The TimesOnLine says “They sound like ideas from a Jules Verne novel, but giant engineering schemes designed to alter the climate offer the cheapest way of avoiding catastrophic global warming, according to a growing number of scientists and green-minded entrepreneurs.

Most of the schemes have been dismissed as impossibly expensive or impractical, such as the proposal to create a space sunshade by using rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere.

One relatively cheap solution, however, is gaining favour among many different groups and is endorsed today by an independent study that compares the costs and benefits of all the main ideas. A wind-powered fleet of 1,900 ships would criss-cross the oceans, sucking up sea water and spraying it from the top of tall funnels to create vast white clouds.

These clouds would reflect a tiny proportion, between 1 and 2 per cent, of the sunlight that would otherwise warm the ocean. This would be enough to cancel out the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions. The ships would be unmanned and directed by satellite to locations with the best conditions for increasing cloud cover. They would mainly operate in the Pacific, far enough from land to avoid interfering with rainfall.
The idea has been circulating for a decade but until now has merely been one of many climate engineering pipedreams. A study commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, a think-tank that advises governments on how to spend aid money, found that the fleet would cost $9 billion (£5.3 billion) to test and launch within 25 years. This is a fraction of the $250 billion that the world’s leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions.

The Royal Society is expected to announce next month that cloud-forming ships are one of the most promising ideas.

More in the TimesOnLine.

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Photo from The Infrastructurist.