Geo-engineer Stephen Salter's work was once derided, but with global warming on the rise it might be coming back into fashion, writes Brian O'Connell
Since the early 1960s, international scientists have been coming up with experimental and futuristic ways to counteract climate change. From putting large-scale mirrors into space to altering the behaviour of clouds, most of these ideas have been relegated to the fringes of experimental science.
Until now, that is.
With global warming high on the political agenda, many international environmentalists and government agencies are now taking notice of once-derided ideas in an effort to stabilise the planet's temperature.
Prof Stephen Salter is among those leading the so-called "geo-engineering revolution". Having first come to prominence in the 1970's for inventing the "nodding duck", a wave-power device which was later controversially discontinued, Salter is a veteran of large-scale scientific experiments.
According to Salter, his latest experiment, a floating wind turbine that sprays water vapour high into the air to increase the amount of sunlight that gets reflected away from the earth by its cloud cover, could be the planet's saving grace.
Salter and his colleague, John Latham, have been working on their idea since 1990 without any government or agency funding and little in the way of mainstream acceptance. But as fears grow that global warming is accelerating, while the collective will to reduce carbon emissions remains questionable, their work is attracting interest from once ambivalent world agencies.
The pair have just returned from a meeting with Nasa, while in early February they head to Washington for a briefing with the US department of energy. Both the BBC World News and CNN recently paid a visit, and some weeks back they were asked to give a workshop to a group of climate academics at Cambridge.
The scientists, then, have most definitely come in from the cold.
"Our ideas are panic measures," says Salter. "What we are putting forward is not intended to make anyone relax. It's almost like a parachute - you don't recommend people get into one until the engine is broke."
SO WHAT ARE Salter and his band of merry geo-engineers suggesting? First up, a little scientific background: geo- engineering solutions to the world's climate problems first came to light in the early 1960's and until recently the ideas held little currency.
But when Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen entered the arena last year and suggested adding aerosols to the stratosphere in order to help cool the planet, geo-engineering suddenly came back in vogue.
Yet it's not without its detractors. Mark Lynas, author of High Tide, and a respected UK environmentalist, articulates a view that geo-engineering is seen as a quick fix to save the planet, thereby helping people evade personal responsibility.
"Adopting geo-engineering solutions is like trying to stick plasters onto the problem. What it needs is to be sorted at source, by reducing greenhouse emissions and not trying to alter global weather. If people get a sense that technology can dig us out of this hole then it removes the pressing need for reduction in carbon emissions, which is the single and only thing that will sort this out."
When I mention the work of Salter and others, Lynas's voice becomes agitated: "This work is not helpful in any way - technology faddism has become a new religion in the world. Modern engineering is seen to have the solutions to all the world's problems. If anything, global warming has taught us to expect the unexpected and learn some humility and not alter the way nature works."
From his office at Edinburgh University, Stephen Salter has heard it all before and says he stopped caring about what his detractors had to say a long time ago. Having retired from daily lecturing, he still turns up to work seven days a week in his lab on campus, tackling a problem he first gave attention to three decades ago.
"From a young age I wanted to make airplanes," he says, "so I went and became an aircraft apprentice fitter. I changed career when the Germans began dropping bombs on little girls in Russia.
"I started examining renewable energy two weeks before the 1973 Yum Kippur war, when the Arabs cut off oil supply, and suddenly there was a demand for renewal energies. Before that anyone who even talked about windmills was looked on as a maniac!"
After a discussion with his wife, who challenged the young professor to come up with an energy source that was clean and safe and would last forever in Scotland, Salter turned his attention to wave power. His early work led to the formation of the Wave Power Group, yet it was an uphill struggle for both recognition and funding.
"Reaction was typical of the time, we got very little support and no money, which was quite familiar. In 1974 though we got funding for about six or seven years. We believed people wanted us to succeed, but it became an unpleasant business, kind of like King Herod [ being] in charge of Barnardos."
The experience quickly turned sour, with Salter accusing those in charge of driving the agenda down the nuclear road. Funding was stopped in 1982 and Salter returned to the academic wilderness, yet he continued to explore alternative ways to generate energy.
He thought up an idea for touch screen computers to make it easier for children to negotiate, coupled with a way for electricity to be automatically switched off for periods of time at the mains, thus saving energy. All the while the global climate crisis worsened.
Cut to 1990, when John Latham had just published a paper in Nature on an idea of his to spray sea salt into the atmosphere, making clouds brighter, reflecting the sun and thus cooling the earth's temperature. If only he could nail the logistics.
"The experiment we are working on now was John's idea," says Salter. "When he came up with it in 1990, most physicists thought it would work, they just didn't see how to overcome the logistics. That's where I come in: I designed the equipment to make it operational. He's the physicist, I'm the engineer."
From his base in Colorado, 70-year-old retired physicist John Latham is short of breath. He's spent the past few hours shovelling snow from his driveway.
It's Sunday afternoon, and he's returning from the lab. Like Salter, tackling global warming is a seven day a week roster.
FOR LATHAM ONE of the most frustrating things about his work over the past 20 years is that a relatively small injection of funds would allow the pair to make working vessels to fully explore their idea. Until now no one has been willing to take a chance.
"If we were talking about making enough vessels for the system to be fully operational on a global scale then we are talking about a few tens of millions of pounds. That is absolutely peanuts compared to a lot of university research budgets," says Latham.
Of the criticisms levelled at the project, and geo-engineering in general, Latham is defiant yet realistic.
"Ours is a holding operation. It doesn't solve all the problems, as long as people continue to burn fossil fuels. Yet it will take several decades to produce the required amount of power from a new form of energy.
"When all factors are taken into account, it is thought that we need to reduce fossil fuels to about quarter of what it is. Despite the Kyoto Agreement, the result since then is an increase in fossil fuel burning. It seems utterly unlikely that a drastic reduction in fossil production is going to happen until some massive catastrophe. But it would have to be something like a more massive Katrina to change the current thinking."
IT REMAINS TO be seen, though, what part, if any, geo-engineering has to play in getting the planet out of its current fix. If it does, Salter and Latham argue that they have done much groundwork, and could have their idea operational much faster than others ideas currently being discussed. They are not overly concerned that their idea should be adopted, so long as the political will changes and action is taken.
" There is a lot more notice being taken of the work - I don't mean specifically our project, but the idea that it might be desirable or necessary to try to modify the earth's climate in a controlled way," says Latham. "I know that's anathema to a large number of people and I understand that, but it depends on how dire the situation is deemed to be. If it turns out that one of the other ideas is better than ours and it works, then I'd expect to feel really pleased. The important thing is that something is done, and fast."