Without disputing its cause or causes, impact or impacts, solution or solutions, most governments around the world have got climate change popping on their agenda all the time. Our energy has been invested in diverse ways to find possibilities of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. We’ve explored measures ranging from simple, “easy-to-do” home based stuffs like: “turn off”; to large scale, complex scientific experiments such as adding iron to the ocean, in what is known as: “ocean fertilization”.

”Ocean fertilization” leads to a bloom in phytoplankton population, which in turn absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Without taking in to account, or ignoring the potential long term risk of artificial “ocean fertilization”, the objectives were far from realization. Scientist in the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, UK, observed a lower than expected absorption of carbon dioxide by phytoplankton after fertilization with natural iron. Like the British team of scientist, an Indo-German team from Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany, and the National Oceanographic Centre of India, also observed a lower than expected absorption of carbon dioxide by phytoplankton induced by artificial iron fertilization.

Surprisingly, in the case of artificial iron fertilization, shrimp-like creatures fed on the phytoplankton, reducing their population and their potential to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this demonstrates our inability to control our complex, dynamic and interconnected natural ecosystems as much as we may want in order to tackle climate change.
In the backdrop of wide media coverage amidst controversy of these iron fertilization experiments, this leaves lots of questions in our minds if it was a “cure” for climate change or a scientific stunt.

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Tags: carbon dioxide, climate change, Environment, global warming

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 7:57 am and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.