As the picture in the links states, there are naturally occurring areas of the ocean with upwelling.

Also, there is likely considerable variability in the water 300m below the surface. In the open ocean, that water probably has few nutrients. However, other areas nearer to coasts or known currents could have much more.

It is good that a field study of the concept is being planned. After that, several peer reviewed papers that meet reputable science journal standards would be needed to validate any findings or conclusions.

There could be negative consequence, however there is little risk in studying the proposal.

Here's a thought. Combining the quick and coherent minds of Lovelock and Gore, we can cure poverty and global warming by having billions of poor people running in treadmills driving pumps out in the ocean.

Gore calls for 'global Marshall plan' Al Gore, the former US vice-president, on Wednesday called for a "Marshall plan" to make job creation and measures to address climate change compatible and urged President George W. Bush to commit to mandatory cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

'This is an emergency,' Mr Gore told the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative. "I think that the key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming � I think what we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/633d030a-6c5d-11dc-a0cf-0000779fd2ac.html

A couple links from Hawaii with more details on the concept. Also, appears that prototypes have already been evaluated.

http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/~liu/Deep%20Ocean/download/DOW%20Application.pdf

http://www.wrrc.hawaii.edu/bulletins/2000_12/aumix.html

It is not nice to mess with mother nature. I wonder how altering deep ocean heat with effect the vast amount of methane hydrates on the ocean beeds. I really don't want to know.

If you want to experiment with a planet, please pick another one and do not bill me for it.

I really wish this nonsense would just stop. This proposed messing with mother nature and with CO2 to "cool the planet." I don't want this planet cooler than it already is. Just STOP with this garbage. It's getting mighty mighty old!

SAVE THE PLANET FROM HOT AIR. MUZZLE A LIBERAL!!!!

After that, several peer reviewed papers that meet reputable science journal standards would be needed to validate any findings or conclusions.

Hi Andrew,

I miss the good old days when people were wary of "mad scientists," rather than trusting the planet to every hair-brained scheme some scientist comes up with. People love to go to the theater and see stories about out of control and dangerous scientists, but somehow the concept gets lost in translation to the real world.

I grew up in a community of scientists and would have to say that the defining characteristic of many is extreme narcissism and a vastly distorted sense of self-importance. In the 1950s many scientists thought they were going to save the world through nuclear technology and chemicals, so they came up with hydrogen bombs and napalm.

If you want to experiment with a planet, please pick another one and do not bill me for it.

"Boondocks" apparently prefers the experiment we are ALREADY running on this planet -- you know, the one where we pump as much CO2 as we can into the atmosphere, just to see what happens.

Who should pay the bill for the current experiment?

Frightening article Brett;
These are the type of really scary and dumb knee jerk reactions that we should worry about.
Without even a solid understanding of the problem we are getting suggestions like this that could have far more negative side effects than the theorized problem.
We could easily end up with a disaster equal to the idiotic baning of DDT caused. That one killed and is still killing millions.
Scaaarrrry Stuff!

Uhhhhhh,

Who will pay the gazillions of $$$ to buy, install, operate & maintain the pumps ???

Uhhhhhh,

Pumps of this magnitude will require several Megawatts each to operate, so where will the gazillions of JigaWatts come from to power the pumps, and who will pay the gazzillions of $$$ for the electricity ?

Uhhhhhh,

Where will we build the hundreds of nuclear power plants to provide the gazillions of JigaWatts, since we won't be using coal or oil. Wind you say ??? Oh, so where will you put the hundreds of millions of wind turbines you'll need since each one is good for only 0.5 MegaWatts. Who will pay for them ???

Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

Let me see if I have this straight.

Producing energy enables industrialization any many other things that we now take for granted. However, our main source of energy produces CO2 as an unintentional byproduct, by which I mean it is not our direct goal or desire to produce CO2, it is simply a byproduct. As a result, we view energy (and therefore CO2) production as meddling with mother nature and therefore BAD.

However, INTENTIONALLY and DIRECTLY meddling with mother nature with uncertain consequences to combat a heretofore unproven "problem" is perfectly acceptable and therefore GOOD.

Simply astounding. It appears their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

"According to the nature.com article, algae also produces certain chemicals that enhance cloud cover, which also has a cooling effect on the planet in certain circumstances."

How about this? We do nothing and watch the earth cycle. The earth will naturally produce cloud cover by the water vapor which is derived from the warmer waters. This vapor would enhance cloud cover, which has a cooling effect on the planet. Let the earth recycle energy to sustain life on it, as it has before we were here. Problem solved.

Another research study purporting solar radiation as the cause of past warming. Sorry, AGWers. The death knell of your theory seems to be getting closer all of the time.

Carbon dioxide did not end the last Ice Age

Media Release, University of California
9-27-07 1400 ET

Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records.

"There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change," said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express.

"You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages."

Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found. The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown - but was not its main cause.

"I don't want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn't affect climate," Stott cautioned. "It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change."

While an increase in atmospheric CO2 and the end of the ice ages occurred at roughly the same time, scientists have debated whether CO2 caused the warming or was released later by an already warming sea.

The best estimate from other studies of when CO2 began to rise is no earlier than 18,000 years ago. Yet this study shows that the deep sea, which reflects oceanic temperature trends, started warming about 19,000 years ago.

"What this means is that a lot of energy went into the ocean long before the rise in atmospheric CO2," Stott said.

But where did this energy come from" Evidence pointed southward.

Water's salinity and temperature are properties that can be used to trace its origin - and the warming deep water appeared to come from the Antarctic Ocean, the scientists wrote.

This water then was transported northward over 1,000 years via well-known deep-sea currents, a conclusion supported by carbon-dating evidence.

In addition, the researchers noted that deep-sea temperature increases coincided with the retreat of Antarctic sea ice, both occurring 19,000 years ago, before the northern hemisphere's ice retreat began.

Finally, Stott and colleagues found a correlation between melting Antarctic sea ice and increased springtime solar radiation over Antarctica, suggesting this might be the energy source.

As the sun pumped in heat, the warming accelerated because of sea-ice albedo feedbacks, in which retreating ice exposes ocean water that reflects less light and absorbs more heat, much like a dark T-shirt on a hot day.

In addition, the authors' model showed how changed ocean conditions may have been responsible for the release of CO2 from the ocean into the atmosphere, also accelerating the warming.

The link between the sun and ice age cycles is not new. The theory of Milankovitch cycles states that periodic changes in Earth's orbit cause increased summertime sun radiation in the northern hemisphere, which controls ice size.

However, this study suggests that the pace-keeper of ice sheet growth and retreat lies in the southern hemisphere's spring rather than the northern hemisphere's summer.

The conclusions also underscore the importance of regional climate dynamics, Stott said. "Here is an example of how a regional climate response translated into a global climate change," he explained.

Stott and colleagues arrived at their results by studying a unique sediment core from the western Pacific composed of fossilized surface-dwelling (planktonic) and bottom-dwelling (benthic) organisms.

These organisms - foraminifera - incorporate different isotopes of oxygen from ocean water into their calcite shells, depending on the temperature. By measuring the change in these isotopes in shells of different ages, it is possible to reconstruct how the deep and surface ocean temperatures changed through time.

If CO2 caused the warming, one would expect surface temperatures to increase before deep-sea temperatures, since the heat slowly would spread from top to bottom. Instead, carbon-dating showed that the water used by the bottom-dwelling organisms began warming about 1,300 years before the water used by surface-dwelling ones, suggesting that the warming spread bottom-up instead.

"The climate dynamic is much more complex than simply saying that CO2 rises and the temperature warms," Stott said. The complexities "have to be understood in order to appreciate how the climate system has changed in the past and how it will change in the future."

More Settled Science becoming unsettled:
� Scientific Consensus on the Man-Made Ozone Hole May Be Coming Apart �
http://icecap.us/index.php
An interesting Excerpt:
� Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,� agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. �Now suddenly it�s like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge. �

Don't Screw with Mother Nature until the science is proven. Consensus means less than nothing.

Let’s see giant pumps and a Czar for Global Warming……LOL, No doubt Al Gore’s multiyear resume of feeding at the public trough will obviously make him the prime Czar candidate. If you can’t get elected President you got to try for a World Job….and Czar to boot.
I got an idea! How about we follow the Constitution instead of a new World Order?
As for the Giant Pumps, there is little doubt that rational thought is on permanent holiday.
If we are really contemplating bizarre plans how about we send spaceships in a geosynchronous orbit filled with Mylar sheathing that, when unfurled operate as a shade?
Acting like a giant Umbrella it would block large areas of sun preventing CO2 and greenhouse gasses from heating the world. It would lower the temperatures to “normal” without screwing around with deep ocean currents or using a Mann fudge factor. When we realize that we are cooling off too much (again another arbitrary figure known only to the Great Czar Gore the First) we just close the umbrella
To defray the costs we could sell space on the AGW Umbrella for advertising. I could just see an electronic billboard, kind a like a space Times Square marquee. We could define this millennia by its animated, digital advertisements seen through out the sky. An added bonus would be less skin cancer because it would block UV out too. (We can cure the ozone whole problem and don’t care if Chinas refuses to stop spewing fluorocarbons into the air.[Remember it is ok to pollute as long as you are a third world nation]) Of course it would destroy any remaining semblance of rationality to a world already gone insane over AGW. So what’s a little more lunacy? Imagine a world where you could just look up in the sky and see the Golden Arches logo or maybe seeing Mattel Toys apologize for their design flaw which apparently was not telling China that lead paint is a no, no in the USA market.
This would be a lot easier and dare I say cheaper than snow machines in the artic, exterminating the world’s moose population, or talk about overpopulation. Seriously, has anybody in the AGW world thought about reworking and implementing Jonathans Swifts- “A Modest Proposal”? That could be a winner!

BT,

If it wasn't for a handful of obsessed scientists, opportunistic politicians, and intellectually challenged journalists - the concept that there is a "problem" would be non-existent. People can not detect a 0.6 degree change over 100 years. The temperature changes more than that every 2 minutes where I live. Glaciers have been melting and sea level rising for the past 20,000 years. AGW has become the global equivalent of mass hypochondria. Nothing is really wrong but many people are panicked due to the work of a few unscrupulous individuals. Every change in the weather is now a sign of global warming.

BTW - Quite an experiment. We have already driven CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere up from 0.0003 to almost 0.0004. This is getting dangerously close to Venus 0.95 concentration. If we increase CO2 by a mere 2375X current levels, the earth will be kind of like Venus. At current rates (assuming an infinite supply of coal) we will catch up to Venus in only about a million years.

BrooklineTom:

When someone can actually prove that increasing C02 levels can possibly raise the temperature as claimed, you may have a point. But since there is evidence that there have been previous periods where the C02 level has been much higher and the temperature was not high, that seems very unlikely.

Plus making a concious concerted effort to alter natural earth systems without KNOWING the total effect could be vastly worse than what we MAY be doing accidentally at this moment.

I am all for ponying up for research, but massive expenditures for partially thought-out solutions to partially defined problems, I am not.

But of course, when it comes down to it, we will not be given a choice.

The idea of a giant shade in geosynchronous orbit is a very attractive one.

wow, this is such a great idea how could anyone not have thought of it before!...to improve upon this 6.6 billion-and-growing, begging-to-be-saved human endeavor, we can scrap all the worlds oil and gas offshore platforms and pipelines and convert them to cold water circulation contraptions, thereby eliminating the root cause of all our problems....we could enhance the contraptions by adding more pipe to the top, creating giant windfarms and solar arrays...we could also install giant mirrors that rotate to reflect unwanted solar heat on top of the contraptions...we can train (proven science) dolphins to gather up all the (save the) whales and point their heads down and wag their tales enhancing the cold water upwelling...we dont have to worry about the shrimp created by our contraptions that the whales eat because they are not a free-thinking lifeform...when a big wave or typhoon wipes out all the contraptions, we can sleep at night knowing we just created artificial reefs and besides the steel industry needs our help to make more pipe...by forming a government office to oversee the oversight office of contraptions, and its subsidiaries, the office of marine wellness, the office of circulation control, the office of solar reflectance, the office of cold water nutrients, the office of contraption construction, the office of contraption maintainence, the office of wind flow, the office of motion of the oceans, the office of environmental enhancement propaganda, and who knows what other offices we can think of; just think of the earth saving jobs we can create...we can fund this truly life saving endeavor with a carbon credit trading tax on any co2 generating industry...lol, i see the prophets of doom are hard at work waving their arms in support of such a silly idea actually believing it could work...AGW is such a joke...

Lunacy, pure lunacy. This phony scam is driving people mad. It is quite sad really.

It is worth noting that the oceans already emit 20X as much CO2 as humans. Seems likely that by exposing more water to the atmosphere, the amount of CO2 coming out of the oceans will increase.

?Brilliant idea, que no?

OMG, I don't believe this proposal? Holy cow! So, what will pumping gazzillions of gallons of hot surface water do to the flora and fauna that thrive in cold deeps? There is not one part of this proposal grounded in any kind of rational, logical, safety for the planet...thought at all in it! Huge pumps! Artificially circulating something with BILLIONS of years of evolution behind it, and we mere humans think it is OK to monkey with a system engineered over this expance of time? HUBRIS! An OUTRAGE....So stupid I want scream!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I'm skeptical of fix-it schemes like this one that involve fixing a known problem with an unknown solution. In this case, in addition to the potential increases in CO2 and harm to sea life, there is a possibility that such upwelling could change or disrupt ocean currents, which potentially could alter the climate in further and unpredictable ways.

Better to stick with the problem we know and address the root causes than to play chance with the unknown.