This past July Russ George served as chief scientist on a cruise to fertilize the northeastern Pacific Ocean with iron—the latest in a long string of similar, and usually controversial, efforts he has led. He has been attempting to commercialize such ocean fertilization efforts for years, including setting up the failed company Planktos. In parallel, he has also been promoting plans to generate carbon credits for companies and governments, allowing them to emit greenhouse gases in exchange for replanting carbon dioxide-absorbing forests from Canada to Europe.

The ocean fertilization experiment is similar. The idea is that by providing missing nutrients, a plankton bloom can be created. Such a bloom sucks up CO2 as it grows, like plants on land, and then, potentially, buries that carbon at sea as the tiny corpses sink to the bottom. But at the same time, George is hoping the bloom will trickle up the food chain and feed salmon, restoring their historic abundance. Of course, if the bloom is eaten, then animal metabolism will reemit the CO2, sending it back to the atmosphere and defeating the purpose of reducing CO2 emissions, as prior scientific studies have shown.

George says he is convinced that iron fertilization can be a solution to global warming, and he's pitched the idea to everyone from the Haida people of British Columbia to would-be "seasteaders" looking for a business proposition for their floating cities. Given the controversy surrounding George's latest bid—which is billed as an attempt to restore salmon populations but also aims to earn saleable carbon credits—Scientific American spoke with him on October 19.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How did this Haida Salmon Restoration Corp. project start?
This is a village project. They started it, they own it, they run it. It's not the Russ George rogue geoengineering story.

You've seen the vile and vehement twisting of this story. You can probably imagine how I feel. I was the faith and trust and hopes and dreams of a village whose environment is dying, whose culture is dying because the salmon are dying. And now the world is saying they were duped.

So did the iron fertilization work?
We don't know. A really famous scientist once told me: "Russ, keep in mind: you don't know." The correct attitude is: "Data, speak to me." Do the work, get the data, let it speak to you and tell you what the facts might be. Don't assume you have this prescient knowledge of how everything is.

But we do know that in 2008 when 450 million sockeye salmon left the Fraser River, the expectation was that fewer than one million would return. More and more baby salmon go to sea and fewer and fewer adult salmon return. But in August 2008 a volcano dusted ash, and the northeastern Pacific Ocean turned into a massive plankton bloom. The plankton bloom was of larger proportion than what we did in the area. So 40 million fish came home instead of a million. That offered some hope.

There have been three volcanic events in the last 100 years paired with record sockeye salmon runs. That's pretty good data. Those fish don't do fishy science, they do good science. Their physical bodies are data, you can track where they've been because of the discrete isotopic characteristics of different parts of the ocean.

9 Comments

1. 1. raymclennan 06:51 PM 10/24/12

   This man has committed ecologic terrorism with huge ramifications and he should be charged and prosecuted for ocean dumping.
   We have time and time again found out what happened when we try and improve on nature, it goes horribly wrong!

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2. 2. fchow8888 07:37 PM 10/24/12

   Sometimes science progresses by taking risks. Jenner with the smallpox vaccine. The Manhattan Project (with some scientists betting the detonation would be hot enough to ignite the atmosphere and kill everything on the planet). You cannot do everything by simulation on a PC. There is no substitute for asking nature herself a question, and yes, sometimes that's a risky thing.

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3. 3. JimLem 10:36 PM 10/24/12

   I'm glad he is pushing forward with experiments. A few angry people should not block research into science that we might need in the future.
   
   And, I'm pretty shocked at the one-sided coverage up until now. If you read other articles in the past week, none of them had any kind of balance and obviously didn't even try to present his side of the story.
   
   That supports his claim that the press has twisted the issue.
   

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4. 4. em_allways_right 02:21 AM 10/25/12

   I am more concerned w. all the other things that people are dumping into the ocean - not some rust dust.

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5. 5. ironjustice 10:25 AM 10/25/12

   Compared to all the drums of toxic waste dumped into the ocean over the years , this project is a drop in the bucket. 'Disposal' companies were paid to dispose of the waste and they've been simply dumping it into the ocean for decades.

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6. 6. Daniel35 04:12 PM 10/27/12

   Since apparently we can't stop burning carbon fuels, at least in time to prevent severe warming, it seems like Iron fertilization is the best option. Sure, plankton gets eaten and some CO2 is emitted, but until we get better data, I think more ocean life of any kind means more carbon-containing waste and corpses go to the ocean floor. Opposing this seems like supporting the human-created epocalypse.

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7. 7. LacklandWilliamsMeadeCNCI 02:30 PM 10/28/12

   100 tonnes of Iron (III) Sulfate turns to be one helluva tectonic laxative!! 7.7 Magnitude Earthquake registered at on Queen Charlotte Fault on October 27, 2012. Sure there was an algal bloom in August, 2012 after the Iron Sulfate dumping from a fishing boat in July, 2012, but it turns out this Iron Sulfate stuff goes right to the fault cracks in the plates and is slippery like graphite in a rusty car door lock!! I think we've got Earth Grease!!
   Patent it!!

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8. 8. raymclennan 02:47 PM 10/28/12

   We as humans have arrogance to think we know how to make nature better and fix everything we have broken! Scientists paid by capitalists spend so much trying to see if the can, and no time thinking about whether they should!

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9. 9. StateOfTheArtist 11:10 PM 1/20/13

   Russ George is an enviromental hero and everyone should be kissing his butt. If PLANKTOS had been allowed to roll out large scale ocean fert 7 years ago when they were trying rather than being villanised as they were, we wouldn't be in quite as deep schtuck as we are today!
   NOW we are within 2 years of complete loss of artic summer sea ice, this lost reflectivity doubling global warming from what greenhouse gases alone are doing.
   NOW we have to furiously "geoengineer" with sulphate aerosols in the Arctic stratosphere and other SERIOUS geoengineering techniques WITHIN THE NEXT 5 YEARS if we wish to avoid the rapidly escalating release of several thousand gigatons of methane locked in and under the siberian continental shelf submarine permafrost which is melting furiously NOW. THAT scenario has global average temperatures up by some 10 deg c and the planet sterile of all higher life forms by 2050.
   Doubt any of this?
   -Check out the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG), and the Arctic News blogsite.
   
   We need ocean fert. ocean biomass, animal or vegetable, dead on the sea floor or swimming...
   -is carbon not in the atmosphere or acidifying the oceans!

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