Question: have you tried inventing anything to help us with global warming and preventing and stopping the dangers they have and will cause?

Katy Mee answered on 14 Jun 2010:

At the British Geological Survey (where I work) there is lot of ongoing research into CCS or ‘Carbon-Capture and Storage’. Oil and gas form in carbon-rich rocks which are generally very ‘porous’ i.e. they have lots of holes and gaps in like a sponge where the oil and gas can collect in reservoirs. When we extract the oil and gas, we’re left with these large expanses of highly porous rock, usually sandstone. The idea with CCS is that when carbon dioxide is produced by burning fossil fuels in power stations, instead of releasing that gas into the atmosphere where it acts as a greenhouse gas, the CO2 is captured at the power station and pumped through a series of pipes back into these depleted oil and gas fields, often under the sea bed. The UK has a lot of depleted oil and gas fields under the North Sea so there are plenty of places where this could be done. And you’re probably thinking, so how come the oil and gas don’t just leak out of these rocks? Well, for rock to be a succesful ‘reservoir’ it must be overlain by another layer of impervious rock, also known as a ‘cap rock’. That’s rock that water and gas cannot flow through. Clay, salt and mudstone are all good cap rocks as they are impervious and are ductile, so even if the rocks fractured for some reason (maybe an earthquake), they are self-sealing.

There are actually lots of new technologies out there for combatting climate change. Perhaps one of the wackiest is NASA’s ‘cloud maker’. Clouds are aerosols which, if they are present in a high enough quantity’ can affect climate because they affect the amount of solar radiation either entering of leaving Earth. These ‘cloud makers’ can actually create aerosols which act like clouds…..have a look on this link: