Boston Globe: Those plans to strew iron in the seas? There ought’a be a law, but there ain’t.

The Boston Globe‘s Beth Daley recently spent time at a two-day conference on fertilizing the sea with iron. We’ve read about this many times in recent years: Pour iron dust on the bounding main, watch the plankton bloom, and hope their offal and other bits sink into the abyss with a load of atmospheric carbon. Nobody really knows if it will work, but at least two companies hope to make a good profit by selling carbon offsets from the practice.

At a recent Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conference on the topic Daly came back with one fresh angle. “If a company wants to seed the high seas, there is extraordinarily little that scientists – or governments – can do to stop them.” She also gets in a tidy wrap-up on the state of play in the broader geo-engineering and climate change world.

-CP

Pic: Source here – scroll down (at Planktos! A company in the biz).