Virgin bigwig Sir Richard Branson has put forward a 25 million US dollars (£12.8 million) prize to scientists to discover a way to stop the planet from being affected by climate change.

Supported by one time US Vice President Al Gore and other renowned environmentalists, Sir Richard asked for science boffins to find a method of taking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Calling the test, the largest prize ever available, Sir Richard compared it to the contest for an individual to find a way of estimating longitude precisely. It was 60 years before the Brit clock maker John Harrison produced an accurate way and was given his winnings from King George III.

Sir Richard is quoted as saying in the Metro newspaper:"The earth cannot wait 60 years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today."

He stated that he had been impacted upon by James Lovelock, the inventor of Gaia Theory, which proposes that the globe could already had gone over a "tipping point".

"My wife Joan is a down-to-earth, practical Glaswegian," he commented.

"When I told her that Lovelock believed we may already be doomed, she responded by saying 'There are a lot of brilliant minds out there. Surely one of them would be able to come up with a solution'."

He said that the majority of the public's experience of the idea of a "planet under threat" came from science fiction plots in which a brave "superhero" saves the day.

He said: "Today we have a threat. Still we have to convince many people that the threat is urgent and real and there is no superhero. We have only our own ingenuity and we have no hope of a meaningful solution unless we find a way to work together."

He also pointed out: "Necessity is the mother of invention."

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