Nice vision, except for the need for a world government and a set of purely objective supranational scientists.
Your wish seems to be Winston Churchill or FDR advised by Albert Einstein, but in reality you will get Ayatollah Khomeni or Hugo Chavez advised by Lysenko or AQ Khan.
Genuinely perplexed why you think this. You explicitly do not need any kind of multilateral/global anything to do this. You need one host government to be willing to go for it (in this fantasy, the Seychelles) and one buyer willing to pay up for it. A major selling point of the setup is that it sidesteps the need for global agreement.
I don’t know if this project needs a one world government, but your comment makes me wonder how deep you’ve gotten into this topic.
I think the one world government thing is a pretty touchy subject, perhaps there’s another way.
I’m part of a group that thinks we can build a worldwide institution for the promotion of a new system, it would be something like a second layer of democracy throughout the world.
We believe it’ll help us to build world cooperation, without a world government.
I'm disheartened to see you persisting with this characterization after V. Smetacek's detailed explanation, which has now circulated fairly widely.
As Victor carefully explained, eddies don't work like elevators moving water up and down. They're rotating bodies of water: they spin horizontally while maintaining the ocean's natural stratification—warmer water on top, colder and denser water below.
Treating eddies as vectors for vertical mixing is just wrong. Physical models suggest and observations confirm that a clockwise-turning northern hemisphere eddy pushes water inward toward its center, piling up warm surface water in the middle. This raises the sea surface slightly at the center (visible in satellite altimetry) while pushing the boundary between warm surface water and cold deep water—the pycnocline—deeper at the center.
The eddy has the overall shape of a convex lens: bulging at the top, depressed at depth. It's called "downwelling" not because water flows downward, but because this boundary layer dips down in the middle.
Carbon captured in the surface layer can only exit by sinking down through the water column, not as part of a water mass being transported downward.
As Victor put it, these eddies are shaped more like coins than columns—100 km wide but only 3-4 km deep—yet they rotate as coherent structures from top to bottom. And this isn’t just theory: Victor actually sailed to the Southern Ocean and recorded the observations that prove that the dominant transport is horizontal, not vertical.
What troubles me most is your apparent unwillingness to update your understanding in response to expert correction. If you're going to seek feedback from the world’s top physical oceanographers, disregarding their feedback undermines the entire exercise.
The conflict is between physics and consensus, and that conflict may never be resolved... or it may be resolved soon. I'll always speak for the physics, and oceanographers will predictably speak for consensus.
In the world of consensus you and they are right. Period. No argument possible.
In the world of physics, so far there's no argument against my localized ocean fertilization, using downwelling eddies.
The source of the conflict appears simple: The removal of 18 Gt of CO2 in 18 months after the Pinatubo eruption, arguably from the ash fall, is 10 times more than ocean science consensus says is possible. That is because of the amount of nutrients said to be in the ocean. Oceanographers had a choice between revising their complex theory of phytoplankton growth, or the physics. They chose to revise the physics.
As a physicist who considers the ocean to be a complex system, I honor the physics and question current assumptions about about the insanely complex process in which phytoplankton pumps CO2 from the air/water to zooplankton & fish, then to biocarbon, and then to dissolved carbon.
I show evidence that nitrogen fixing bacteria can provide most of the needed nutrients, in real time, near eddies. That was not considered in consensus thinking, but Seth John is beginning to work on it now.
In recent decades oceanographers have focused on computer models, and not on the physical Mauna Loa CO2 data. That difference in focus is cultural.
Is historical CO2 and tree ring data better than the output of computer models that any lab can develop? That's a matter of culture. Ocean researchers today cannot do physical experiments at suitable scale, but they can do computer modeling experiments, and that's what they do. Hopefully our work will build interest in having those computer models be compared to historical CO2 and tree ring data. Your writing could accelerate that shift.
It's worth noting that in 1993 Sarmiento and Keeling did the physics and came to generally the same conclusion I do. The culture of science was different back then-- before complex computer modeling displaced physical measurements as the measure of scientific success.
Two facts for you and your readers:
1. A downwelling eddy in the ocean is just like a high pressure system in the atmosphere. The Coriollis effect pushes the air in the atmospheric eddy (several hundred km in diameter) down about 3-5 km, increasing pressure on the ground. The dry air from high altitudes moves down, due to the Coriollis effect, giving those nice dry blue sky days in a high pressure system.
A several hundred km diameter downwelling eddy acts the same, pushing water down about 3 km towards the seafloor. That's simple physics--you experience it every week in the weather report. This is clearly different from Victor's story of no vertical water flow.
2. As Victor demonstrated in 2004, the only cases of significant CO2 removal in the ocean are related to eddies. I've never seen a record of significant ocean CO2 removal--from intentional OIF or from natural OIF that wasn't closely related to eddies.
Quico--Keep up your good thinking and good work. Continue to choose consensus and AI over physics--it makes for better stories. Physics' day will come soon, I predict.
You may be wondering where ocean science has diverged from physics.
Here's the simplest example: Oceanography consensus appears to be that the CO2 pause (or anomaly as Sarmiento called it) was caused by land-based vegetative growth. This would be related to some combination of decreased total sunlight (?), increased diffuse sunlight, and decreased temperature.
There are numerous modeling papers justifying these pathways. However tree-ring analyses (Krakauer 2003) show that tree rings are smaller following large eruptions like Pinatubo. Presumably this is roughly proportional to the typically 2% reduction in sunlight for 1-2 years.
Tree rings would have had to double or triple in size following the eruption, and they didn't. Also, Sarmiento 1993 pointed out that the amount of oxygen produced compared to the CO2 removed is consistent with ocean (phytoplankton) photosynthesis.
There is no physical evidence of significant terrestrial vegetative contribution to the 18 Gt CO2 Pinatubo pause.
And the numerous modeling papers about how oceans cooled by 0.18 degrees in 1992 and removed 0.5 Gt CO2 only account for 2-3% of the CO2 anomaly. And only for a couple years.
They don't mention that critical comparison to physical fact. This results in readers and writers wrongly suggesting that land photosynthesis is the cause of the Pinatubo CO2 anomaly. That is physically impossible based on published, peer reviewed physical data.
I’m curious about the worst case scenario? How bad can it be?
And you mentioned something about it being reversible, how easy is that?
The AI that's advancing most rapidly these days are LLMs.
Our ability to simulate physics and climate models is quite a different technology.
I'm skeptical we'll be at the stage to model such ambitious projects by 2038.
Of course, more data from trials will help enormously so doing smaller scale modelling exercises that can be verified by real outcomes is critical
Nice vision, except for the need for a world government and a set of purely objective supranational scientists.
Your wish seems to be Winston Churchill or FDR advised by Albert Einstein, but in reality you will get Ayatollah Khomeni or Hugo Chavez advised by Lysenko or AQ Khan.
Genuinely perplexed why you think this. You explicitly do not need any kind of multilateral/global anything to do this. You need one host government to be willing to go for it (in this fantasy, the Seychelles) and one buyer willing to pay up for it. A major selling point of the setup is that it sidesteps the need for global agreement.
I don’t know if this project needs a one world government, but your comment makes me wonder how deep you’ve gotten into this topic.
I think the one world government thing is a pretty touchy subject, perhaps there’s another way.
I’m part of a group that thinks we can build a worldwide institution for the promotion of a new system, it would be something like a second layer of democracy throughout the world.
We believe it’ll help us to build world cooperation, without a world government.
Quico- Great thinking. Keep in mind that the critical aspect to productive ocean fertilization is downwelling eddies.
See my Substack: Localized ocean fertilization is not OIF....It’s vastly better
https://climaterestoration.substack.com/p/localized-ocean-fertilization-is
I'm disheartened to see you persisting with this characterization after V. Smetacek's detailed explanation, which has now circulated fairly widely.
As Victor carefully explained, eddies don't work like elevators moving water up and down. They're rotating bodies of water: they spin horizontally while maintaining the ocean's natural stratification—warmer water on top, colder and denser water below.
Treating eddies as vectors for vertical mixing is just wrong. Physical models suggest and observations confirm that a clockwise-turning northern hemisphere eddy pushes water inward toward its center, piling up warm surface water in the middle. This raises the sea surface slightly at the center (visible in satellite altimetry) while pushing the boundary between warm surface water and cold deep water—the pycnocline—deeper at the center.
The eddy has the overall shape of a convex lens: bulging at the top, depressed at depth. It's called "downwelling" not because water flows downward, but because this boundary layer dips down in the middle.
Carbon captured in the surface layer can only exit by sinking down through the water column, not as part of a water mass being transported downward.
As Victor put it, these eddies are shaped more like coins than columns—100 km wide but only 3-4 km deep—yet they rotate as coherent structures from top to bottom. And this isn’t just theory: Victor actually sailed to the Southern Ocean and recorded the observations that prove that the dominant transport is horizontal, not vertical.
What troubles me most is your apparent unwillingness to update your understanding in response to expert correction. If you're going to seek feedback from the world’s top physical oceanographers, disregarding their feedback undermines the entire exercise.
Quico- I appreciate your concern about eddies.
The conflict is between physics and consensus, and that conflict may never be resolved... or it may be resolved soon. I'll always speak for the physics, and oceanographers will predictably speak for consensus.
In the world of consensus you and they are right. Period. No argument possible.
In the world of physics, so far there's no argument against my localized ocean fertilization, using downwelling eddies.
The source of the conflict appears simple: The removal of 18 Gt of CO2 in 18 months after the Pinatubo eruption, arguably from the ash fall, is 10 times more than ocean science consensus says is possible. That is because of the amount of nutrients said to be in the ocean. Oceanographers had a choice between revising their complex theory of phytoplankton growth, or the physics. They chose to revise the physics.
As a physicist who considers the ocean to be a complex system, I honor the physics and question current assumptions about about the insanely complex process in which phytoplankton pumps CO2 from the air/water to zooplankton & fish, then to biocarbon, and then to dissolved carbon.
I show evidence that nitrogen fixing bacteria can provide most of the needed nutrients, in real time, near eddies. That was not considered in consensus thinking, but Seth John is beginning to work on it now.
In recent decades oceanographers have focused on computer models, and not on the physical Mauna Loa CO2 data. That difference in focus is cultural.
Is historical CO2 and tree ring data better than the output of computer models that any lab can develop? That's a matter of culture. Ocean researchers today cannot do physical experiments at suitable scale, but they can do computer modeling experiments, and that's what they do. Hopefully our work will build interest in having those computer models be compared to historical CO2 and tree ring data. Your writing could accelerate that shift.
It's worth noting that in 1993 Sarmiento and Keeling did the physics and came to generally the same conclusion I do. The culture of science was different back then-- before complex computer modeling displaced physical measurements as the measure of scientific success.
Two facts for you and your readers:
1. A downwelling eddy in the ocean is just like a high pressure system in the atmosphere. The Coriollis effect pushes the air in the atmospheric eddy (several hundred km in diameter) down about 3-5 km, increasing pressure on the ground. The dry air from high altitudes moves down, due to the Coriollis effect, giving those nice dry blue sky days in a high pressure system.
A several hundred km diameter downwelling eddy acts the same, pushing water down about 3 km towards the seafloor. That's simple physics--you experience it every week in the weather report. This is clearly different from Victor's story of no vertical water flow.
2. As Victor demonstrated in 2004, the only cases of significant CO2 removal in the ocean are related to eddies. I've never seen a record of significant ocean CO2 removal--from intentional OIF or from natural OIF that wasn't closely related to eddies.
Quico--Keep up your good thinking and good work. Continue to choose consensus and AI over physics--it makes for better stories. Physics' day will come soon, I predict.
You may be wondering where ocean science has diverged from physics.
Here's the simplest example: Oceanography consensus appears to be that the CO2 pause (or anomaly as Sarmiento called it) was caused by land-based vegetative growth. This would be related to some combination of decreased total sunlight (?), increased diffuse sunlight, and decreased temperature.
There are numerous modeling papers justifying these pathways. However tree-ring analyses (Krakauer 2003) show that tree rings are smaller following large eruptions like Pinatubo. Presumably this is roughly proportional to the typically 2% reduction in sunlight for 1-2 years.
Tree rings would have had to double or triple in size following the eruption, and they didn't. Also, Sarmiento 1993 pointed out that the amount of oxygen produced compared to the CO2 removed is consistent with ocean (phytoplankton) photosynthesis.
There is no physical evidence of significant terrestrial vegetative contribution to the 18 Gt CO2 Pinatubo pause.
And the numerous modeling papers about how oceans cooled by 0.18 degrees in 1992 and removed 0.5 Gt CO2 only account for 2-3% of the CO2 anomaly. And only for a couple years.
They don't mention that critical comparison to physical fact. This results in readers and writers wrongly suggesting that land photosynthesis is the cause of the Pinatubo CO2 anomaly. That is physically impossible based on published, peer reviewed physical data.
Mind-blowing. I’m in awe of your vision.