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Comment by tines | Hacker News Reader

Time for some GMO corals baby

Not the worst idea in the world. BUT, we're going to need to think carefully about taking million year processes and trying to speed them up to reverse climate change.

As much as we should be cautious about complicating the problem further, we have roughly 20 years before the cumulative greenhouse effects really take effect. At what point do we stop worrying about what might happen in the far future and focus on what we know will happen within our lifetimes? I get that knock-on effects might cause more problems further down the line, but the impending end of the world seems like a more pressing concern.

This, except for geoengineering. Developing the infrastructure to apply it at planetary scale will take years, and then actually applying it will take trillions of dollars. If by some miracle it turns out to not be necessary, we have plenty of time to cancel it, but now (really, 10 years ago) is the time to start spending 100s of billions of dollars preparing (and 100s of billions reducing emissions, of course).

FWIW, my preferred approach is ocean-powered olivine weathering, as in Project Vesta. But we'll need multiple approaches.

"but the impending end of the world seems like a more pressing concern". While climate change may lead to a mass extinction event that will likely wipe out a lot of species, including our own, it will not likely lead to the end of the world. Isn't it the short term thinking you are advocating here that lead us into this situation to begin with?

Planet Earth will continue to exist and the natural world may eventually recover, but a manmade extinction event and the possible extinction of human life is a good enough definition of "the end of the world" for me, though perhaps I should have said "the end of the human world". I agree that it's not worth fixing climate change at the expense of the future, but the situation is bad enough that fixing it is worth some level of risk - we had the time for a methodical, considered approach to climate change when we found out about it decades ago, and we didn't do anything.

I also think the decision to accept some long-term risks to alleviate the (frankly terrifying) short/medium-term dangers we face is very different to the decision to exploit natural resources in service of the industrial revolution.

That would create a monospecific ecosystem, but the idea deserves being examinated further.

In any case hermatypic corals are often two species in one. Modifying one of them could not be enough

Not necessarily GMO, but there is some research into seeding corals with more resilient Zooxanthellae - the algae that is symbiotic with the coral itself. Often it's the Zooxanthellae that dies in the higher temperatures and that causes the coral to die because it derives nutrients from the algae.

People like to talk about technology saving us, but there is only one technology that can stop climate change now. I can't remember what it's called though. It's kind of a big wooden frame with a big metal thing that slides vertically. Used to be popular in France at one time.

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