Gee, What Could Go Wrong?

The Guardian reports on one instance of the predictable and dangerous result of global warming hysteria:

A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a "blatant violation" of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week.

Satellite images appear to confirm the claim by Californian Russ George that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilisation that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.

According to a CBC News report, this Russ George conned convinced the people of the island group of Haida Gwaii to dump about $1 million of their own money into the project on claims that it would raise the levels of salmon species in the area.

The apparent motivation for George is to score big with carbon credits, if not now, in the future, but the exact details aren't entirely clear. Regardless, it seems incredibly stupid and reckless to go off and do this sort of thing on such a massive scale. George claims that the governments of Canada and the United States both knew about what he was doing and approved and supported it, but even as screwed up as the US NOAA is I find it hard to believe they would support this mad scientist sort of crap. If they did, heads need to roll from the top all the way down to the lowest culpable idiot.

The Guardian claim that iron sulphate was dumped was refuted in a disturbing way in the CBC article:

Earlier reports said iron sulphate was used in the dump, but Disney said this was incorrect. He says a finely ground dirt-like substance with trace amounts of iron was actually used.

Gee, I don't know about you, but that sort of vague denial always makes me feel so much better. WTF is "dirt-like substance" supposed to mean? Just WTF did those people do?

I'm no Luddite by any means, so I am not against continued research in some areas. But for damned sure we do not understand enough about climate and the environment to start actually deploying these "solutions" on a large scale.

Huge plankton blooms, sun-reflecting chemicals in the atmosphere, massive carbon capture and storage projects that create huge ticking time bombs underground. The stupidity is getting worse and worse. We need to end this nonsense before somebody does some serious damage with the inevitable unintended consequences.