

What with all the time I spend focusing on geongineering's potential drawbacks, it's easy to forget that the projects do embody some breathtaking human ingenuity. Take, for example, John Latham and Stephen Salter's so-called albedo yacht, pictured at right.

The unmanned, wind-powered ships would be sent to wherever oceanic cloudmaking conditions are favorable. Rather than sails, they use Flettner rotors – hence the funky columns. But the rotor masts also house the pipes where, using energy generated from the drag on bottom-mounted turbines, sea water would be turned into a fine mist and sprayed high into the air, seeding sunlight-reflecting clouds.

The usual caveats about unintended consequences apply. But now's a good time to point out that the usual caveats, discussed at length in other geoengineering posts, don't mean we shouldn't try. They just mean we ought to proceed cautiously, starting with models, moving on to small tests, and then to larger tests. A couple ships, then the armada.

Sometimes I get a little nervous about my role as a science journalist, which tends towards admonishment and problem-finding rather than cheerleading. Because, let's face it, a lot of these ideas – in other fields, but also in geoengineering – are just damn freaking cool. Like the albedo yacht! It lightens my heart to think of whole fleets of these ghost ships going back and forth across tropical oceans without ever stopping, trailing lifesaving clouds behind them like so many dreams.

And if we can't stop global warming and things go all Waterworld on us

\– well, the deck of an albedo yacht would be a pretty rocking place to call home.

The BBC wrote about Salter and Latham's plans here.

Image: John MacNeill*

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