We miscalculated our climate tipping points: This decade is critical

New Ocean Restoration Research And Development Act 2022 is a great step forward

America has invested billions in the study of ocean pastures over the past 50 years. It is time to apply this wisdom to save and restore our oceans immediately, before it is too late!

A recent OP-ED in ‘The Hill’ We miscalculated our climate tipping points: This decade is critical is a good one as it covers some many bases in this dire context of climate change. I am surprised that it did not feature the primary location of the worst ills and best hope regarding climate change. That is of course the blue part of this Blue Planet. The Hill in fact covered my work on this vital topic this spring (05 May) so the editors there are very well aware of the blue crisis. The Climate Solution That Can Also Restore Our Seas.

The US congress just this past week took a giant step forward with the introduction of The Ocean Restoration Research And Development Act 2022. Thanks to Congressman McKinley for his faith and effort. It calls for and provides appropriations to move ocean restoration forward. This is what the targeted applied science and technology that OPR New England and its sister company OPR Alaska aim to help resolve through the 3-year R&D mariculture and carbon capture work we have begun. In these few short years, our venture-financed company will work to prove we can restore the vital ocean pastures that are so vital to New England’s Atlantic Salmon, Alaska’s Pacific Salmon, and all other marine life.

The collapse of ocean primary productivity is clearly exceeding 50% and that lost photosynthetic productivity is the primary cause of ocean fisheries declines. No one declares that pastures on land collapse resulting from decades of drought and have lost their wildlife and livestock due to over-harvest of the animals, but somehow our ocean pastures that are surely in the decades-long drought of mineral dust and iron and showing more than a 50% collapse from lush pastures into clear blue deserts have their wildlife/fish declared as being endangered only by bad overfishing fishermen.

Ocean Pasture Restoration Brings Back The Fish

The Alaska State government chart of salmon catch show just how well our simple nature-based dusting solution to restore the ocean works. Tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 were repurposed into salmon!

45 Years of Alaska Salmon Catch Data – OPR was performed in 2012, the very next year the fish came back producing the largest catch in all of history!  Click to read more.

So does Mother Nature, as the eruption of the Alaska volcano Kasatochi in 2008 clearly proved when it dusted ocean salmon pastures in the Gulf of Alaska.

It’s not a new idea, Mother Nature has been dusting her ocean pastures forever…

The volcano Kasatochi is located in Alaska’s Aleutian islands. It erupted in 2008 sending a dusting of life and restoring mineral ash far to the South East into the Gulf of Alaska. The ocean turned from being a 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.  Read the report on this second miracle of the fishes.

The oceans turning into deserts from lack of dust in the wind isn’t the only crisis, another dramatic and imminent ocean threat is ocean acidification.

The GoesFoundation in Scotland has this year published a report showing a cataclysmic trend-line of ocean pH, anyone can extend that single-point data trend line without the need for a contentious multivariate climate model. The pH trend line reaches the end of days for most marine life as we like it by 2045, but alas this immediate ocean crisis escapes mention by the climate change community, as the new OP-ED in The Hill reveals.

The utter and total failure of the Bering Sea crab fishery is easily understood when one notes that the pH of the crab nursery pastures is the most acidic ocean water anywhere, at pH7.7. The larval crabs simply have no hope of being able to produce their first thinner-than-paper shells. This confirms the deadly threshold on the chart!

Or worse than ignoring the ocean’s endangerment, the climate change world still proposes that emission reduction, that is reducing tomorrow’s CO2 emissions can solve all of the deadly dilemmas of yesterday’s CO2, including its causing today’s cataclysmic ocean acidification. Or even worse yet, there is the distraction proposed by the research community that the answer to ocean acidification might be to add a buffering base material like ground-up limestone. Alas the fact that such buffering limestone would be needed in annual measures of billions of tonnes, an impossible mining proposition, though a popular research grant proposition.

The ONLY possible means of delivering an antidote to the trillions of tonnes of Yesterday’s deadly CO2 already emitted and acidifying our Blue Planet is to restore the ocean plankton pastures.

Solar-powered photosynthesis is more than capable of restoring the oceans to historic health and abundance that John Martin in 1990 proposed would take merely half a shipload of iron to cool the planet.

My hero, the late great John Martin, (Read his NASA memorial web page – On The Shoulders Of Giants)  had not anticipated that humanity in our collective insanity would engage in 30 years of academic polemics and allow the acidifying force of our CO2 push us to the brink we see the oceans will be at by 2045. Only by Ocean Restoration is there hope that Yesterday’s CO2 might be repurposed via the immense power of photosynthesis from its causing certain death in the 72% blue part of this Blue Planet into becoming restored Ocean Life!

The good news for this Blue Planet is that the work that my company OPR New England and our sister company OPR Alaska is working to deploy immediately! Additional sister companies in five of this Blue Planets seven seas will be deploying overseas. Our 3-year commercial scale pilot projects will, through state-of-the-art scientific data it collects, that Ocean Pasture Restoration is Environmentally SAFE, Ecologically SUSTAINABLE, and Economically SUCCESSFUL. In three short years, we will have scientific data that will speak for itself, and indeed ‘speak for the fish’ and all of ocean life, that Ocean Restoration, which has been academically studied for 50 years is already a practical technology, deliverable in time,  to save our oceans.

National Academy of Science, Medicine, and Engineering

The National Academy of Science this February published a report on ocean carbon and for that we applaud them. However, in the report where they acknowledge the decades of work done on John Martin’s Iron Solution to restore ocean photosynthesis and primary productivity to historic levels of health and abundance, the Academy practices the usual polemic device of preaching FUD – fear uncertainty and dread.

Nearly 50 years ago ocean restoration was so important that the US and the world science community put the first ocean pasture satellite in orbit.

Avoiding mention of the 50 years and billions of dollars invested in ocean restoration research, the academicians lament that more research ought to be done for at least another 10 years before even considering deploying work to replenish and restore the ocean pastures.

This startling polemic of academic vested interest even proffers the unprecedented recommendation that the private sector science and technology community ought to be banned from participating in this vital ocean restoration work.

Thank God, the US Congress in its new Ocean Restoration Act makes it clear that the brilliance of the private sector is required in this ‘All Hands On Deck’ ocean emergency.

Now, Dear Mr. President, we need to talk about how your new IRA Act offers inspiring potential to stimulate R&D into Carbon Capture research and DEVELOPMENT, the ocean pastures are where the USA has already invested billions in science and technology that have proven this can save us, just as John Martin advised all those decades ago. It doesn’t require more decades of research, we just don’t have that sort of time left! In just a few years, Ocean Restoration will, as the best minds on the planet have clearly stated, almost immediately begin capturing billions of tonnes of deadly CO2 every year and repurposing it safely into new ocean life.

Come on Mr. President the choice is a simple one – do you choose LIFE or DEATH?

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