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A pair of Britain’s leading environmental scientists have proposed a way of solving the climate change problem using special technology under the sea. The idea is to increase the amount of CO2 the sea absorbs by installing special tubes underwater.

Chris Rapley, head of London’s Science Museum, and Gaia theorist Professor James Lovelock believe that cutting carbon emissions is becoming a lost cause and the most useful thing the government can do to sort out the problem is invest in “huge flotillas of vertical pipes in the tropical seas.” Currently being investigated in the US, the installations would mean that less CO2 ends up in the atmosphere as more would be taken up by the sea. As Lovelock explains:

“We are taking the very strong line that we are not going to save the planet by the regular approaches like the Kyoto Protocol or renewable energy. What we have to do is to look at it in a systems sense, or a Gaian sense, and see if it’s curable by direct action.”

Though the technology is quite complicated, the basic science of it is that the huge floating pipes which start at the surface of the ocean and go down will swell and bob up and down, causing cold water to come up onto the ocean’s surface. A valve would block the reverse occurring so that the surface gradually becomes colder. Apparently, cold water contains more life as it can absorb more carbon, and this will help in the battle against climate change.

The two scientists are not the first to come up with the plan. Indeed, Atmocean, a company in the US, has already started trials of the same technology. Although the research is in its early stages, the firm has high hopes. As Phil Kithil from Atmocean says:

“There is much yet to be learned. We need not only to move towards the final design and size (of the pipes), but also to characterise the ecological effects. The problem we would be most concerned about would be acidification. We’re bringing up higher levels of CO2 along with the nutrients, so it all has to be analysed as to the net carbon balance and the net carbon flux.”

There are other pressing concerns as well, for example, the pipes could cause problems for marine life such as whales and dolphins. However, it is certainly an interesting and promising concept that may end up being many many times more productive than reducing carbon output.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Technology, Environment, Science, Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.