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Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)
- raverbashing 8y agoAt least one good news Maybe we should look into farming seaweed (and other algae)
- sdiq 8y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=seaweed+farming+in+zanzibar https://www.google.com/search?q=seaweed+farming+in+zanzibar
- King-Aaron 8y agoThey've been farming seaweed in places like Japan since the 1600's/1700's and is a $2 billion industry. They also farm it all through south-east asia :)
- Gustomaximus 8y agoBeing done in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-16/king-island-kelpers-keeping-it-in-the-family/9446788 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-16/king-island-kelpers-ke... Looking at opening more in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-30/not-just-for-sushi-the-push-to-farm-seaweed-off-queensland-coast/8853678 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-30/not-just-for-sushi-the...
- atourgates 8y agoIt's happening in the US as well, though currently on a smaller scale: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-seaweed-farming-and-its-surprising-benefits/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-seaweed-farming-and-...
- GunlogAlm 8y agoThere are already significant seaweed farms in Japan, and farms exist in China, Korea, Fiji, Zanzibar, and even the UK.
- Shoh3pif 8y agoFrom the article: > All in all, super-powered seaweeds could sequester around 173 million metric tons (190 million tons) of carbon each year, about as much as the annual emissions of the state of New York. It's not that much in comparison to the emissions of the entire industrialized world. Every bit helps of course, but it's not a magical solution to our problems.
- DennisP 8y agoThat's how much is happening naturally, with a low percentage of seaweed sinking to the depths. Large-scale farming operations could do a lot more.
- Shoh3pif 8y agoIntensive farming only happens when the material is used in a profitable way. Growing things only to dump them in the oceans is only profitable with subsidies or carbon taxes. Extensive farming would likely have the natural rate of sequestration.
- Apfel 8y agohttps://www.greenwave.org/ https://www.greenwave.org/ There's some really cool stuff happening in this field. IIRC some farming designs have been open sourced, too. All you really need is a few hundred metres of rope and some seed spools.
- jstsch 8y agoAlso see northseafarm.org
- ariehkovler 8y agoReally interesting. Makes me think of Daisyworld and the Gaia Hypothesis. 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. 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. Anyone who ever played SimEarth in the 90s, it was based on this theory and even had a Daisyworld simulation built in. 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. 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.
- pjc50 8y agoWe know that there are a number of homeostatic (self-regulating) processes that affect the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere; if it wasn't homeostatic it would have drifted off to an extreme long ago. The key question is how well and how rapidly these mechanisms can respond to an increase in CO2 levels.
- bumholio 8y agoThe homeostasis might work in a limited range under which the biological world evolved in the recent past. Exceeding that range could quickly turn to a runaway geological event of rapid climate change, a state transition in a complex and unpredictable system. Take for example the great oxidation event happening 2.5 billion years ago. As oxygen excreting algae began to take over methane producing organisms, oxygen started to build up in the atmosphere - first slowly, as there were lots of stuff to oxidize, like methane and iron. Eventually, these naturals sinks were saturated and oxygen levels reached the critical toxic point for the other species, leading to a runaway die-off where more and more oxygen was released and methane - a strong green house gas - rapidly disappeared from the atmosphere. This shock was so massive it produced the 400 million year Huronian glaciation - a whole planet freeze unlike any since. So I have full faith life on Earth will eventually restore the feedback loops and get the temperatures back in the sweet spot. I have less faith that this will happen soon, or that most species, humans included, can survive such a massive transition event.
- beerlord 8y agoCan we bio-engineer seaweed which doesn't decompose and can't be eaten? 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. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01/07/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...
- hawkice 8y agoIt would probably be dangerous to engineer an organism that doesn't break down. Imagine a living, growing plastic. Except not a Dr. Who villain.
- beerlord 8y agoWell presumably we could still collect, dry and burn what accumulates on the shore, and the rest would fall to the seabed. If the alternative is a hothouse Earth, with large sections of the planet rendered uninhabitable, geoengineering schemes like this are going to be necessary. We can start with iron fertilisation experiments - Australia has a lot of it, and is near oceans.
- TuringTest 8y agoYou risk creating a locust-like scenario, where it's impossible to fully control areas with specimen outbreaks.
- cimmanom 8y agoWouldn’t burning it defeat the carbon sequestration purpose?
- NinjaViking 8y agoThat would be a desperate attempt to reverse a runaway process, if it turns out to be too successful.
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- akuji1993 8y agoStupid 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?
- undreren 8y agoYour question isn't stupid. Right now though, we are storing our CO2 in the atmosphere. This causes problems. To solve those problems, we need to store the CO2 somewhere else. It can be released again, but lets hope that the massive effort required to yank the CO2 out of our atmosphere causes the sunk cost fallacy to kick in until we've completely moved past fossile fuels.
- Scea91 8y agoI do not expect that we will be able to move past fossil fuels in the next 100 years. There is simply no other source of energy with as much density and as convenient as oil. The only think we know that can rival oil is nuclear energy but it has problems of its own.
- akuji1993 8y agoHonestly, there's a lot of stuff I'm skeptical about what will happen in the next 100 years. I don't think that fossil fuels will be a thing in 100 years though. I think we'll have something smarter figured out. Think about how much time has passed since 1918 and what we achieved in that time frame.
- Scea91 8y agoExactly, we haven't achieved that much actually. Most of the technology we use for harvesting energy is not much further from what people could imagine in 19th century. Turbine was invented in the 19th century. I really suggest watching this talk by Smil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guXaWwQpe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guXaWwQpe4 and if you are interested reading some books from him about energy and oil. Really insightful.
- s_dev 8y agoAlso 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. https://phys.org/news/2018-05-seaweed-relieve-gassy-cows-dairy.html https://phys.org/news/2018-05-seaweed-relieve-gassy-cows-dai...
- ianai 8y agoI bet it’s the chlorophyll
- stkni 8y agoThis would be a great win-win! But wouldn't the sequestered CO2 get released back into the environment and potentially the atmosphere?
- dub4u 8y agoMethane is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.
- louthy 8y agoFor a shorter period of time [1] > The lifetime in the air of CO2, the most significant man-made greenhouse gas, is probably the most difficult to determine, because there are several processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. The rest is removed by slower processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years, including chemical weathering and rock formation. This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years. > Methane, by contrast, is mostly removed from the atmosphere by chemical reaction, persisting for about 12 years. Thus although methane is a potent greenhouse gas, its effect is relatively short-lived. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhouse-gases-remain-air https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...
- jarvist 8y ago
- wj 8y agoDoes this mean that, like barbecue, it should be eaten in moderation because of cancer risks?
- machiavelli1024 8y agoLOL! Sure buddy! Remember: carbon = bad for you I for one, follow a strictly carbon-free diet and am as healthy as ever!
- EamonnMR 8y agoUnlikely. The carcinigens you worry about in barbecue are compounds formed in the extreme heat of cooking by that method, not formed inside living organisms.
- caseymarquis 8y agoMost 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.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago>we need to seriously approach an engineered solution We haven't tried the political solution yet. Since limiting carbon emissions is the cheapest and easiest solution to climate change, it would be a good start to have politicans serve the people's interest instead of the fossil fuel ones, don't you think?
- 0xffff2 8y agoWhat are the people's interests here? Selfishly, I happen to like driving my car. Cheap gasoline is in my interest. What needs to be served to tackle climate change politically is the global greater good. We don't have a great track record with global anything in politics, nor do we have a great track record on serving the greater good, so I don't like those odds.
- dwaltrip 8y agoWhat do you care about more, cheap gas or the types of lives your grandchildren or great grandchildren will be living? Regulations solved the ozone issue, leaded gasoline, etc. It has also failed many times. It's tricky, I get it. But it can be possible to create effective regulations. Sometimes situations demand we try -- this looks like one to me.
- tim333 8y agoThey've studied SO2 injection in the atmosphere but I'm not sure it's a good idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection_(climate_engineering)#Efficacy_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... A less dramatic thing to try would be a carbon tax of say $50/ton combined with a similar credit for sequestration efforts like seaweed farming.
- sk_hazratali 8y agoReally interesting. https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2018/08/khana-e-kaba-ki-ziarat-ki-fazilat.html https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2018/08/khana-e-kaba-ki-...
- wallace_f 8y agoBy contrast reddit's front page is trending a Vice article with the opposite sentiment
- andy_ppp 8y agoMake me wonder if we could grow seaweed and turn it into oil...
- bacon_waffle 8y agoNot seaweed exactly, but some algae produces a significant amount of oil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
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- sn41 8y agoDidn't Freeman Dyson talk about this idea? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/308306/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-dan...
- annadane 8y agoI believe in climate change (and Dyson does too, he just doesn't like the alarmism) but Dyson is a very interesting person and clearly should be taken seriously.
- pvaldes 8y agoThere 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. 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. 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. 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.