Ocean iron fertilization is probably the most well known form of intentional climate change, known as geoengineering. Last year, two companies entered the space, Planktos and Climos. Just last week Planktos went belly up, but Climos is plowing ahead, revealing to CNET that they have received $4 million in venture funding.

The move represents the latest step in efforts to commercialize the technology by selling carbon offset credits in exchange for the company depositing iron sulfate across 100 km by 100 km patches of ocean. The premise behind the practice is that iron stimulates the growth of phytoplankton, which then consume large quantities of CO2 and take some of it into the ocean's depths, thereby keeping it out of the atmosphere.

As we reported last week, the leading iron fertilization scientists, are not sure how much of the consumed carbon ends up sequestered and therefore "don't have enough confidence to say that ocean iron fertilization could have any real impact on stopping or even slowing climate change." And a long-time climate ethicist called geoengineering a "moral hazard" because ""if you promise a solution to the problem of emissions, you encourage people to continue emitting."

Nonetheless, the number of schemes for reversing climate change is likely to increase as its effects get more severe.

Link (Nice scoop, Martin!), Via Earth2Tech

Image: USGS (Via)

BOSTON, Mass. - We're all familiar with the insult construction that takes the following form: "You're a (insert fruit)! You know, because you're (insert color) on the outside, but (insert color) on the inside." It actually has a nasty racial history, but there are lighter-hearted variations too, like the one Dale Jamieson, an NYU professor, offered during his talk on the ethics of geoengineering here at the AAAS annual meeting.

In an effort to explain that he was not opposed to markets as mechanisms for combating climate change he said:

"I'm not a watermelon," he said. The crowd murmured, expecting the joke's punchline, which Jamieson provided. "You know, someone who is green on the outside and red on the inside."

Continue reading "A New Fruit-Based Insult Emerges: The Watermelon" »

BOSTON, Mass - If we made made the globe warm, we can make the globe cool. That's the premise and promise of geoengineering, the name given to intentional attempts to alter the climate. But, the science behind most of the current schemes is relatively unproven.

Perhaps the most attempted geoengineering strategy is to put small amounts of iron into the ocean, which spawns hordes of plankton that eat CO2 and carry it  into the depths of the abyss. Or so the story goes.

Ken Buesseler a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute spoke on the science of this process, known as ocean iron fertilization at a symposium addressing the feasibility of this type of carbon sequestration at the AAAS annual meeting. His talk came a week after Planktos, one of two  iron fertilization startups, indefinitely suspended its operations (as Earth2Tech cleverly put it, "Planktos Dead in the Water").

You need to know three things from Buesseler's talk, which was based on looking at twelve fertilization experiments. One, putting iron in the ocean does increase plankton numbers. Two, scientists don't really have any idea how much of the carbon the organisms eat actually drops from the surface into the depths, which is the key to sequestration. It could be anywhere from 2-50 percent, which is almost like saying, "It could work or it could not work." Three, the leading scientists in the field don't have enough confidence to say that ocean iron fertilization could have any real impact on stopping or even slow climate change.

For the full story and a ton of detail, check out these features on ocean iron fertilization straight from Woods Hole.

More generally, geoengineering is going to be harder than people think. You're talking about reversing  the effects of the entire world economy's reliance on burning carbon-based substances to generate energy for moving or making.

Image: flickr/nttrbx

BOSTON, Ma - Climate change highlights the interesting relationship that the political world has with science. While almost all scientists say that climate change is occurring, the policies of the worlds biggest greenhouse gas emitters, China and the United States, continue to make the problem worse, flying in the face of the best available science.

Lawrence Susskind, an MIT professor, presented an easy answer for why this is happening at talk here at the AAAS annual meeting. "We know that politically motivated stakeholders reject scientific analysis that challenges their policy positions," he said. "They reject the science, not just the policy."

Wish as we might, those political motivations aren't going away, so he suggests, we have to learn to deal with them. From the largest resource problems like climate change to much smaller decisions like protecting a wet land while incorporating a suburban development, everyone recognizes that increasingly complex science has not translated well into the public sphere. Susskind, however, thinks that he's developed a framework for making science not just useful but usable in the public sphere.

Continue reading "Synthesizing Science and Politics" »

BOSTON, Ma - Carbon dioxide, the most well-known greenhouse gas, isn't actually a toxic substance. In fact, plants, within some limits, like and use the stuff. The problem,as we know, is with the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Black carbon, on the other hand, is composed of very fine particles of carbon that can be released into the air in aerosol form. They are generally generated by burning some type of biomass, like firewood.

V. (Ram) Ramanathan of the UC-San Diego La Jolla,  said that reducing black carbon could play an important role in reducing global climate change here at the AAAS annual meeting. Ramanathan said that a mere 10% reduction in black carbon would be equivalent to eliminating 25 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions. For scale, the world produces about 8 gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year.

Continue reading "The Other Carbon: Reducing Black Carbon's Role in Global Warming" »

BOSTON, Ma - With several panels dedicated to biofuels at the AAAS annual meeting, the sustainability and scalability of growing a large percentage of our transportation fuel is emerging as a major theme of the conference.

DuPont's most expensive R&D projects are now in biofuels, said John Ranieri of DuPont Applied Biosciences during his talk on producing new biofuels like butanol. Ranieri spoke during the Food and Fuel: Biofuels, Development, and a Sustainable Bioeconomy symposium at the AAAS annual meeting.

The $40 billion chemical company sees very high growth rates for producing biofuel. They see a business that can get big, or in investor argot, scale. That's not a bad thing, per se. With climate change, we need solutions that scale. I remember hearing a conversation between two high-level data managers, one from Facebook and the other from MySpace. With their huge numbers of users, they kept returning to the same refrain: Very few solutions scale. And if they don't scale, they don't matter. In fact, this is one argument that Vinod Khosla made in laying out his biofuels investment thesis (or biohols as he calls them) in WIRED. "Biohols were the only kind of alternative energy that I believed met two essential criteria," he wrote. "They would scale to solve a material problem, and they could economically compete with fossil fuels without subsidies."

Continue reading "AAAS: Can Biofuels Companies Scale Their Benefits Along With Their Revenue?" »

BOSTON, Ma. President Bush recently signed a mandate into law requiring that at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels be produced in the US by 2022. But here at the AAAS annual meeting, scientists are questioning the sustainability of farming our way out of using oil.

At the Soil Protection for Sustainable Well Being symposium, several questioners from the audience pressed Luca Montanarella of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability in Milan, on whether or not biofuels were a sustainable phenomenon. He demurred, but did note that soil is a finite resource, just like water and oil. That means we will run out of good soil unless we take steps to grow things more wisely.

As I listened to the exchange, a phrase popped into my head for what intensive energy crop farming really is: phytomining the soil. Plants are used to extract carbon from the environment. We then turn that plant biomass into a liquid hydrocarbon that mimics the fossil fuels our entire transportation infrastructure is built on.

Continue reading "AAAS: Phytomining and the Biomass Backlash" »

The Discovery Channel will launch a new visualization tool for understanding the dynamics of global climate change. Wired.com brings you an exclusive preview of the new app, seen in the screenshot above. UPDATE (2/11): The site is now live at Discovery Earth Live.

Drawing on data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the new site allows users to see nearly real-time satellite data of the globe's cloud cover, water vapor, and sea surface temperatures. Discovery and developer partner EffectiveUI have combined these elements to create "stories" around events like Katrina, La Nina, and a year in the life of the earth's biosphere. Users can also remix the elements of the biosphere into custom world views. All views can be added to web pages and Facebook as widgets.

Continue reading "Exclusive Preview: Discovery Channel's Earth Live Web App" »

Nearly all male smallmouth bass in parts of the Potomac River basin have hermaphroditic characteristics.

These findings, published in the Journal of Aquatic Animal Health by researchers from the United States Geological Survey, are the starkest evidence yet of physiological malfunctions caused by human pollution. Even more worryingly, the same chemicals that likely turned the fish intersex are present in our own drinking water.

Hermaphroditic fish are, in and of themselves, hardly news anymore. Such is the nature of novelty and the news cycle. And when I first saw the Associated Press headline and one-paragraph writeup in my RSS feed, I gave it only a glance.

Hermaphroditic fish, more common in polluted areas -- what a surprise. I even considered making it a No @#&!, Sherlock entry.

Continue reading "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Hermaphroditic Fish" »

Steadily progressing climate change is already worrisome; add the notion of tipping points -- moments when the interaction of climate and geophysical systems is suddenly knocked from its traditional balance, producing sea level rises or weather shifts incompatible with reliable agriculture and comfortable living, and possibly accelerating climate change further -- and the future gets a whole lot scarier.

Continue reading "A Handy Guide to Climate Change Tipping Points" »

Our environments--both built and natural--are full of data. Until recently, almost all of this data went uncaptured. Now, a new MIT program, inaugurated with a workshop last week, is imagining a network of sensors deployed across Singapore that would allow researchers to see, in real-time, a SimCity like view of the region.

Called the Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling (CENSAM), the project will enable a new type of four-dimensional map that won't just show streets, buildings, rivers, and oceans, but what those features are doing with and to each other. In the past, I've thought about it as reverse engineering The Matrix. More projects like CENSAM will allow us to build the datasets that hide inside any environment in the world.

Continue reading "MIT Launches Pervasive Environmental Sensor Program" »

Geologists say the Earth has entered a new age, one defined by human activities, as different from our recent ancestors' time as the Jurassic was from the Triassic. So what are we going to call it?

They favor a phrase coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen: the Anthropocene, with "anthro" signifying humanity's biospheric rewrite role. But why stop there? On Friday, Wired Science asked readers to name our age; entries are below, from Polymerocene to Neoscene to Makeascene. Feel free to add your own, and vote away. The contest will close on Friday.

What's at stake? Well, geologists might not listen to us -- but in social terms, modernity is all about networks and multiplicities of meanings. Maybe we can get the best names out into the memesphere, making Earth's geological reality part of public consciousness. And if the names spread through conversation and across the intertubes, the Oxford English Dictionary's word-searching bots will pick them up and add them to our civilization's formal documentation.

Not that Morlocks and Eloi will have much use for dictionaries. But until then....

Continue reading "Name Our New Geological Age: The Contest" »

It's time to make it official, say geologists: human activities have so changed the Earth that we're living in a whole new age. And not on some namby-pamby scale of a few thousand years, but in geologic terms. The sort of terms that schoolchildren of the future will write on their wrists before tests, and that scientists will see as a sharp line in every scientific record of the planet's history.

First proposed by Nobel laureate and geoengineering visionary Paul Crutzen in 2002, the case for a new age is given front-cover treatment in the latest GSA Today, the journal of the Geological Society of America. 

Acidified oceans, major carbon cycle disruptions, radical shifts in plant and animal life, transformed sediment patterns -- add it all up, say a team of British geologists, and there's no reason to link the pre- and post-industrial epochs. A new age has begun, and it needs a name.

(Little challenge, WiSci readers: can you identify the age we're currently living in? Without Googling it? I'll take your answer in good faith after the jump.)

Continue reading "It's a New Geological Age. Now Name It!" »

Yesterday, at the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceship design, Richard Branson talked about how his commitment to the environment fits with the new spaceship.

"It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue," Branson started. He went on to say that with the end of the oil era approaching and climate change progressing faster then the models predicted that the utilization of space for agricultural monitoring, climate science, and someday even space based solar power is essential.

"Aviation is often singled out as a key component of climate change," he said, "While I believe that aviation has to get much more carbon efficient then it is today, it is important that people begin to realize that seemingly benign industries such as IT have in fact overtaken aviation in terms of their CO2 output."

Branson commented that the nearly half billion servers around the world each are consuming hundreds of watts. He then added an interesting twist: what if we could literally take some of that heat off of the planet by someday using space as a repository for our information technology?

Continue reading "Richard Branson Shares Eco-Vision of IT in Space" »