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Faecal attraction: Whale poop fights climate change - Yahoo! News
The cetaceans have been previously fingered as climate culprits because they breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2), the commonest greenhouse gas.
Really fucking stupid thing to say. However, there is no referance to who said it. The CO2 from living animals is part of the natural cycle, neither increasing nor decreasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
As the the mechanism of the fecal material decreasing the atmospheric CO2, that is explained further down in the article.
But this is only a part of the picture, according to the paper, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
In a heroic calculation, Australian biologists estimated that the estimated 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean each defecate around 50 tonnes of iron into the sea every year after digesting the fish and squid they hunt.
The iron is a terrific food for phytoplankton -- marine plants that live near the ocean surface and which suck up CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
As a result of faecal fertilisation, the whales remove 400,000 tonnes of carbon each year, twice as much as the 200,000 tonnes of CO2 that they contribute through respiration.
By way of comparison, 200,000 tonnes of CO2 is equal to the emissions of almost 40,000 passenger cars, according to an equation on the website of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Now anybody that has researched this problem at all has read of using iron fertaliztion for removal of atmospheric CO2. As with any geo-engineering project, this idea is frought with unforeseen consequences.
Suckee...... all you made clear is that you continue to be an ignoramous.
