First Paragraph
The ocean is the largest reservoir of mobile carbon over decadal to centennial time scales, absorbing approximately 41% of cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions (Sabine and Tanhua, 2010). Various geoengineering solutions seek to exploit this uptake capacity (see Vaughan and Lenton, 2011, for a review), including CO2 injection (Marchetti, 1977), iron fertilization (Martin et al., 1994), and artificial upwelling (Lovelock and Rapley, 2007). The ubiquity of social media—allowing anyone to “self-publish”—and funding from crowd-sources and private foundations have allowed some proposals to gain traction outside of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. A recent example is the proposal by theoretical neurobiologist W.H. Calvin (2013) to construct a massive array of push-pull pump systems to enhance the ocean’s natural biological pump to sequester atmospheric CO2.