Environmental Talk

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

One of the reasons I majored in business in college was because there was only one science course required for Finance majors.

Fortunately, there was a class called Chemistry and Society that was not filled with pre-med students. As far as I could tell, Chemistry for Dummies existed for the sole purpose of allowing regular students to get an “A” in a science-related course.

The course was “taught” by a one-handed professor. The professor had blown off his other hand while demonstrating a chemical reaction to a class of med students some years earlier.

Obviously, the professor had tenure at the time of the explosion (or maybe my alma mater just had a better sense of humor than I give it credit for) because the guy continued to teach introductory chemistry, year after year, to students whose only interest in chemistry was what the perfect formula for a margarita was.

This is all by way of saying that my scientific background isn’t what most people would refer to as “strong” or “extensive.”

I do know that one of the things that both global warming advocates and skeptics alike agree on is that the science surrounding climate change is amazingly intricate and complex.

Starting from that point, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the idea of combating global warming by dumping iron dust into the ocean around the Galapagos Islands is not all that brilliant of a scheme.

And by “all that brilliant,” I mean “dumber than Paris Hilton with a concussion.”

Planktos, Inc. is a company that wants to drop iron dust into the ocean in one of the most environmentally rich and diverse areas on the planet in the hope that the additional iron will encourage the growth of phytoplankton.

According to the plan, the accelerated growth of plankton would then suck “excess” carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere during photosynthesis.

What could possibly go wrong?

There’s probably not much of a chance that some of the animals that frequent the Galapagos could ingest something like 4000 times their current minimum daily requirement of iron. And, it’s probably even more of a stretch that, in the event of lightning strike, these newly iron-rich animals would become living magnets, but do we really want to run the risk of having six giant turtles stuck together?

Worse yet, what if the polarity was such that when the turtles went to mate, they actually repelled each other? At the very least, you’d have a lot of angry and frustrated turtles who would be more inclined to attack tourists. And that would kill the local eco-tourist economy.

You see, it all comes down to finance.

On the other hand, I suppose it might make for much more efficient fishing if you could just send out a boat and magnetically suck fish out of the ocean in a 10 mile radius.

The moral of the story: even the darkest cloud can have a silver iron lining.

global warming, climate change, Galapagos Island, plankton, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, TMNT, eco-tourism, Darwin