[Ryan]

Branson: $32m to fix global warming
Jeremy Lovell
February 11, 2007

Airline tycoon Richard Branson has announced a $US25 million ($A32m) prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the battle to beat global warming.

Flanked by climate campaigners former US vice-president Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, Sir Richard said he hoped the Virgin Earth Challenge would spur innovative and creative thought to save mankind from self-destruction.

The prize will initially be open for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges including Sir Richard, Mr Gore and Mr Tickell as well as Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery, US climate scientist James Hansen and Briton James Lovelock. "Man created the problem and therefore man should solve the problem," he said.

"Unless we can devise a way of removing CO 2 (carbon dioxide) from the Earth's atmosphere we will lose half of all species on Earth, all the coral reefs, 100 million people will be displaced, farmlands will become deserts and rainforests wastelands."

Sir Richard rejected suggestions that he, as an airline owner, was being hypocritical in offering the prize. "I could ground my airline today, but British Airways would simply take its place," he said, noting that he was investing in cleaner engines and fuels.

Top scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and four degrees this century due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels, putting millions at risk from rising sea levels, floods, famines and storms.

Mr Gore, whose campaign film An Inconvenient Truth has helped spread the message, said all science showed something was drastically wrong but that Armageddon was not inevitable.

The winner must devise a way of removing 1 billion tonnes of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years — with $US5 million ($AS6.4m) of the prize being paid at the start and the rest at the end.

If no winner is identified after five years the judges can decide to extend the period.

"This is the world's first deliberate attempt at planetary engineering," Dr Flannery said via video-link from Sydney. "We are at the last moment. Once we reach the tipping point it will have been taken out of our hands."

REUTERS

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/bra...0524347037.html

[FlyinGenie]

i don't think that's true. he's not getting an answer. if there was an answer then he wouldn't need to fund the project because they would have already done the research...just the implementation would need funding. how could anyone get to the implementation stage without the research and experimentation which is where they really need the money??