Archive for January, 2008
The American Geophysical Union recently published a revised policy statement on the Human Impacts on Climate, which makes a causal link between climate change and human GHG emissions. The statement also discusses the range of expected impacts, such as, “Warming greater than 2°C above 19th century levels is projected to be disruptive, reducing global agricultural productivity, causing widespread loss of biodiversity, and—if sustained over centuries—melting much of the Greenland ice sheet with ensuing rise in sea level of several meters.”
The AGU Council adopts position statements that relate the understanding and application of the geophysical sciences to relevant public policy. In making such statements, the Council limits itself to positions that are within the range of available geophysical data or norms of legitimate scientific debate. The full statement is reproduced after the break.
Categories: Climate Change Science
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The National Center for Policy Analysis presents a policy discussion of geoengineering alternatives, including reforestation, atmospheric sun screens, and ocean iron fertilization. The premise is that CO2 emissions are still increasing exponentially, and that this doesn’t appear likely to change anytime soon despite our best intentions. Therefore we should explore alternative mechanisms, such as geoengineering, although it must be done in a way to does not reduce the incentive cut emissions.
Categories: Ocean Fertilization
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Neal Dikeman at Jane Capital and several of his industry peers maintain one of the most followed online sources for timely news and perspective on all things cleantech. He was gracious enough recently to interview Dan Whaley about Climos and OIF.
Categories: Ocean Fertilization
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A Jan 11 Policy Forum in Science magazine, “Ocean Fertilization: Moving forward in a sea of uncertainty“, sounded a supportive, though cautious, note for further evaluation of OIF as a potential climate mitigation tool.
The article stresses the need to have better demonstration of sequestration and permanence in particular before carbon offsets are sold from these early demonstrations. We certainly agree that past demonstrations have not been done in a way consistent with rigorous market protocols, and have not sought independent verification of results.
Climos has provided a response that seeks to highlight under what conditions we feel cost recovery via the carbon market would be justified, and provides some analogies of other carbon projects which do so in support of ongoing research efforts.
Read it here: Are Carbon Offsets Appropriate for Ocean Iron Fertilization?
We also note that one of the authors of the Policy Forum piece, Dr. Anthony Michaels clarified his position in Science Daily.
Categories: Ocean Fertilization
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A recent paper related to ocean fertilization is the 2007 Cassar et al. paper “The Southern Ocean Biological Response to Aeolian Iron Deposition”. This paper strongly suggests natural iron fertilization in the Southern Ocean causes sequestration of carbon dioxide, and that this may have been a major cause of the reduction of atmospheric CO2 during the ice ages. Their modeling shows that up to half of the total CO2 reduction from Interglacial to Glacial conditions could have been caused by this process, or 40ppm CO2. The implication is that a program of anthropogenic iron fertilization could have significant atmospheric carbon reduction benefit.
Now, Philip Boyd and Douglas Mackie have published a Technical Comment in Science that challenges the assertion of the Cassar et al. paper. Science has also published Cassar’s response.
The primary critique by Boyd and Mackie is that Cassar’s iron dissolution model does not apply to the Southern Ocean. Cassar responds that observed increases in airborne dust also strongly correlate to increases in biologic productivity, which suggests that questions over the iron dissolution model do not affect the fundamental conclusion of the original paper. Cassar also defends the iron dissolution model, as well as the other criticisms of Boyd and Mackie.
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Categories: Ocean Fertilization
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