Particle injection into the stratosphere could mitigate effects of climate change

will be subjected to pressures of about 6,000 bar as the stratospheric particles are pumped through. The tethered balloons will equally need to be capable of resisting pulling forces.

The location for the deployment of the tethered pipes has yet to be considered. Former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, who is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures in the United States (“Intellectual Ventures: A genuine path breaker or a patent troll?” 19 February 2010 HSNW) and leading a similar project to SPICE dubbed Garden Hose to the Sky, has suggested that the enormous sulphur-pumping pipes should be placed near the North and South poles.

Watson said he is unsure whether the North and South poles are the right locations and is relying on his co-investigator Lesley Gray, a meteorologist at Reading University, to model where the best places in the world would be to inject their specific particles and the amount to introduce into the stratosphere.

Public opinion

The idea of pumping sulphur or other particulates into the Earth’s stratosphere is to be put to the public in a sister project organized by the EPSRC. That project — Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Proposals (IAGP) — has received £1.7 million to increase public awareness of the benefits and

potential drawbacks of geoengineering projects such as SPICE.

 

Principal investigator Piers Forster, a professor of physical climate change at Leeds University, said the public might be wary of what they perceive as ‘hardcore artificial interference’ with nature.

 

“I think we’ve definitely learnt our lesson from the debate over genetically modified food — that it is really important to inform the public from the beginning and to be as transparent and open as possible about what we’re doing with this work,” he said.

Watson said public opinion will influence the direction of the SPICE project. Initially, the project researchers will restrict their ideas to computer modeling, but their eventual goal of a 1km tethered pipe demonstrator may be impeded by the EPSRC if the IAGP team is confronted with significant public disapproval.

“The research councils are still considering the possibility of being exposed to some sort of reputational risk,” he said.

One thing is clear though, Watson said, and that is no one is endorsing the SPICE solution as a “get out of jail free card” to carbon emitters. “It’s a Plan D,” he said. “It’s essentially an insurance policy for the situation where we hit a tipping point in climate change quickly.”