A California
businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron
dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo
into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and
government officials.
The entrepreneur,
whose foray came to light only this week, even duped the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration in the United States into lending him
ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.
Canada’s environment ministry says it is investigating the experiment,
which was carried out with no government or scientific oversight. A spokesman
said the ministry had warned the venture in advance that its plan would violate
international agreements.
Marine scientists and other experts have assailed the experiment as
unscientific, irresponsible and probably in violation of those agreements,
which are intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise
of trying to fight the effects of climate change.
Though the environmental impact of the foray could well prove minimal,
scientists said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue
field experiments that might unintentionally put the environment at risk.
The entrepreneur, Russ George, calling it a “state-of-the-art
study,” said his team scattered iron dust several hundred miles west of the
islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in exchange for $2.5
million from a native Canadian group.
The iron spawned the growth of enormous amounts of plankton, which Mr.
George, a former fisheries and forestry worker, said might allow the project to
meet one of its goals: aiding the recovery of the local salmon fishery for the native Haida.
Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas, and
settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had
hoped that by burying carbon, they could also sell so-called carbon offset
credits to companies and make money.
Iron fertilization is contentious because it is associated with geoengineering, a set of proposed strategies
for counteracting global warming through the deliberate manipulation of the
environment. Many experts have argued that scientists should be researching such
geoengineering techniques — like spewing compounds into the
atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or using sophisticated machines to remove
carbon dioxide from the air.
But tampering with the environment is risky, they say, so any
experiments must be carried out responsibly and transparently, with the
involvement of the scientific community and proper governance.
“Geoengineering is extremely controversial,” said Andrew Parker, a fellow at the Belfer Center
at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “There is a need to protect the
environment while making sure safe and legitimate research can go ahead.”
Mark L. Wells, a marine scientist at the
University of Maine, said that what Mr. George did “could be described as ocean
dumping.”
Dr. Wells said it would be difficult for Mr. George to demonstrate
what impact the iron had on the plankton and called it “extraordinarily
unlikely” that Mr. George could prove that the experiment met the goal of
permanently removing some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
NOAA acknowledged that it had provided the project with 20
instrument-laden buoys that drift in the ocean for a year or more and measure
water temperature, salinity and other characteristics. Such buoys are often
sent out on what the agency calls “vessels of opportunity,” and the data they
provide, uploaded to satellites, is publicly available.
But a spokesman said the agency had been “misled” by the group, which
“did not disclose that it was going to discharge material into the ocean.”
The nature of Mr. George’s project was first reported this week in an
article in The Guardian, a British newspaper, after it was revealed by the ETC Group,
a watchdog group in Montreal that opposes geoengineering.
Mr. Parker, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, said it appeared that the
project had contravened two international agreements on geoengineering, the London Convention on the dumping of wastes at
sea and a moratorium declared by the United Nations Convention on Biological
Diversity — as well as a set of principles developed at Oxford
University on transparency, regulation and the need for public participation.
Mr. George, said that his experiment was not related to
geoengineering, and that 100 tons was a negligible amount of iron compared to
what naturally enters the oceans. “This is a community trying to maintain its
livelihood,” he said of the Haida.
He said his team had collected a “golden mountain” of data on the
plankton bloom. Mr. George, who described himself as chief scientist on the
project and said he has training as a plant ecologist, refused to name any of
the other scientists on the team.
Scientists who have been involved with sanctioned iron fertilization
experiments strongly disputed Mr. George’s assertion about the quality of his
experiment, saying that it was roughly 10 times bigger than any other but that
the fishing boat used and the science team were clearly insufficient.
Victor Smetacek, an oceanographer with the Alfred Wegener
Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany who recently
published an analysis of sanctioned fertilization
research conducted in 2004 in the Southern Ocean, said Mr. George’s project
would give a black eye to legitimate research.
“This kind of behavior is disastrous,” he said, describing Mr. George,
with whom he had brief contact more than five years ago, as a “messing around,
bumbling guy.”
Mr. George, 62, of Northern California, was previously in the public
eye when, as chief executive of a company called Planktos,
he proposed a similar iron-fertilization project,
in the equatorial Pacific west of the Galápagos Islands, whose purpose was the
sale of carbon offsets. Under cap-and-trade programs in various countries,
polluters can offset their emissions of greenhouse gases by
buying credits from projects that store carbon or otherwise mitigate global
warming.
The project was canceled in 2008 after what his company called a
“disinformation campaign” by environmentalists and others made it impossible to
attract investors.
Mr. George said that during that period he was contacted by the Old Massett Village Council, one of two Haida
groups on Haida Gwaii, about “wanting to do something about their fish,” which
had suffered population declines.
But John Disney, the council’s economic development director, said he
had worked with Mr. George on other projects before, including one to generate
carbon credits by replacing alder forests on the islands with conifers. That
project never came to fruition.
Mr. Disney defended the iron sprinkling project, saying that it had
been approved by Old Massett’s villagers and cleared by the council’s lawyers.
He said at least seven Canadian government agencies were aware of the
project. But a spokesman for Canada’s environment minister said Thursday that
the salmon group was twice warned in advance that its plan violated
international agreements Canada had signed that would prohibit an iron-seeding
project with a commercial element, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
reported.
Mr. Disney also said that the marine science community, including
researchers at the Wegener Institute in Germany, had known about the project.
But Mr. Smetacek disputed that as well. “I’ve had no contact with this
guy on this,” he said, referring to Mr. George.
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