A 20km pipe designed to spray a shield of sulphate particles into the stratosphere could be deployed to mitigate the potentially devastating effects of climate change.
The team involved with the SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) project has received £1.6m from the EPSRC to test the feasibility of constructing what some in the research community have refered to as a ‘garden hose to the sky’.
Principal investigator, Bristol University’s Matt Watson explained that the idea is inspired by volcanoes and the way they can affect the climate after eruptions.
An extreme example took place in 1815 when a volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa led to 1816 being known as the ‘year without summer’. The eruption from the volcano Tambora spewed out 400 million tons of sulphur-rich gas that spread worldwide, blocking sunlight and lowering temperatures.
Watson said the SPICE project isn’t looking to recreate a Tambora, but it will be relying on the same principle of using stratospheric particles to refract light and cool the Earth.
Their work will begin at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, where the researchers will use lasers and molecular spectroscopy to choose the particles they want to use. According to Watson, the team is drawn to the use of sulphate because of its particular ‘shininess’ to visible light. However, the team will trial other particles including clays, salts and mineral oxides.
Whatever they choose, Watson said, won’t matter unless they can get it into the stratosphere.
The current proposal sees the construction of a 20km Kevlar pipe tethered by one or more balloons. Cambridge University’s Hugh Hunt, who is leading the delivery systems portion of the project, will address the engineering challenges inherent in such an ambitious idea.
Hunt and his team of PhD students will address material-science questions ranging from how the pipe will be manufactured to how it will withstand the extreme stresses and pressures when in use.
Watson said the team will be especially concerned with how the pipe and tethered balloon or balloons will behave in different types of weather systems.
‘If you’re going to loft a helium balloon to 20km you’d need have to have a very good handle on what the wind is doing at these elevations.’
Watson said the base of the pipe will have to be especially reinforced because it 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 US 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 organised by the EPSRC.
That project − Integrated Assessment of Geoengineering Proposals (IAGP) − has received £1.7m 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 modelling, 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.’
Is this really a solution? The ‘year without summer’ and similar events do reduce temperatures, but the solar dimming also reduces agricultural yields. This would appear to be a choice between global famine caused by a climate that is too dry or global famine caused by lack of light..
Given that the two options are likely to affect different parts of the globe in different ways, who gets to decide which group of people to benefit??
A more interesting application of this research could be to run a big cable up to the ionosphere. Allowing the ionosphere and earth surface to be used as the plates of a giant, solar wind charged, capacitor. Must be some renewable energy possibility there.
One point of clarification here. The project is not to build a 20 km pipe, but to investigate the engineering behind the idea. The difference between ‘can we do it?’ and ‘should we do it?’ is very very important.
Is this going to ground air traffic ?
At the first vortex or vortices in the air: all particles will gather together. Theses particles will never remains uniformly spread long enough.
This is a ludicrous idea! The whole point of climate change at the rate we are seeing is due to the activities of mankind. This is just one more manmade activity that will meddle with nature. A tragic consequence of climate change is the lack of rain in countries where they depended on the yearly monsoon. Cooling of the earth will not recreate those monsoon periods – it is heat of the sun that causes the movement of air either side of the equator that creates the rain clouds, so cutting off the sun will not help. Furthermore, a major contributor to the imbalance is aircraft. Research has shown, by more than one study, that the amount of sun reaching the earth has reduced in the last 40 or so years because of vapour trails. Less heat means less evaporation of water and hence less rain.
Putting particles in the air, if it reduces the earth’s temperature, will only be a way of allowing more pollution and exacerabting the problems. An escalation that could well lead to other much more serious problems (if it could get more serious!).
this doesn’t sound like a good idea to me either. More cycling [including UK postal deliveries], energy conservation and sound ideas please.
Why not design new planes to emit sulphate particles, then we can all
fly and save the plane at the same time.
What an amusing idea. Add in an unpredictable, sizeable and phosphate rich volcanic eruption, and we could generate another completely new catastrophe. This will help to take our minds off our other existing climate catastrophe.
Surely you don’t mean “sulphate” in the form of sulphuric acid which would be formed after a volcanic event involving sulphur dioxide which could be absorbed by water vapour and then changing via sunlight from sulphurous to sulphuric acids?
Makes sense to look at it as a feasibility study.
Irrespective of the truth of global warming/Green house effects. Humans don’t really control what happens, natural forces way-out side our control ultimately do.
So this technique may well have uses to combat/alleviate unforseen global changes in the future. Nature is not a steady state system!
Who says a modest degree of global warming is bad? More people by far die of hypotermia than heatstroke. mlre CO2+more food. Real answer is less people.
Global warmig to date is minimal, it occurs mainly behind the podia of CRU and IPCC.
I have to agree that this type of engineering would be better employed providing an energy generation solution rather than a way of controlling the effects of using fossil fuels. Not only is there the idea inductance generation but also high altitude kites and turbines. I suspect that as per usual the quangos aren’t thinking “big” enough.
I read in a book… of an idea that sprays sea water into the air over the ocean and relies on the wind to take the spray/mist up to make more clouds which will in turn reflect more sun light – the source of this idea seemed to be from some credible scientists.
Surely simpler and ‘easier to try’ ideas should be ruled out before we start wasting £1.7M of tax payers money on a 20Km tube feasibility study. Even if it is technically possible – it will never get off the ground (pun intended) because of public and other government environmental concerns.
First we set off a thermo-nuclear explosion in the ionosphere to create global warming (see HAARP), now we want to block out the sun in the stratosphere to “fix” it. It still looks to me like someone’s just trying to reproduce Tesla’s ideas in a way they can own. When are we going to learn to live WITH nature and quit trying to CONTROL her? The air around the earth belongs to the earth. Its not a toy for us to play with.
The only solution to pollution is dilution.
How can adding more potentialy harmful particals into the sky be guarentened not to have any side effects.
After spraying, would the particles stay where they are suppose to, Has anyone considered the conseqeunces and the effect of shielding the sun around the equator? I am no scientist but I do know what happens when poultry and tomatoes are genetically modified,
Obesity and indigestion. The hormones that bloats poultry remains in the carcass to increase the waist line and modified tomatoes do not rot therefore cannot be digested easily.
By the way Global warming is caused by exessive radio and microwave signals from communication systems, sounds too daft isn’t it.
When will humans learn to let mother nature take her course? The so called “global warming” will be offset by mother nature in one way or another if we stop meddling. But no, we want to fix it till its utterly broken. Now we want to introduce sulfates into the atmosphere – why the hell are we scrubbing sulpher from power plants then??!! And seriously, are we actually going to ever build this? Wouldn’t it be easier to have a jet slowly ooze this into the atmoshpere? But aside from the technical aspects – plants love warm, CO2 rich environments – which will produce more O2 – which is good for us, yes? As long as we don’t cut down the forests we need!
Instead of all this BS about CO2, lets make sure we have enough forest and healthy ocean biology to eat up the CO2 and focus on keeping the human populations steady? That would do more good than anything else.
What about the net energy and pollution effects?
Kevlar doesn’t grow on trees, neither does compressed hydrogen or sulphate particles. The amount of energy needed to make these is huge.
Cut out cheap holiday flights instead- no-one ‘needs’ to have a holiday halfway round the world. Continued existence is far more pressing.
I know! Why don’t they just deliver them via aircraft criss crossing above leaving huge plumes! oh wait…they’re already doing that…