The idea behind ocean seeding seems simple and straightforward: fertilize the oceans with nitrogen or iron to cause massive blooms of phytoplankton and other microbes in the ocean surface, which suck up carbon dioxide as they multiply. Then, let them die and sink, removing that CO2 from the atmosphere and fighting global warming in the process. Sounds like a peach of an idea, right?

Maybe not. Delegations from 200 countries have enacted an indefinite moratorium on seeding at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. And they've done so for good reason: marine biologists and microbiologists have cautioned that ocean seeding could acidify the oceans, and could disrupt the poorly-understood and crucially important ocean surface ecosystem.

We've seen the unintentional fallout from the unintentional fertilization of the oceans in the form of the "dead zone" at the mouth of the Mississippi River, formed as microorganisms multiplied wildly and consumed all oxygen in a region of the ocean as big as New Jersey. Seeding might not cause effects that dire, but it still could do more harm than good.

We never met a sensible scheme to combat climate change that we didn't like. This one fails to qualify. Trading one kind of environmental problem for another doesn't sound like much of a bargain.