Scientists who are working on various concepts for “geo-engineering” the climate are almost comically eager to stress that they are not trying to come up with a substitute for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of man-made global warming. They are just researching back-up systems that we might need if the reductions don’t happen fast enough.
“It’s hard to imagine a situation except a dire emergency where this will be used, but in order to have that conversation sensibly we need to provide some evidence-based research,” Dr Matt Watson of Bristol University told the British Science Festival in Bradford last week. He is planning to test the feasibility of an “artificial volcano” that injects sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, so where better to try it than in the pancake-flat county of Norfolk?
Interestingly, he has the implicit blessing of the British armed forces, which take the threat of climate change very seriously. His experiment will ...