Planktos Answers Grim IPCC Climate Diagnosis with Affordable Green Marine Remedy
If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had consulted more doctors of ocean science, their report might have mentioned that we can effectively cure half the planet's CO2 ills just by healing our forgotten seas.
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) February 2, 2007
Silicon Valley ecorestoration firm, Planktos, Inc. declared today that the dire "Climate Change 2007" report just released by the IPCC in Paris should rightfully rivet policy makers' attention, especially since the authors concede it is a highly conservative assessment. Indeed Planktos contends that the report tells much less than half the story, partly because far harsher views were edited out to achieve consensus, but mostly because the plight and promise of the blue 71% of the planet were fundamentally ignored.
According to Planktos CEO Russ George, "Too many climate scientists still regard the ocean simply as a lifeless thermodynamic system with interesting CO2-driven physics that now threaten our ports and coasts. Too few see it as the Earth's most vital living ecosystem which faces murderous CO2 threats of its own. And by closing their eyes to the ocean's life, they not only miss the worsening CO2-driven crises of acidification, plankton loss, and food chain collapse, they fail to recognize the enormous planet-cooling effects that restoring its health could achieve."
The Neglected Science of the Sea
Ocean scientists from NASA, NOAA and university labs have been warning for years that marine phytoplankton, Earth's most vital form of life, have been literally decimated since 1980, primarily by an increasing shortfall in wind-borne iron dust.
Often called the lifeblood of the planet, phytoplankton are the tiny marine plants that generate half the planet's oxygen, remove half its CO2, and feed every larger creature in the sea. Their growth and photosynthesis are highly dependent on micronutrient iron historically delivered to the open sea by dust storms from arid lands. That crucial supply has recently dwindled by nearly 35% thanks to modern agricultural practices and the soil-stabilizing greening effect of increasing CO2. Plankton populations have consequently declined more than 25% in many parts of the Pacific and over 10% globally. Plankton are therefore metabolizing 3-4 billion fewer tons of CO2 each year than they were just a generation ago, an amount equivalent to half of all our manmade emissions today..
The effects of this micronutrient are so dramatic, however, that every iron atom that we restore can catalyze the photosynthetic removal of over 100,000 molecules of atmospheric CO2. In other words, replenishing just a few hundred thousand tons of iron dust could reverse the open ocean's plankton decline, regenerate billions of tons of food for fisheries and whales, and pull down billions of tons of global warming CO2 as well. In fact, restoring plankton health back to 1980 levels would annually remove four to five times more carbon dioxide from the sky than instant universal compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.
Russ George concludes, "The IPCC report is clear. We face two immediate and equally critical challenges today: reducing the volume of our greenhouse gas emissions and removing the lethal surplus already in the air. Unfortunately, nearly all our policies, activism and media attention have focused just on emission reductions, the most difficult, expensive, and politically exhausting half of the problem. Nurturing trees and healing seas to reduce the existing excess, which IPCC scientists say could continue to afflict us for centuries, are either disregarded or actively opposed -- despite their affordability, effectiveness and the countless other environmental benefits they confer.
"We at Planktos are striving to correct this dangerous imbalance both with our climate forest parks in Europe and our plankton restoration pilot projects at sea. We have the science, skills and tools to turn this emergency around. We just need people and policy makers to start revering the powers of life and nature as much as they venerate industrial technology."
For more information on the science, promise and political economy of plankton power and ecorestoration, visit the Planktos website at http://www. planktos. com (http://www. planktos. com).
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