When will people stop messing about with things we don't really understand very well?
In the latest episode of "Let's try random geo-engineering projects to try to keep the planet from actually catching fire," we now have an ambitious scheme to get the Atlantic Ocean to sequester more CO2 by pouring chemicals into it. Yes, I'm serious; the group trying this lunacy is calling it the Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, or (OAE).
There are a number of problems with this idea.
Last August, 65,000 litres of bright red chemicals were pumped into the Gulf of Maine – yet this wasn't an enormous industrial disaster.
Instead, it was a controversial geoengineering experiment that scientists claim could help to slow down global warming.
The oceans already hold around 38,000 billion tonnes of CO2, trapped as dissolved sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda.
The goal, as stated, is to increase the amount of CO2 held in solution in the Atlantic by changing the pH balance of the ocean's waters. Here's the problem: Most marine life is adapted to live within a certain salinity and pH range. Mucking around with that could lead to bad consequences for some marine life. Some people are already sounding the warning about this:
The geoengineering method known as Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) aims to speed up this natural process by resetting the ocean's pH.
Over four days, scientists added vast quantities of sodium hydroxide – an alkaline chemical tagged with a red dye – to the waters off the coast of Boston.
Making the ocean more alkaline should encourage it to absorb even more CO2 from the atmosphere.
However, critics have warned that the potential effects on marine life remain uncertain.
Gareth Cunningham, Director of Conservation and Policy at the Marine Conservation Society, told the Daily Mail: 'These approaches are resource–intensive and their ecological impacts are still poorly understood.'
Key concept: These impacts are still poorly understood. If there's ever to be an epitaph written for the climate change panic-mongering, this would be it.
Read More: CBS Being More Balanced on Climate Change: Media Matters Hardest Hit
The Hidden Cost of Renewable Power: Toxic 'Green' Waste to Hit 1 Million Tons
This is a concern, in part because some mass extinctions in the world's oceans in the past were caused in part by pH balances going out of whack, usually due to volcanic activity - lots and lots of volcanic activity. But while we don't understand all the implications of this yet, neither am I too worried about it. Why?
Because the amount of sodium hydroxide - lye - being dumped into the ocean in this effort is literally a spit in the ocean. This effort put 65,000 liters of chemicals into the Gulf of Maine, which dumps into the Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean contains 1 x 10 ^20 liters of water - that's three hundred quintillion liters, or 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters. That means that for every liter of ocean water, the project has added 2.16 x 10 ^-16 liters of sodium hydroxide, which takes us into a simply enormous number of liters of ocean water for every liter of chemical.
That's pretty much the definition of futile.
So, as it happens, I have some questions.
First: How much is all this costing? Who is picking up the tab? Is someone going to propose this as a government project, funded by the taxpayers? If so, which government? Or will it be funded by donations? If that latter is the plan, this will surely be another case of spitting into the ocean.
Second: This is a question that goes back to my days as a corporate consultant and industry Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) guru: How do you propose to measure success? How will you know how much chemical is enough? What is the desired end state? How will you know you have achieved that end state?
Third: This presumably won't be a one-time effort. China's not going to stop building coal-fired electrical plants. Russia isn't going to stop exporting natural gas. And, unless some political calamity befalls the United States, like another Democrat in the White House, Alaska isn't going to stop producing oil and gas from our North Slope fields. So how often is this going to have to be done? For how long? And, again, at what cost?
Fourth and finally: How much CO2 is produced in the process of manufacturing the billions of pounds of sodium hydroxide required to neutralize all of the output of all of the humans in all of the nations of Earth? How much fossil fuel-generated electricity will be required? How much diesel will be burned in transport, from raw materials to processing plants to transport to whatever watercraft will be required to dump this stuff into the Atlantic?
Look, this is a bad idea for any number of reasons, but the primary one is this: The people pushing this dumb idea have no idea how it can be scaled up, who is paying for it, or how to know what effect it's really having - but they want to go ahead anyway, because climate - despite not having any idea what the "correct" climate settings are supposed to be.
The climate scolds have been doing a lot of wondering about why their cause is losing support. Here's another reason.
