This article from Nature contains an appalling lie about the 2012 Haida Salmon
Experiment.
The Nature article falsely states "scientists have seen no evidence that the
experiment worked." This alleged failure to see any evidence ignores extensive
data and theory supporting the Haida Salmon results.
Here is one link to the scientific evidence that Nature claims does not exist.
Ocean Fertilization: A Dangerous Experiment Gone Right | PlanetSave states the
Haida Salmon Restoration Project may have "worked much more dramatically than
anyone could have foreseen... satellite imagery showed that a massive 10,000
square kilometer phytoplankton bloom had developed in the Gulf of Alaska,
centred around the area which was seeded with iron sulfate. The following year,
in 2013, catches of pink salmon from the Pacific Northwest showed a 400%
increase over the previous year."
The corrupted politics of the climate lobby are vividly illustrated by this
failure of Nature magazine to apply basic standards of rigour and fact checking
to its false statement about evidence for the Haida Salmon experiment.
Best of luck to the Chile entrepreneurs. You are up against a venal climate
lobby who do not appear to care about biodiversity or climate repair, and who
are happy to promote false claims denigrating ocean iron fertilization in
support of dubious political objectives.
Robert Tulip
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Ocean Fertilization: A Dangerous Experiment Gone Right | PlanetSave
A rogue ocean fertilization experiment carried out in 2012 may well prove to
be the saviour of the world-renowne... | |
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From: Andrew Lockley <[email protected]>
To: geoengineering <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, 25 May 2017, 17:11
Subject: [geo] Iron-dumping ocean experiment sparks controversy
https://www.nature.com/news/iron-dumping-ocean-experiment-sparks-controversy-1.22031
Iron-dumping ocean experiment sparks controversy
Canadian foundation says its field research could boost fisheries in Chile, but
researchers doubt its motives.
- Jeff Tollefson
23 May 2017
Article tools
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Blickwinkel/AlamyPhytoplankton need iron to make energy by
photosynthesis.Marine scientists are raising the alarm about a proposal to drop
tonnes of iron into the Pacific Ocean to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton,
the base of the food web. The non-profit group behind the plan says that it
wants to revive Chilean fisheries. It also has ties to a controversial 2012
project in Canada that was accused of violating an international moratorium on
commercial ocean fertilization.The Oceaneos Marine Research Foundation of
Vancouver, Canada, says that it is seeking permits from the Chilean government
to release up to 10 tonnes of iron particles 130 kilometres off the coast of
Coquimbo as early as 2018. But Chilean scientists are worried because the
organization grew out of a for-profit company, Oceaneos Environmental Solutions
of Vancouver, that has sought to patent iron-fertilization technologies. Some
researchers suspect that the foundation is ultimately seeking to profit from an
unproven and potentially harmful activity.“They claim that by producing more
phytoplankton, they could help the recovery of the fisheries,” says Osvaldo
Ulloa, director of the Millennium Institute of Oceanography in Concepción,
Chile. “We don’t see any evidence to support that claim.”
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More related storiesTensions flared in April, when researchers at the institute
went public with their concerns in response to Chilean media reports on the
project. The government has since requested input from the Chilean Academy of
Science, and the institute is organizing a forum on the project and related
research on 25 May, at a marine-sciences meeting in Valparaíso, Chile. The
Oceaneos foundation, which declined an invitation, has accused the scientists
of improperly classifying its work as geoengineering, rather than ocean
restoration. Oceaneos president Michael Riedijk says that his team wants to
work with Chilean scientists and will make all the data from its experiment
public. The foundation plans to hold its own forum later, but if scientists
aren’t willing to engage, he says, “we’ll just move on without
them”.Researchers worldwide have conducted 13 major iron-fertilization
experiments in the open ocean since 1990. All have sought to test whether
stimulating phytoplankton growth can increase the amount of carbon dioxide that
the organisms pull out of the atmosphere and deposit in the deep ocean when
they die. Determining how much carbon is sequestered during such experiments
has proved difficult, however, and scientists have raised concerns about
potential adverse effects, such as toxic algal blooms. In 2008, the United
Nations Convention on Biological Diversity put in place a moratorium on all
ocean-fertilization projects apart from small ones in coastal waters. Five
years later, the London Convention on ocean pollution adopted rules for
evaluating such studies.Because Oceaneos’s planned experiment would take place
in Chilean waters, it is allowed under those rules. Riedijk says that the
foundation will voluntarily follow international protocols for such studies; it
is unclear whether that will allay fears that the group is promoting an
unproven technology, rather than conducting basic research.
“If they want to partner with academics, then surely transparency is their best
foot forward.”
Philip Boyd, a marine ecologist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart,
Australia, wants to see the foundation publish research based on lab
experiments before heading out into the field. “If they are a not-for-profit
scientific venture that wants to partner with academics, then surely
transparency is their best foot forward,” he says.Oceaneos’s links to a 2012
iron-fertilization project off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, have made
some researchers wary. In that project, US entrepreneur Russ George convinced a
Haida Nation village to pursue iron fertilization to boost salmon populations,
with the potential to sell carbon credits based on the amount of CO2 that would
be sequestered in the ocean. News of the plan broke after project organizers
had dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulfate into the open ocean. In the years
since, scientists have seen no evidence that the experiment worked.Riedijk says
he was intrigued when he read about the Haida experiment in 2013, and contacted
one of its organizers, Jason McNamee. McNamee later served as chief operating
officer of Oceaneos Environmental Solutions — which Riedijk co-founded — before
leaving the company last year.Despite the Haida project’s problems, Riedijk
says that ocean fertilization merits further research: “If this actually does
work, it does have global implications.” Oceaneos Environ-mental Solutions has
developed an iron compound that can be consumed efficiently by phytoplankton,
he adds, but he declined to release details. Riedijk also says that the
foundation is working on a method to trace the movement of iron up the food
chain and into fish populations.In the meantime, scientists say that it will be
difficult to get solid data from the Oceaneos foundation’s planned experiment.
The geology off the Chilean coast, and the patterns of currents there, create a
mosaic of low- and high-iron waters. Anchovies, horse mackerel and other fish
move freely between these areas.And adding iron could shift the location and
timing of phytoplankton blooms to favour fast-growing species, says Adrian
Marchetti, a biological oceanographer at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. One of those, the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia, produces domoic acid, a
neurotoxin that can kill mammals and birds. Oceaneos’s experiment will probably
increase plankton growth in low-iron waters, Marchetti says, “but it’s not to
say that that is actually good for the higher levels of the food chain”.
- Nature
- 545,
- 393–394
- ( 25 May 2017 )
- doi :10.1038/545393a
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