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Pipes hanging in the ocean might bringglobal warming under control, two of Britain's most distinguished scientists suggest.
By mixing deeper water with surface water, they could help the sea absorb vastly more carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, say James Lovelock - creator of the Gaia hypothesis which sees the earth as a single organism - and Chris Rapley, the director of the Science Museum in London.
In a letter published in the journal Nature, Professor Lovelock and Dr Rapley suggest the ocean could be helped to take up much more carbon by "fertilising" the plankton in its top layer with nutrient-rich waters from deeper down that could be pumped upwards through pipes by the action of the waves.
The idea is to provide a planetary-scale techno-fix for climate change of gigantic proportions, yet remarkable simplicity.
Far-fetched as it may seem to some, Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson, who in February launched a £13 million ($35 million) prize for the best way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, is considering funding a trial of the project.
Although a gigantic piece of geo-engineering - many thousands, if not millions, of pipes would be needed to act on a whole-earth scale - it would, in essence, be uncomplicated and use no energy other than the natural power of the ocean, say the scientists.
But most important of all, it will "help the earth to help itself" by making use of the carbon cycle, the natural process by which carbon is transferred from vegetation on land to the atmosphere and to the ocean, where much of it is sequestered, or locked up.
The idea follows directly from Professor Lovelock's celebrated theory, now widely accepted, that the earth possesses a planetary-scale control system that, for millions of years, has kept the environment fit for life (and which he christened Gaia).
He believes, and Dr Rapley, the former head of the British Antarctic Survey, agrees, that global warming is destabilising the system and making it work against us, with a whole series of positive feedbacks that will boost the warming even further.
Both men feel climate change is proceeding so fast, as shown in the increasingly rapid melting of the ice in the Arctic Ocean, that the conventional approaches the world has been discussing for the past 15 years, such as stopping the burning of fossil fuels, will simply not now be enough.
Only by using the earth's own processes might we have a hope of getting climate change under control.
"We can't cure the planet," Professor Lovelock said.
"We haven't the power, but we just might be able to make it go into reverse phase and cure itself."
- Independent
