Meet your new ocean.

Remember that list of "10 mad ways to save the planet"? They're trying #10. From e360:

A team of scientists will soon dump 20 tons of iron sulphate into the stormy waters of the Southern Ocean to test whether the fertilization helps pull large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and sequesters it under the sea. The expedition aboard the German vessel Polarstern has drawn protests from environmental groups, which claim that the controversial geoengineering project — aimed at slowing global warming — was banned last year by the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity. But scientists say that their experiment, which will spread the iron sulfate across a 300-square-kilometer (116-square-mile) area not far from South Georgia Island, will help provide data needed to judge the effect of such iron fertilization experiments. Meanwhile, researchers have reported that the warming waters of the Sea of Japan are now absorbing only about half as much CO2 from the atmosphere as was absorbed in the 1990s.

The world's coral reefs are dying, suggesting the world could be "on the brink of a mass extinction event." That's not good. Via Daily Kos.

EcoTuesday!

* Kim Stanley Robinson, hero of the environment.

* People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.

* We're double-saved! 'New Facility Uses Algae to Turn Coal Pollution Into Fuel.'

* Except we've already destroyed the oceans and the rainforests.

A global map of human impacts to marine ecosystems, via Science, via MeFi. The impacts page is even more stark than the main one; check out, for instance, the maps for ocean acidification (right), ocean-based pollution, and climate change.

NBC News devoted a few (two) minutes to this study recently. "If we change our ways," the report says, "the oceans can recover."

Glad that's taken care of.

This continued Pollyannaism towards environmental issues drives me nuts. If we change our ways—but we won't, not least of all because of the poisonous indifference of big media outlets like NBC News itself—the oceans can recover—can with a heaping spoonful of might and eventually in time, and recover always carefully underwritten with to some degree. Still, at least two minutes is time spent, some token acknowledgment of the problem; it's better than CNN's incredibly sorry record in the 2008 presidential primary debates, where in five coal-industry-sponsored debates not a single question was asked about environmental issues.

In fairness, CNN did once allow Dennis Kucinich to speak to a snowman for a minute and a half, so I guess we're even.