Virgin's Branson offers $25 mln global warming prize

Fri Feb 9, 2007 1:09 PM GMT

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.

"We are now facing a planetary emergency. The planet has a fever," he said. "This is an initiative to stimulate someone to do something that no one knows how to do. This is right at the cutting edge."

The prize will initially only be open for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges including Branson, Gore and Tickell as well as U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, Briton James Lovelock and Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery.

The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years -- with $5 million of the prize being paid at the start and the remaining $20 million 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," Flannery said via videolink from Sydney. "We are at the last moment. Once we reach the tipping point it will have been taken out of our hands.

He said 200 metric gigatons of carbon had accumulated in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, raising concentrations by 100 parts per million. The challenge was to find ways of bringing that back down again.