Oceanic Carbon Sequestration

Current Temperature in New York City: 59 degrees
Expected High Tomorrow: 66 degrees

While I am definitely enjoying the very mild winter here in New York this year, I can't shake this sinking feeling that 5 or 10 years from now science and society will look back at this winter as a major point in the progression of global warming. Columbia University economist and director of the Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs argues that the global ecosystem acts as a "step function". In much the same way that a bathtub can continue to accept water without any ill effects until suddenly the water reaches the top and begins to overflow onto the floor below, the earth's ecosystem can accept continuous environmental stress until one day it reaches its limit and begins to rapidly deteriorate. I worry that this winter of near record-breaking warm temperatures here in the northeast is signaling that the bathtub has begun to overflow.

Fortunately, however, there are some very intelligent people out there working on some very new ways of turning back the clock on global warming. One interesting path of research is carbon sequestration -- pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and burying it deep underground. While scientists are still working on ways to actually make that a reality, one economist/inventor, Philip Kithil, thinks he has a way to sequester carbon in our oceans to the ocean floor. As reported in the Guardian , there is a "barrel-shaped type of plankton called salps, which feed on algae and excrete dense pellets of carbon that sink to the ocean floor." By using a system of plastic tubes installed throughout the ocean, Kithil argues that colder, nutrient-rich water can be pulled from the deep ocean and brought closer to the surface to promote a suitable environment for algae. With the abundance of algae, the salp plankton will begin to flourish and through their biological processes, naturally sequestering carbon from the surface down to the ocean floor. Furthermore, Kithil believes that once the systems of tubes are in place, their output could be accelerated in order to further cool the surface water ahead of incoming hurricanes, which strengthen as they move along warm water.

The downside, of course, is that all of this is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but I figure if the US alone can spend over $300 billion on losing a war in Iraq, I think that the global community can scrape together enough money to make innovations like this a reality.

Let's face it: if we mess up this planet, we don't really have anywhere else to go.