On February 11, NBC News published a story by writers Kenzi Abou-Sabe, Yasmine Salam, and Cynthia McFadden titled “Could giving the ocean an antacid help limit climate change?,” describes ways to artificially create the world’s oceans to capture and store more carbon dioxide.
Whether artificially altering ocean chemistry is a worthy or valuable goal to combat climate change is still unclear, it is quite clear that it is impractical due to the large scale and can have unintended negative consequences.
The NBC News story is perhaps best summed up in the first few paragraphs of the story:
Just over a year ago, Canadian oceanographer Will Burt was in Fairbanks, Alaska, lecturing college students about the effects of global warming on marine life when a former colleague approached him. It’s about a startup looking to use the ocean to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
“I don’t have to think about it,” Burt said.
…
Burt works for Planetary Technologies, a Canadian startup trying to tap into and accelerate that potential by adding acid-resistant powder to the ocean.
The theory is that by altering seawater chemistry, the ocean’s surface could absorb more carbon in the atmosphere than it would naturally.
The premise is that with human intervention, the world’s oceans can absorb more carbon dioxide (CO2), dissolved in them, to slow or reverse the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, Burt and other researchers seem to misunderstand basic chemistry, which tells us that as the temperature of the oceans increases, CO2 will outgas from it. This has been known for decades, as shown in the figure below.
So, just as bubbling soda water produces more carbonate when it’s warm than it is cold, the oceans give off more CO2.2 when they warm up. The Earth is warming modestly and has been since about 1850. As water temperatures rise with the warmer planet, CO2 the solubility becomes less and the ocean emits more CO2. As seen in Figure 2, CO2 increasing in the atmosphere, partly due to anthropogenic contributions, but also due to CO . emissions2 from the oceans as the Earth has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, which ended around1850.
Adding antacids won’t have any effect on temperature-dependent chemistry in the ocean, and these researchers will soon discover that their efforts will be very small in the big picture. .
Of course, when Burt says “I don’t have to think about it.” he is right, and any logical person can see the madness of his quest just on an unbelievable scale, never mind the uphill battle against CO reduction2 dissolved and released into the ocean as the temperature increased.
And, do oceanographers like Burt think about dumping large amounts of antacids into the ocean? On the one hand, we were told that fragile ocean, on the other hand, we were told by Burt and others that they should be used for an experiment in industrial-scale antacid trials. The article states, “Planetary intends to recycle mine waste from a defunct asbestos mine in Quebec to produce pure magnesium hydroxide, which the company believes will help accelerate the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon. in the areas where it is used.”
Dumping asbestos mine waste in the ocean? Surely there must be environmental laws against such a thing.
The idea that we should be trying to intentionally change global ocean chemistry by dumping refined asbestos mine waste into them is misleading. Even if it makes sense, without unintended consequences, the scale needed to dramatically reduce atmospheric CO22 is likely not possible.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front and behind the camera as an online TV meteorologist since 1978 and now does daily radio forecasts. He has created graphical weather display systems for television, specialized weather instruments, as well as co-authored articles on climate issues. He runs the world’s most viewed website on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
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