Engineer or Good Shepherd

Today, 18 Jan. 2015, my blog here started seeing a good number of people visiting who had arrived from the blog of Dr. Roy Spencer, a noted climate scientist who writes on global warming – he’s a bit of a contrarian for many. His blog post today sub-title was Why I Should Have Been an Engineer Rather than a Climate Scientist.

I’ve written to Dr. Spencer suggesting that it’s not too late for him to add being an engineer, or as I prefer to call it being a good shepherd, to his career path. I think it is important for him to consider doing so. I could sure use his help and brain power. The world seems utterly overwhelmed and engaged in argument and debate about global warming, climate change, and CO2. I believe a vast majority of people who pay attention to or engage in this argument are tired of it all.

What the world needs is immediate solutions not endless arguments

The problem regarding global warming and CO2 always comes around to the topic of money. At present spending levels of hundreds of billions of dollars per year there is a lot to argue about and fought over. But what if the problem of the dangerous and deadly effects of CO2 were a fraction of 1% of those hundreds of billions of dollars, even better what if at that cost of a fraction of 1% the death delivering CO2 we pour into the world from burning fossil fuels could be turned into life itself? That life producing alternative is at hand today, we just need to get on with it. Engineer solutions as Dr. Spencer might say.

Here’s what I wrote to Dr. Spencer but given that YOU are reading this I make the same offer to you.

Dear Roy,

I like your posting on your blog why you might better have become an engineer instead of a climate scientist. It’s not too late, you can be both. I invite you to lend a hand in my work and in turn I’ll happily lend a hand showing you how easy it is to become an ocean pasture engineer, on land we have more endearing words and we call those pasture engineers ‘good shepherds’.

My work revolves around the simple fact that is linked to rising CO2 in the atmosphere and that one effect of that extra CO2 is “More grass growing means less dust blowing.” Just as pastures on land on which grass grows in mineral soil must have rain to thrive and be abundant, ocean pastures where the plankton/grass grows in water must have dust to thrive and be abundant.  (Here’s a link to an article about this Yin and Yang of pasture life on land and at sea.)

There can be no dispute that there is global greening taking place. All that extra grass we call ‘good ground cover.’ That covered ground is giving up less and less dust to the wind and that has created a cataclysmic drought of dust for ocean pastures. Those ocean pastures have lost and are losing carrying capacity at alarming rates.

But the story needn’t take a turn into the climate change/global warming debating world. We can take the story straight to good news for the planet. In 2012 after decades of work I took just 100 tons of iron mineral dust out to an ocean pasture in the NE Pacific. I spread that dust over a patch 10,000km x 10,000km over the course of about 10 days. The dust swirled and mixed in the ocean and quickly turned 30,000+km2 of blue ocean into a lush green ocean pasture. Ocean life from 1000 miles around arrived and thrived in that verdant ocean pasture. The following year (2013) the fishermen of Alaska were expecting to catch 52 million pink salmon, instead they caught 226 million ocean pasture fed Pink Salmon the largest catch in all of history. There is much more to my story on my blog at www.russgeorge.net

But this note to you is not to tell the whole story but to invite you into a conversation on how we might together turn the endless arguments about global warming and climate change into a wonderful good news story. A story about restoring and replenishing ocean pastures by turning photosynthesis and our billions of tons of anthropogenic CO2 away from a bad news story into a story of bringing back, engineering, shepherding that CO2 into life itself.

Your work and my work are both regarded as controversial and some might think we are on opposite sides of a debate. But we are both good scientists and I have discovered that becoming an ‘engineer’ as you put it or a ‘good shepherd’ as I prefer to call it is remarkably simple.

The problem that you might help me ‘engineer’ a solution to is how to get the good news I have out to the world. Both you and I surely agree that the factions that are the worst in the science of CO2 and change are the dark green carpet baggers who are intent on imposing a tax of hundreds of billions onto the people of the world to feed their fomented crisis. Those carpet baggers are slicing off as much of the money allocated to CO2 and its issues as they possibly can. I count them as truly evil for doing so. George Bush was right to recognize and call out ‘evil doers’ for what they are. My ocean pasture restoration work has shown that the cost of replenishing dust to the ocean pastures and saving them from the deadly drought of dust we have forced upon those pastures is impossibly cheap, literally dirt cheap. That incredibly low cost is terrible news for many.

While the carpet bagging greens want CO2 mitigation to cost $100 or more per ton my work has shown that the cost of converting CO2 from its ocean killing forms into ocean life itself is a fraction of a cent per ton. This has made me the worst enemy of the left winger dark greens, misanthropes, and climate change carpet baggers of many ilks. In a world with a ‘dirt cheap’ solution to CO2 there is simply no room for those who want to live a life of luxury and pocket vast wealth in selling doom, gloom, and impossible solutions to our emissions of fossil CO2.

I’d love to call you or SKYPE you and perhaps we can do some brainstorming of ideas.

Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981.  Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal click to read more

Russ George, Ecologist Ocean Pasture Good Shepherd click to read more

We’ve both earned our gray hair, perhaps together we are greater than the simple sum of that experience.

We can enjoy working on behalf of the still waters and green pastures. I guarantee it will restore your soul.

Let me know.

Best fishes

Russ George

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We Bring Back The Fish – www.russgeorge.net