Futuristic fleet of 'cloudseeders' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

VIEWPOINT
Professor John Latham

Some experts are proposing radical ideas to save us from disastrous climate change. But would they work? Professors John Latham and Stephen Salter have designed a fleet of yachts that would pump fine particles of sea-water into clouds, thickening them to reflect more of the Sun's rays. Here, Professor Latham talks about the proposal.
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The idea my colleagues and I are pursuing is to increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space from the tops of thin, low-level clouds (marine stratocumuli, which cover about a quarter of the world's oceanic surface), thereby producing a cooling effect.

Calculations show that if we can increase the reflectivity by about 3%, the cooling will balance the global warming caused by increased CO2 in the atmosphere (resulting from the burning of fossil fuels).

Cloud-seeding yachts

In order to deploy our scheme and produce adequate cooling, we would need to spray sea-water droplets continuously over a significant fraction of the world's oceanic surface, at a total rate of around 50 cubic metres per second.

Professor Stephen Salter has developed plans for a novel form of spray-droplet production (involving high-velocity propulsion of sea-water droplets), and has designed a wind-powered unmanned vessel which can be remotely guided to regions where cloud seeding is most favourable.


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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/6354759.stm

Most such proposals seem to falter in the face of the sheer scale of the problem. These guys seem to have picked a 'fulcrum point' -- some factor that can be manipulated on a managable scale, to produce meaningful results on a global scale. (Since this is largely how the problem got started, it seems worth trying some intellectual judo to attack the problem.)

As he explains in the article, the point of this effort is to BUY TIME, not to solve the whole problem. Buying time may be something we find ourselves in desperate need of.