Tim Flannery is an Aussie icon.

Awarded the Australian of the Year in 2007, his 1994 book The Future Eaters was a best seller. His other books include The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth which examined the influence of climate change on evolution and popular science natural histories of Europe and North America.

Tim ‘s doctoral thesis was on palaeontology. He’s held several academic appointments and spent 7 years as the director of the South Australian Museum. It was while he was working at the SA Museum in the 1980s and 90s that he first became concerned about climate change, speaking out against global warming scepticism despite the personal attacks against him.

In 2011, Tim was appointed head of the Climate Commission, established by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard. His appointment was lived. Reputably in its first act, the incoming Abbott Government sacked Tim and reconstituted the Climate Commission as The Climate Council.

In this 2019 TED Summit presentation, Tim talks about a subject we don’t hear much about, an entirely possible way fix to catastrophic climate change.

His answer – seaweed farms!

Massive, massive, spectacularly massive seaweed farms located far out in the deep ocean.

Sounds truly weird. OK, let’s go look at the numbers and the science:

•    Tim says solving climate change has two sides – cutting CO² emissions ASAP and drawing down ASAP as much of the CO² that’s already in the atmosphere
•    climate scientists believe we need to drawdown 3 gigatonnes of CO² and to cut emissions by 3% every year to 2100
•    nothing yet is happening on the drawdown side of the equation
•    we have 2 drawdown choices – chemical or biological (biological is the preference)
•    of the biological choices, seaweed is preferred over reafforestation
•    there’s a very wide variety of seaweed species we can use
•    seaweed can grow very quickly (up to a metre a day)
•    the oceans cover about 70% of the Earth’s surface
•    seaweed farms that covered 9% of the world’s oceans (about 4.5 times the size of Australia) would use photosynthesis to drawdown about 1 gigatonne of CO² from the atmosphere every year
•    already the global seaweed industry is worth $6billion a year and is continuing to innovate with approaches such as ‘ocean permaculture’ where fish and shellfish are integrated into the seaweed farm and provide several environmental benefits (and possible human benefits too – if seaweed farms covered 9% of the world’s oceans, the potential harvest could supply 200 kilos of seafood to every person on the planet at a population of 10 billion people).

To realise Tim’s dream, it will take billions of dollars in investment and decades to scale-up, but how could we not be excited about a development like this? You’d have to have the sensibility of a rock not to be impressed by the sheer audacity and scale of this scheme.

This video is so worth watching and there’s so much to learn. As for Tim Flannery, he sure is one Switched ON fella.