ Breaking the News_, that explains why the news media prefers to not convey useful information with the numbers.
Even critical thinking classes rarely mention your responsibility to do a tiny bit of arithmetic.