National Academy of Sciences Holds Up Key Climate Solution
In August 2021 Center for Media and Democracy published my article, “Misconceptions Shouldn’t Hold Up Key Climate Solution”. In 2022, The National Academy of Sciences issued a report that unfortunately continued to propagate many of the same misconceptions that I corrected regarding that “key climate solution”, namely Ocean Pasture Restoration, or, OPR. The great influence of the NAS plus the unfathomable urgency of avoiding Climate Ruin makes it imperative to once again set the record straight.
We can assume that the NAS committee that wrote this report is quite familiar with my article, as their writing committee includes Romany Webb from Columbia Law School, a Senior Fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, who contributed valuable and conclusive content to my article. Indeed, before publication I sent it to her to check the accuracy, and she was satisfied with it. Consequently, Webb and her committee must be aware of the facts as I laid them out in my article, and cognizant that nobody has refuted those facts.
Nevertheless, the NAS report makes quite a few untrue and misleading assertions regarding those very same facts, and profoundly misrepresents the overall context in a way that leads a casual reader to draw deeply erroneous conclusions.
Let’s begin with the allegation that OPR can be dangerous in terms of creating a toxic effect. My paper clearly proves with plenty of evidence and scientific references that there is no such danger of creating a toxic effect. The NAS while cognizant of this nevertheless refuses to concede, much less proclaim, that point as they dauntingly title their section on this allegation “Harmful Algal Blooms”. But do they offer any evidence to supersede my paper’s clear proof of the non-harm? Not at all, and they even support the truth with phrases such as, “there are few data to support this concern”, and “studies…did not detect increased (toxicity)”. But rather than using their platform of respected authority to remedy the ubiquitous misconception of toxic danger and declare that the unwarranted fears of toxic effects from OPR are indeed unfounded, they decided instead to intensify the cloud of doubt and fear around the topic by inundating the reader with misleading phrases such as “there may be conditions where harmful responses are possible”, “one might see a harmful response”, “caution is warranted”, and “unintended consequences that will be important to study”, which serve to sow doubt and fear, but without any basis in fact.
This obfuscation is couched in a fallacious context since OPR is designed to replenish and restore the ocean to a natural state while the NAS conjures a fear of unnatural geo-engineering with language describing OPR as “intended to produce changes to community composition”. Furthermore, they add a sham anxiety that OPR may be moving from mere research to an alarming “large-scale implementation”, while giving the impression that we need decades more research which unnecessarily and tragically puts us well past the time limits for surviving this urgent crisis. This misrepresentation is rather appalling considering the NAS is aware of the evidence that OPR is plenty safe to deploy right now as one of our only scalable solutions to global warming. Moreover, the NAS report fails to mention that well-funded academic research on this topic is now nearing 40 years, with a robust amount of research easily justifying moving forward with OPR.
Then, they add this further folly: they advise to limit all research to coastline areas of the ocean. But coastline areas are already overwhelmingly saturated with the iron that OPR is designed to restore to areas that are deficient in that iron, which means that the NAS recommends experiments that make no sense and have no efficacy.
In addition, their dwelling on the subject of toxicity adds to the misconception that red algae or “red tides” have any meaningful connection with iron and OPR. In fact, the entire allegation that red tide or red algae is somehow a risk from OPR is totally untrue and fact-free. Adding iron never triggers these problems because red tide/red algae only occurs in coastal areas, and these areas are already super rich in iron. Iron does not play a meaningful part with influencing the growth of algae near land because the major nutrients from pollution, sewage and agricultural runoff are millions of times more influential. Moreover, OPR is only implemented in the deep ocean, which is where it can be effective restoring the ecosystems, never in the coastal areas. So, NAS’s recommendation that OPR experiments only be located in coastal areas is a misguided, misleading, useless and even absurd recommendation.
Professor Victor Smetacek, a top authority from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who has done many experiments in the oceans with OPR related projects, had this to say about OPR safety concerns: “In general, the claim that OPR may cause harmful algal blooms (HABs) and lead to closure of fisheries in coastal waters is completely unfounded. Specifically, the NAS report mentions that OPR does not pose a threat of HABs in the open deep ocean. I fully agree with this.”
Furthermore, Professor Smetacek told me that his review of the NAS report revealed several seriously troubling flaws in their methodology, including treating the many kinds of phytoplankton, which are as distinct as grass is from trees, as essentially the same variety. “It’s like calling all green life on land ‘plants’ without dividing them into trees, shrubberies, and meadows, or differentiating ecosystems into deserts, pastures and woodlands.” In addition, he says, the NAS report misleadingly groups all the OPR related experiments together regardless of length and other factors and makes over-generalizations about the fate of the plankton blooms.
Rendering the report even more unsound, as Professor Smetacek continues, the NAS gives the impression that deep sinking sequestration of CO2 (a key goal for OPR) was observed only in one of the experiments, and this, according to Smetacek, is not true. He says, “The experiment where deep, massive sinking was found was also the only one designed to find it. This type of sinking definitely also happened in the other experiments but they were either too short or disconnected from the deep water to track sinking particles. Indeed, results presented in 2 papers I was a lead participant in, including one involving the NAS itself (!) in 2013, are not cited.”
Unfortunately, the NAS creates barriers to the private sector for research and implementation of OPR — would they limit Thomas Edison from working on the lightbulb? Would they restrain Pfizer from working on the covid vaccine?
Next, let’s examine how NAS refers to the main historical example of OPR, the successful 2012 Haida project. Right away, the NAS makes a seriously false statement that the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC) asked the native village to “fund a commercial venture”, which bolsters the pernicious fiction commonly seen in the media that this project was essentially some predatory corporate businessmen imposing their avarice on hapless natives. The reality is that the villagers themselves created the HSRC to restore their fisheries, all with the full permission and cooperation of the Canadian and provincial governments, as well as the native government.
There was nothing hapless about this project. Here is the statement of the village’s native project leader, John Disney, President of the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, made on October 19, 2012:
“Our project has generated a great deal of media attention both nationally and internationally. I want to tell you about the project, what we did, how we did it. This project was not entered into lightly. And we have complied with every necessary aspect of the ocean governance before undertaking the work. I want to make very clear: we do not consider micronutrient replenishment of a naturally occurring substance to be pollution. We are using this for restoration purposes, to restore the salmon back to their rightful place in the Old Massey economy. We have created a great team, working to develop the knowledge that will allow us to have a sustainable future, and that is the guiding principle of the company. As President, I am very cognisant of all of the requirements of the scientific and legal nature that applies to this project. I’d like to say that at this time that the international media and national media seems to have focused on Russ George who we brought in as our Chief Scientist. I want to make this emphatically clear: Russ George did not, I’m saying did not come to us to dupe us or sell us a bill of goods. We approached him, and we based that on ten years of work with him in other fields. I’ve known Russ for over ten years and I’ll you something that is very rare: he has never once lied to me, he’s only told me the truth, he has a great integrity, and he’s never let us down. And every time he’s told me something that I thought was unbelievable I’ve checked it out and he’s always been right. And I challenge anyone else in the corporate world to come up with that about a person. Russ has one aim in life: he wants to try and make the planet a better place. That’s it. I don’t care what else you read.”
This statement highlights another NAS calumny: the studious marginalization of the main practitioner of OPR, Russ George.
The NAS in their report not only chose to leave out Mr. George’s name, to not mention the person who deserves most of the credit for implementing this key solution to global warming, and they not only chose to leave out any supportive commentary that has publicly reflected on his honest leadership in the field of OPR, but they did not even do the minimum due diligence of contacting Mr. George at all. Mr George says, “Neither the NAS nor any of its authors of the report ever contacted me for comment or fact checking that would have perfectly revealed their fallacious presentation.”
A further falsehood in the report is terribly misleading to the public: “Controversy remains about the legality of this effort”. There was nothing at all illegal about this effort. Period. NAS should rather say “Unfounded controversy remains about the legality of this effort”. The way the NAS phrased it erodes confidence in future OPR projects for no good reason, implying it might be breaking some laws, furthering the misconceptions about its legality that I clearly debunked in my article. The NAS is undoubtedly aware of its legality since the NAS’s own Romany Webb herself stated it was legal, and since elsewhere in the NAS report this legality is affirmed.
Next, we get the utterly untrue assertion, “no links could be made to enhanced fisheries.” On the contrary, the Alaska Fish and Game Report for 2020 shows a strong link to enhanced salmon fisheries resulting from the 2012 Haida project. In fact, the expected catch of Pink Salmon in 2013 was predicted by salmon experts and managers to be 50 million fish, but the catch turned out to be 224 million Pinks, that’s 4.5 times the official prediction, the largest catch in all of history.
The last example I will give, but only because space is limited, is how the NAS report sets the upper limit of how much CO2 can be removed by OPR at about 1 gigaton per year. Humans are currently emitting about 40 gigatons of CO2 per year, and so we need to be removing (or not emitting) that 40 plus at least another 40 gigatons per year of existing CO2 in the atmosphere to significantly lessen the current greenhouse effect. Therefore, if readers of the report were to believe the NAS claim that OPR’s capacity for CO2 removal is limited to 1 gigaton per year that would render OPR quite useless as a solution to the climate problem. However, while the NAS claims to be making a full survey of the relevant scientific assessments, they somehow overlooked one of the very top elite experts in the field, Sir David King, the UK Government’s former Special Representative for Climate Change, and the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 to 2007. Sir David made this statement about the effect of an OPR type of spreading of iron-rich dust for removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere: “If we cover about 2% to 3% of the deep ocean surface with iron in this way we would remove about 35 billion tons of greenhouse gasses a year. I’d suggest with that one technology, it is possible that we could deliver a massive potential solution.”
So, let us not let misconceptions from the National Academy of Sciences, or any other source, hold up a key climate solution, that is, not slow the progress of Ocean Pasture Restoration, which appears to be our most potent natural tool for avoiding Climate Ruin.
Alex Carlin, Foreign Correspondent for Environment, Center for Media and Democracy
