Muck spreading in the ocean: don’t look up!

When I was a kid the muck spreaders used to scatter cattle effluent over fields as fertiliser for new crops. Sewage contains nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More like nitrogen and phosphorous that plants need to grow. Modern fertiliser is simply an artificial substitute. It’s a synthetically-produced chemical that can be bought, sold and refined by companies. So, when I read that scientists have been trialling artificial whale poo to promote algal growth in the ocean, it wasn’t surprising. They want to grow algae by fertilising the ocean with a mix of elements like iron and nitrogen. But they’ve skipped the stage of muck spreading in the ocean and gone straight to synthetic fertiliser in a single bound.

Will it work? Yes of course it will. Ask the right question and you can always prove your own hypothesis.

By spreading nutrients on the ocean surface you will promote planktonA soup of micro-organisms. Usually refers to all the zooplankton and algae in the ocean but can also be used to describe tiny insects in the atmosphere (see aerial plankton). More growth. If you calculate the amount of carbon captured you can scale this up. Et voila! You have the basis for increased carbon capture and storage. That’s indisputable.

That is what will happen because the engineers are not ecosystem scientists. They haven’t asked the right question yet. Ask instead, Will it create more problems than it solves? The answer to that is a resounding yes!

Here is the reason why scientists are trying though. Because there is $100 million up for grabs from Elon Musk and the alternatives, the ones that work, are either less commercially inviting and / or the scientists aren’t qualified to understand the risks.

Don’t look up!

In the film Don’t Look Up on Netflix a team of scientists discover an asteroid about to hit Earth. It is going to almost certainly destroy human life on the planet but a billionaire fantasises about a commercial opportunity and steps in to save the day. Scientists and media get swept up in the rhetoric and before you know it, things are headed for disaster.

It’s a hollywood film and metaphor for our reaction to climate change. But it’s not about billionaires being special. It’s about the hyperbole and how it has infected society.

The truth is that scientists, billionaires–even you and I– are capable of profound mistakes when swept up in the excitement of new technology. Geoengineering is a bad idea.

Who is thinking about ecosystem impacts?

WhaleX, the team behind the poo experiment (without whales), is trying to win money to help save us from climate change. But it will make things worse. It’s not because of any kind of evil conspiracy though. In the words of Jennifer Lawrence in Don’t Look Up “the truth is way more depressing”.

The problem with artificial whale poo is there is no whale involved. Without the whales, you’re just pouring shit into the ocean. Or at least, its most powerful chemical components, that are capable of tipping ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More into chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More.

Fertilising the ocean is just like fertilising the land. You end up with a big plant life monoculture and surplus energy that creates chaos and pollution. It’s already why we have dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico. What the scientists are proposing is mimicking a process that is deoxygenating the world’s oceans already. It’s also similar to what caused a mass extinctionAnimal life hasn't existed for very long on planet Earth. In the last 500 million years, there have been five mass extinctions, defined as events that wiped out at least 75% of animal life. The Devonian mass extinction is considered to have been caused by the rise of plants on land, which polluted the oceans in the absence of animals. More 350 million years ago.

A real scalable solution involves lots of animals

The money from billionaires needs to be spent convincing the world to take more care of wildlife, not muck spreading in the ocean.

Whales are essential to climate because they precisely distribute nutrients exactly where it is needed. If we try to do this artificially we will ruin the sea. We cannot replicate millions of years of evolution and the role of millions of animals globally with ships full of artificial whale poo. It’s simply preposterous. This is not how climate and biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More works.

I realise this is only a small project. But it worries me that these stories get airtime in media like The Guardian who never seem to ask the hard questions. Media, unsurprisingly, was one of the chief protagonists of disaster in the film Don’t Look Up.

If we keep expressing these schemes under the illusion of false optimism, people start to think of them as solutions, when they are in actual fact, really dangerous experiments. Scaled up, all WhaleX will do is create a bigger amount of carbon where we least need it.

If we want to capture billions of tonnes of carbon, money would be better spent on whale conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More, or reducing the erosion of coastal wildlife, and habitatsWhat is habitat for animals and people? Habitat, hence the word "habitable" describes the natural surroundings in which any animal (or human) lives, that houses basic needs, such as food and shelter. Vegetation, for example, is habitat for animals. On its own, habitat is not necessarily stable or sustainable, which is why it differs from an ecosystem. Habitat in disrepair More. Because without wildlife, we don’t have the ability to redistribute carbon to where it is most needed for our survival.