Really interesting. Makes me think of Daisyworld and the Gaia Hypothesis.<p>Daisyworld is a model Earth covered in black and white daisies, that either absorb or reflect light. In the model, black daisies need less light because they absorb more, increasing the Earth's heat absorption. White daisies absorb less so need more light, but also reflect more light back, increasing the surface albedo of the planet and lowering its ambient temperature.<p>Because of this, there's a feedback loop were even if the sun gets a little hotter or colder, the successful daisy would spread and either warm or cool the Earth in response, effectively acting as a stabilizer. Gaia theory suggests that the world is full of these stabilizing systems.<p>Anyone who ever played SimEarth in the 90s, it was based on this theory and even had a Daisyworld simulation built in.<p>In this case, the paper is suggesting that seaweed grows much faster in response to raised CO2, and then sequesters some of that carbon underwater.<p>One question I have is how sequestered the undersea carbon really is and whether it will have other, unknown effects on the deep see ecosystem.
Also relevant: Feeding dairy cows seaweed mitigates the amount of methane they pass. Irish famers are beginning to do this because seaweed is easy to come by in Ireland.<p><a href="https://phys.org/news/2018-05-seaweed-relieve-gassy-cows-dairy.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2018-05-seaweed-relieve-gassy-cows-dai...</a>
Most of what I've read lately seems to indicate climate change can't be mitigated through societal restraint at this point. I think we need to seriously approach an engineered solution akin to terraforming. I'd love to know what efforts are being made in this direction.
Can we bio-engineer seaweed which doesn't decompose and can't be eaten?<p>Its not a joke - these were the circumstances of early Earth, before microbes evolved to digest lignin and cellulose. Trees would fall and not decompose, eventually being compressed into coal.<p><a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01/07/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...</a>
Stupid question incoming. Does it really help us to trap even more CO2 under the surface? If something exposes that CO2 again, it will be back up in the atmosphere right? So it feels like this would be a "solution" like storing used uranium underground in lead containers - eventually it will become a problem. Or am I completely wrong here?
There is a lot of the word "seaweed" repeated in the article, but they are talking about brown macroalgae. A group comprising a few families inside the huge diversity of extant algae.<p>Pointing this can seem pedantic, but the detail is important. Brown macroalgae evolved to live in cold waters. In the limit of their distribution you raise the minimum water temperature two degrees and the plant is unable to reproduce anymore. As they have short lives, at 25 celsius degrees they went locally extinct very fast. Is their kryptonite.<p>Moreover, they are adapted to live in a permanent state of guerrilla quiting warm areas on years with "The Niño" event, and massively recolonizing the area in the next year. This is the reason for their famous superfast growth.<p>In extensive areas of the south of Europe, entire submarine forests of the "european Kelp" Laminaria and Saccorhiza (comprising a huge biomass) went in an accelerate decay and are totally gone in the last few decades. They can't return because the local average temperature raised a few degrees in the coastal areas. We need to keep this in mind if we count in this creatures to store our excess of carbon.
Didn't Freeman Dyson talk about this idea?<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/308306/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-dan...</a>