Published October 18, 2012
By Margaret Munro
The Ocean Peal, shown here flying the flag of the Old Massett First Nation, left a rusty trail behind the ship as it travelled through this waters off Haida Gwaii this summer spreading iron in the sea.
Photo Credit: HSRC
VANCOUVER _ Russ George doesn’t think small.
He got the Vatican to buy into a venture to reduce its carbon footprint by growing a forest in Hungary.
He sailed off to the Galapagos Islands in 2007 with a grand plan to scatter iron over a large swath of the South Pacific.
And now George is leading the world’s largest ocean-fertilization experiment off the B.C. coast, which was widely denounced this week as shoddy science and a violation of international rules.
George is the kind of can-do entrepreneur – or “rogue climate hacker” as he was described this past week – that makes some worry about unauthorized experiments putting the planet at risk.
It’s the ocean this time, and the experiment will likely do no serious damage, says Ken Denman, an oceanographer at the University of Victoria. Next time, he says, it could be some multimillionaire or “rogue” country shooting sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere to block incoming solar radiation in a bid to slow global warming.
“That’s the big worry,” says Denman, a former Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist who has spent years working on international efforts to better protect the global atmosphere and oceans. Continue reading
Margaret Munro 