Jun

21

They Don’t Want a Solution to AGW

June 21, 2008 |  Tagged , , , , |

When I was a kid I liked to read old Popular Science magazines. A house that my parents purchased had a finished basement (very rare in the SF Bay Area). The previous owner left all of his old PS magazines inside the built-in benches. I spent many, many hours down there reading about scientific breakthroughs in the 1950s and 1960s. I still enjoy reading them today, even though the editors often have a significant liberal slant to their worldview.

The July, 2008 edition is no exception. The title of this month’s magazine is:

The Future Of The Environment
ECO-TROPOLIS
A Blueprint For Fresh Air + Pristine Water + Cheap Energy

There’s another article in the magazine though, that caught my attention. The article is titled: CARBON DISCREDIT (Thompson, K, 2008, pp. 55-59, 91). The article is about a company that was created by Russ George, called Planktos Corporation. Originally a non-profit company, he was able to find investors and take the company public.

George’s plan was to seed sections of the ocean with iron, which when put into the ocean encourages the growth of plant life that consumes carbon dioxide. The Weatherbird II headed out towards his first target: a section of the Pacific Ocean over twice the size of Rhode Island west of the Galápagos Islands. Unfortunately, environmental groups became involved and began to strongly protest against their plan.

The usual scare tactics were used. Greenpeace Internation (the organization that the captain of Weatherbird II had worked with for 20 years) and Accíon Ecológica issued a press release with the heading Geoengineers to Foul Galápagos.

[Planktos's plans are a] risky gamble with sensitive marine ecosystems. Climate change is a real threat, but common sense should not be its first victim.

They got other groups involved and eventually stopped the project. They even picked up on the company’s website description of its iron particles as nanosize. They said,

The Planktos experiment may be the largest intentional release of engineered nanoparticles ever undertaken.

George was understandably incensed with these groups. He said,

calling Planktos a nanotech company was dishonest, a calculated attempt to raise unfounded fears in the public.

The Weatherbird II then sailed towards the Canary Islands, but was turned away when Spanish authorities radiod Captain Wilcox to tell him that they would not be able too dump their toxic waste in their waters.

The article goes on to detail their plans and discuss whether or not the concept would actually reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Oceanographer John Martin said in 1988 at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in MA,

Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age.

Other scientists say that when the plant life dies the carbon dioxide will simply be released back into the atmosphere. There is some question whether or not the plant life can be kept deep enough so that it won’t do just that. I’ll leave that to others to hash out.

I did, however, enjoy Russ George’s description of those that tried to stop him. He called them radical environmental groups. Among them were Greenpeace International, the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

What stood out to me more than anything else in this article, was a statement attributed to these environmentalists by Thompson.

If society relies on quick techno-fixes to ameliorate global warming, people will stop putting in the hard work necessary to cut carbon emissions.

As we’ve known all along, these environuts aren’t at all interested in eliminating the problem of global warming. They want to take away your way of life, and send you back to the stone age.


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