What can the mammoth do for the climate?
George Church has an answer that is as clear as it is surprising: a lot.
A lot.
Church is a molecular biologist and genome scientist at Harvard Medical Lab in the United States.
A few years ago he informed the public about his plans, which sound so absurd that he would be considered crazy if he were not a Harvard scientist: Church wants to bring the extinct woolly mammoth back to life and thus climate change contain.
It should work like this: The genetic makeup of the Asian elephants is changed so that they resemble their former ancestors.
The mixed form of elephant and mammoth should then be able to withstand enormous cold and survive in the Siberian tundra.
There it should change the flora with its feeding behavior in such a way that more sunlight is reflected again, which would have a positive effect on the climate.
It is also supposed to protect the gradually thawing permafrost soils, in which vast amounts of carbon are stored.
"More joy in inventing"
To do this, the animals only have to trample the snow cover, which then cools the ground more effectively. Their weight will also create small cracks in the ice, which can then be cooled by the wind in previously excluded places. A private initiative is now funding the project with fifteen million US dollars, as recently became known. Church hopes that in a few years the first embryos of surrogate elephant mothers can be carried to term. But is it really that simple?
Scientists who are not involved in the project are very skeptical about feasibility, timely implementation and the desired effect. Two parties in particular would benefit from success in this country: the CDU and above all the FDP with Christian Lindner in the forefront. It is well known that both parties rely on innovations in the fight against climate change. The party leader of the Liberals never tires of pointing out that a state-controlled climate policy is more expensive than the model of his party, which relies entirely on “ingenuity”.
"For more joy in inventing than in prohibiting" is written on the election posters of the FDP. In the context of such debates, it is mostly about “market economy approaches” and futuristic technologies such as CO2 filters that are supposed to suck the molecule out of the atmosphere. Less about extinct animals. But Lindner won't care if the shaggy trunk animals with the big tusks actually do their part to curb global warming at some point. It would be the big hour of the FDP, which could rightly say: Look here. We have always told you how to solve this mammoth task.