Certain unicellular green organisms have extremely short life cycles. They go through many generations in a day, provided the conditions are favourable.

We select some of those, pack them in dried dust form and spray them into the atmosphere together with suitable nutrients, also in dry powder form.

Provided conditions are favourable, these will seed clouds and the resulting cloud, which is an aerosol after all, will stay on the air for a few generations of the said organism.

During this time, the said organism multiplies because it is in direct sunshine and there are nutrients available. When it finally reaches the ground as rain it will have photosynthesised skads of the Carbon dioxide which is causing the global warming and thus giving those sleepless nights to those boffins who are bonkers enough to lie awake nights thinking about it.

In the process, the CO2 level goes up, Oxygen is evolved, and the resulting biomass falls into the sea, with a 66% probability.

Or maybe it falls in a sticky mess onto a highway and causes the traffic to glop to a sticky halt, thus again bringing about the above result.
-- neelandan, Jul 19 2006

Feed_20The_20World_20On_20Air [xaviergisz, Jul 20 2006]

Neat idea, but I suspect that the cloud seeding aircraft will release more CO2 than the algae will absorb.
-- Galbinus_Caeli, Jul 19 2006


I find it hard to believe that, if something like this could exist, then it doesn't already - life has been filling every available niche on the planet for three and a half billion years.

There is a lot of argument about it, but the red rains of the past few years in India are thought to be somehting like this.
-- DrCurry, Jul 19 2006


I am with [Curry] on both counts. I bet that there are such organisms. I suspect they live at very low densities - sort of like the deep earth organisms. I suspect there are organisms colonizing just about every conceivable ecosystem. The problem is how to identify them. It is hard to reproduce a cloud in a petri dish.
-- bungston, Jul 20 2006


Exactly, bung, my idea is to identify those organisms existing in the wild, and cultivate them in a higher density.

Compare the crop density in cultivated versus fallow land. The atmosphere has a larger volume and intercepts far more of the sun's radiation. Even a low density of those organisms will make a significant contribution.
-- neelandan, Jul 20 2006



random, halfbakery