New International Monetary Fund report says for the good of humanity we must ‘bring back the whales’.

Whale carbon, the value from a single whale is worth more $2 million in carbon sequestration.

Globally today’s surviving whale herd, a tiny fraction of what it once was, is worth at least $1 trillion.

When it comes to sustaining the planet, each whale is worth more than an entire forest of trees. Our work ‘brings back the whales and the fish to historic levels of health and abundance.’

In a new report by the International Monetary Fund, it seems whales are incredibly big/valuable allies on this blue planet. Or at least they used to be. Their role as shepherds of their (and our) ocean pastures has, thanks to the IMF, been given a monetary value in terms of the whale carbon, aka ‘blue carbon.’ Today on this mostly blue planet only a tiny fraction of the number of whales that once thrived remain. The demise of whales is a complex story. It’s not just about the usual suspects hunting and killing the whales it is about where whales live and work as a vital and valuable part of Nature.

The point of view of the IMF is a great place to start, albeit in this blog post I strive to explain and expand on some of their points of view.

IMF FINANCE AND DEVELOPMENT MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019. – Click to read more

The International Monetary Fund in its highly respected and influential Finance and Development publication is no exception in its fealty to the ‘everything is climate change’ mantra. We can forgive them for this sin in their new paper on the incredible importance of being a whale. At least, as they write so powerfully, whales are incredibly earnest at taking care of this blue planet’s ocean pastures where they live. The IMF explains in terms of a bankers financial format, whale carbon or blue carbon, whales are, or ought to be, a most vital part of the world’s climate change solutions.

Among climate change solutions any proposed solution, such as capturing carbon directly from the air and burying it deep, are complex, untested, and expensive ideas, let alone technologies ready to deploy. But the IMF posits, ‘What if there were a low-tech solution to this problem that not only is effective and economical but also has a successful funding model? Could whales be one of those low-cost solutions?

The IMF boffins offer just such a whale of an example that they say comes from a surprisingly simple and essentially “no-tech” strategy to capture more carbon from the atmosphere.  Increase global whale populations and the ‘blue carbon’ they manage will increasingly be removed from our atmosphere. They point out that Marine biologists have long reported that whales—especially the great whales play a significant role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere.

They then make note, perhaps even a plea,  regarding how international organizations have politically orchestrated, implemented, and enshrined programs such as Reducing Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD) that fund the preservation of carbon-capturing ecosystems by protecting living forests on Earth/Land. IMF openly wonders would the same work for the 72% of this blue planet that is oceans?

IMF DEMANDS THE WORLD MUST ‘BRING BACK THE WHALES’

The IMF advocates that adapting earthly initiatives, aka forest ecosystem initiatives, to support international efforts to restore whale habitat, ocean pastures and whale populations will lead to a breakthrough in the fight against climate change. According to the IMF, the carbon capture potential of whales is truly startling.

In this post from 2013, I described the whales as being like earthworms, churning and enriching the pasture on which they feed. Click to read more

Whales tend and feed upon ocean plankton pastures to keep the pastures healthy and productive. This results in a vastly healthier ocean pasture ecosystem, not just for whales but for all of ocean life. During a whales long life, they are in effect gentle giant worms that constantly toil to enrich their pastures of plankton.

Like the worms that whales are most like, what they eat is only partially digested. This plankton tonnage becomes a rich compost inside the whales gut that when pooped, nourishes both the surface ocean pastures and in substantial part sinks into the ocean abyss where it nourishes deep ocean life. Much of a whale’s daily plankton diet becomes safely sequestered carbon that remains in the deep ocean for centuries to millennia. More than long enough to outlive the fossil fuel/fool age.

Life is not the only time whales help the carbon equation. When whales die, they rapidly sink to the very bottom of the ocean. In death each great whale safely sequesters 33 tons of CO2 on average, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries and more. A tree, by comparison, absorbs only up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year, for most trees on Earth a lifetime is less than a century and their total carbon value is just two or three tonnes.

Whales herds are today no more than 10%-25% of their historic healthy numbers.

The IMF makes it clear that by simply protecting the last of the whales this action could add significantly to valuable carbon capture. They report that the current population of the largest great whales being only a small fraction of what it once was, represents a lost opportunity. The report then begins to go off the rails as it ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence that whales are, first and foremost starving to death, on once verdant ocean pastures that are becoming clear blue lifeless deserts. Just put the Google the search terms, “emaciated starving whale” into Google News Search, to begin the research for yourself.

This incredibly important IMF report states “Sadly, after decades of industrialized whaling, biologists estimate that overall whale populations are now to less than one fourth what they once were.”

While true in part, the inference is clear, it is those bad whalers (the usual suspects) who have caused this grief to come to the world of whales, not the perilous effects of our deadly CO2 that is turning their ocean pastures into clear blue lifeless deserts.  Thus, the benefits from whales’ ecosystem services to us and to our survival as projected in this IMF report are much less than they could be.

Of Seas and Trees

Click to read more about the world of plankton

Wherever whales, the largest living things on earth, are found, so are infinitely vaster populations of some of the smallest, phytoplankton. These tiny plants and animals that make up the ocean pastures contribute 90 percent of all oxygen to our atmosphere. They do so by capturing and managing not less than 37 billion metric tons of CO2, an estimated 40 percent of all CO2 produced. Many learned scientists suggest this number is much higher, but the IMF being conservative bankers use the least figures. Incredibly the IMF fails to mention the reports that oceans have lost about half of their productivity, so really this value of healthy oceans relative to climate-carbon could be much greater.

To put things in a common context, the IMF researchers state that this annual ocean pasture productivity is equivalent to the amount of CO2 captured by 1.70 trillion trees. The Amazon Rainforest, by comparison, captures just 2 billion tonnes of carbon each year, 1/20th of the ocean pastures. The Amazon also exhales 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon each year, so its net carbon value is a small fraction of the total under living management. It is clear the ocean is where this blue planet manages its carbon, and whales, fish, sea birds, plankton, all have vital roles to play.

The Whale Pump

Whale Biological Pump – click to enlarge

In recent years, scientists have discovered that whales have a multiplier effect of increasing phytoplankton production wherever they go. How? It turns out that whales’ poop contain exactly the substances—notably iron and nitrogen—phytoplankton need to grow. Whales bring minerals up to the ocean surface through their vertical movement, called the “whale pump,” and through their migration across oceans, called the “whale conveyor belt.” Preliminary modeling and estimates indicate that this healthy whale fertilizing activity adds greatly to phytoplankton growth.

The most vital nutrients that sustain ocean pastures arrive most importantly via vital dust storms. Classic plant fertilizers, especially nitrogen and phosphorus are very scarce at distances out to sea at distances beyond the continental shelves. This is a major limit the amount of phytoplankton that can bloom, such regions are called HNLC zones, high nutrient low chlorophyll zones.

In the majority of the world’s distant oceans far from land and dust, especially the Southern Ocean, the limiting mineral tends to be iron. Iron for the distant ocean pastures comes almost exclusively in the form of dust in the wind. If more of these missing minerals became available in parts of the ocean where they are scarce, more phytoplankton could grow, potentially absorbing much more carbon than otherwise possible.

Bring Back The Whales

Following my ocean pasture restoration work, perfectly correlated in time with Orca maternity, an Orca whale baby boom miracle began. We can bring back the whales immediately. – Click to read more

This is where the whales become economic players according to the IMF. If whales were returned to their pre-whaling number of 4 to 5 million— triple the number of 1.3 million today—the whales would add significantly to the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans and to the carbon they capture each year.

The IMF report shows that even a few percent increase in phytoplankton productivity that would come from merely tripling whale numbers would capture billions of tons of additional CO2 each year. This would be the instantaneous equivalent to the sudden appearance of upwards of 2-5 billion mature trees. Given that myriad other forms of ocean life that live alongside the whales are many times the potency of the gentle giants, restoration of ocean pasture life can readily offer an immediate solution to the ‘whales share’ of required climate change action.

Whales mothers and herds are very responsive to proper maternal nutrition. As we rebuild their ocean pastures the well-nourished whales will have many more babies. Imagine the impact over the average lifespan of a whale, more than 60 years of procreation will usher in a fabulously potent natural remedy for climate change.

Somehow the IMF misses the fact that despite the drastic reduction in commercial whaling, whales still face increasing declines. Scores of news reports in the past many years show sad photographs of emaciated whales on beaches around the world. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of whales that die sink promptly into the deep abyss these emaciated beached whales provide certain proof of widespread ocean pasture collapse.

Efforts to restore whale populations are not going to gain much even with the improbable further reduction of hunting of whales which is today only carried out by three machismo whaling nations, Japan, Iceland, and Norway. Those nations continue whaling, not for the economic value of the whales, but more because the testosterone dominated whaler egos cannot tolerate outsiders telling them they ought not to be whalers, arrrgggh!

Pasture collapse and the great dying

Countless forms of ocean life are shown to be dying of starvation on dying ocean pastures. – Click to read more if you dare

In the presence of collapsed ocean pastures that is evidenced by not just whales dying, but all of ocean life dying in cataclysmic numbers, it is sheer folly to blame the usual suspects, the exploiters of Nature for profit.  If we are to employ a new, as the IMF names it, “earth-tech” approach to carbon sequestration we need to understand the mechanism by which it works.

Keep in mind as the IMF makes clear that this ‘earth-tech’ avoids the risk of unanticipated harm or consequences from suggested untested high-tech climate geoengineering fixes. Nature has had millions of years to perfect her whale-based ocean pasture natural carbon sink technology. All we need to do is help Nature and the whales will live again.

IMF’s call to restore the whales to historic health and abundance is a great idea. Read much more in their report and clarion call by following this link. Read on here about how we can just get on with it and instead of talking the talk we can walk the walk.

Real-World Proven Ability To Bring Back The Whales And The Fish And All Of Ocean Life

This is how ocean pasture restoration works. The image below comes from my mind’s eye as when the 2008 volcano Kasatochi erupted I was not present out on what would become in 2012 my Gulf of Alaska salmon pasture. But this is how I imagined it looked and how my friend artist Leanne Hodges who was commissioned to put the scene on canvas captured what surely occurred.

The volcano Kasatochi is located in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. It erupted in 2008 sending a dusting of life-restoring mineral ash far to the southeast into the Gulf of Alaska. The ocean turned from being dying clear blue desert into a lush garden of Eden. Two years later Sockeye salmon from the Fraser River near Vancouver, Canada were expected to return in such small numbers as they had repeatedly been doing in-spite of decades and hundreds of millions spent improving the condition of their native spawning rivers and streams.

While a Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice was holding court in a special Royal Inquiry commanding all salmon and environmental experts give sworn testimony as to why and what might be done to save the salmon the fish instead of returning in the smallest number in all of history returned in numbers equal to the largest in all of history. Those 40 Million Salmon who arrived to give their testimony to the Chief Justice were welcomed, but their message was ignored by the court. In spite of nearly $40 million being spent in court costs no solution was offered,  just expensive talk.

That’s me and my friends at work, bag by loving bag, dust for the ocean will restore the plankton blooms, silver salmon, ocean life, will thrive and even boom! CLICK to watch the video of how it all just works!

Starting in 2008 working with a tiny village of native Haida people who once were known as the People of the Salmon, through a public-private-partnership with the federal and provincial governments, we proved in 2012 we could actually restore the ocean pastures and bring back the fish and the whales.  This came about because the people of the village of Old Massett were in grief. They felt they could no longer use their ‘people of the fish’ name as their salmon were now all but gone.

The village elders came and asked me to help and together we became the volcano. It meant working together with the village for years to develop the project and obtain its formal government approval. But finally, we delivered our first single fishing boatload of vital mineral dust, just as Mother Nature does. We dusted that native people’s ocean fish pasture with our bags of life restoring and sustaining vital mineral dust in the summer of 2012.

IT JUST WORKED!

We proved we don’t need to wait for the volcanoes.

Indeed we must not wait for the volcanoes as the collapse of ocean pastures around the world has proceeded to a catastrophic state. I have proven we can BE THE VOLCANO and working as Mother Nature has taught us, using her same natural minerals, we can take the dust back to her oceans to restore, replenish, and sustain her ocean pastures. Because we know how to do this in the safe and sustainable manner we now have at hand we simply must. It is our solemn duty as living participants here on Mother Natures blue planet.

My voyages of recovery for the world’s ocean pastures are signing up crew members now, join us!