Fleet of 'Cloud Ships' Could Cool Climate

There are several wild ideas for throttling global warming, from putting giant shades in orbit to altering the chemical composition of the sea. One new idea sounds simpler and cheaper:

"A wind-powered fleet of 1,900 ships would crisscross the oceans, sucking up sea water and spraying it from the top of tall funnels to create vast white clouds," The Times of London reports.

Groups in the United States and the UK are said to be working on the concept, aimed at reflected 1 or 2 percent of sunlight back into space. The effect would be similar to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which filled the atmosphere with reflective particles and reduced the global temperature by half a degree. A bigger eruption in 1815, of Mount Tambora, created a year with no summer.

The cost: Some $9 billion over 25 years, according to a think tank in Denmark.

In a recent self-selecting LiveScience poll, only 9 percent of readers thought it a good idea to geoengineer the climate, while 44 percent thought it smarter to proceed with caution and study the matter further. As of this writing, 47 percent thought it a bad idea.