With scientists more eager than ever to try and find ways to combat global warming, a Harvard physicist has proposed a new method to help cool the planet.  And of all the geoengineering schemes out there, this one is wackier than most.

Russell Seitz proposes that rather than dim the sun, we should instead brighten the water.  In a paper submitted to the Climatic Change journal, he suggests this can be done by creating tiny bubbles (or microbubbles) in the sea, thereby making it more reflective.  Scientists are already aware of an effect they call “undershine”, where naturally-occurring bubbles increase the sea’s reflectivity.

Seitz’s plan sounds crazy, but when you consider China’s ability to make it rain with “cloud seeding”, you have to wonder whether it could actually work.

Scientists already have several different schemes that could help cool the planet, and this scheme sounds just as plausible.  Compared with using algae to capture carbon dioxide and using dust particles to block some of the sun’s heat, microbubbles in the oceans may not be that outrageous.

Seitz certainly seems to think it could work.  In fact, based on the evidence of his climate model, he thinks it could cool the planet by up to 3°C.  That may not seem like much, but in terms of average global temperature, it is huge.

And by primarily cooling the sea, there is the added benefit of conserving water.  When you consider that California loses billions of tons of fresh water every year to evaporation, the idea  and its benefits begin to sound more appealing.

The actual viability of this idea, however, is questionable.  Surprisingly, Seitz doesn’t believe that energy will be the limiting factor.  Instead he believes that increasing the lifespan of the microbubbles is the major challenge, along with the technological difficulty of creating those bubbles.

Until further studies have been done, there is no way to know whether his ideas will truly work.  The limitations of climate models are well known, and meddling with our planet’s climate isn’t something that should be done lightly.  There unintended consequences of deploying such a scheme could be worse than the original problem.