From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jan 25 2001 - 18:53:06 MST
At 05:34 PM 25/01/01 +0100, denis wrote:
>> there are proposals to seed the oceans
>> with iron to stimulate plankton blooms which seems to
>> be the most effective way to sequester the huge amounts
>> of carbon that some claim we need to get rid of.
>Their line of thinking might be like this: 'We hurt the
>planet by doing things the consequences of which we do not fully understand.
>Therefore, solving these issues by doing another thing we do not fully
>understand is a bad idea, since it may very well turn out that we will do
>even more damage.' If this is the way they are thinking, I would tend to
>sympathise with them very much.
Precisely. I'm pretty sure this was Gregory Benford's take on the proposal
as well, when he was talking at a world sf convention in Melbourne a couple
of years ago about deep time and the consequences of making big chances at
tipping points.
Damien Broderick
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