Fe fi ho hum

Hooray, hooray, it's another Carnival of the Blue today, hosted by the merry duke of Cephalopodcast. I'm particularly pleased that today's Carnival introduces me to the Oyster's Garter, where Miriam Goldstein has already written much of the post I keeping putting off on the grand plans for iron fertilization. With two companies already running around proposing large scale dumping plans on the high seas it's a fair time to consider if John Martin's words will indeed be prophetic:

"Give me a half tanker of iron and I will give you the next ice age." 

It's hard to know how to shop for both global warming and an ice age, but monkeying around with the great pumps that drive the ocean's circulation could certainly send us from bikinis to parkas. Out in international waters, free from the laws of nations and far from view, one would hope any large-scale iron fertilization would proceed cautiously and not with the reckless abandon of an early dotcom start-up. At least Climos is proposing a voluntary code of conduct, which seems only polite. And the folks at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute are taking a good, hard look at the issue, since, as Dr. Ken Buessler says, "It's a delicate balance."

But talking about iron fertilization as "gardening in the ocean" is a poor metaphor at best. In your garden, you're controlling almost all the variables: shade, water, soil nutrients and pH, and every single plant you grow. You visit your garden regularly so you see the effects of your labor, year after year. Dumping iron in the ocean is gardening like me buying a bare plot of land in Iowa, pouring a truck of fertilizer on it, and then heading home to wait for the corn to roll in.

Do we need to think creatively to solve greenhouse gas emissions? Yes. Do we need to treat every "underutilized" patch of the sea as a place to fill in with growth? Maybe not. There's a good reason I can't grow a rainforest in my Zone 11 front yard. After all, wanton fertilization is part of the reason the oceans are in trouble today.