Two of Britain's best known scientists proposed Wednesday to curb global warming by sowing the world's oceans with thousands, perhaps millions, of giant vertical pipes 100m to 200m deep.
"We need a fundamental cure for the pathology of global heating," James Lovelock and Chris Rapley wrote in a letter to the British journal Nature. "Emergency treatment could come from stimulating the Earth's capacity to cure itself."
As the planet's atmosphere heats up, they explained, certain cyclical processes that normally regulate climate are beginning to amplify the process of warming rather than holding it in check.
When Arctic sea ice recedes further each year, for example, sunlight falls on heat-absorbing blue water rather than white snow and ice which reflects heat back into space, accelerating the warming process.
Lovelock and Rapley suggest that climate change may have already pushed Earth past the "tipping point" beyond which this, and other disrupted cycles, become part of a self-reinforcing, "positive feedback" loop.
They look to the world's oceans, which cover more than 70 percent of the planet's surface, for a solution.
Free-floating or tethered pipes with one-way flaps some 10m in diameter, they conjecture, would increase the mixing of nutrient-rich waters below the surface with the warmer waters at the surface.
"This upper layer is almost free of algae and of nutrients and is an ocean desert," Lovelock explained in an e-mail.
"We wondered if we could restore algal growth with its capacity to draw down carbon dioxide," he wrote.
As with ice in the Arctic, white clouds reflect back much of the sun's heat. But clouds do not form spontaneously from water vapor, they require chemical elements that play a critical role in regulating the marine climate.
"We wanted to use this approach to illustrate the value of action to halt climate change," Lovelock said.
Lovelock said that UK entrepreneur Richard Branson had offered to fund a prototype.
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