The Iron Experiments
Richard Barber's Team Goes to the End of the Earth to See
if Dust Once Played a Role in Climate Change p.5
Since much of the carbon fixed in
both patches was tracked down to hundreds of meters below
the surface, when “extrapolated over large portions of the
Southern Ocean” the SOFeX results suggest “that iron fertilization
could cause billions of tons of carbon to be removed from
the atmosphere each year,” the release adds.
So does the SOFeX cruise show that
there could be an engineered iron solution for contemporary
global warming? Barber doesn’t think the sinking carbon was
tracked down deep enough to resolve whether lots of it would
be stored for long time periods.
“But the indications that Martin’s
Iron Hypothesis is true keep looking better and better,” he
says, noting that, at the least, the scientific community
no longer tends to believe those who think iron could have
such an effect on global climate are “certified lunatics.”
“Now it’s actually creeping into
the textbooks as a given. First you could not get people to
believe it, and now you find that people are believing it
without being critical enough. It’s an issue in which basic
science seems to give a hint of a socially useful thing. We
have made enormous progress in understanding this, but we’re
not there yet.
“In some ways I’m sorry that we
raised the engineering side of this,” he says about notions
of iron-laden vessels rescuing humankind from problems we
have caused ourselves by generating so much CO2
to drive our vehicles and run our power plants.
“It would be a big mistake for
us to use it as an excuse for not doing other things we know
would work, like becoming more energy efficient or moving
to alternative forms of energy,” he muses.
“It would be simpler for us, as
scientists, if the societal application didn’t exist.”
Monte Basgall is a senior writer
in Duke’s Office of News and Communications specializing in
science.
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