At The Atlantic, Graeme Wood has an excellent new blog dedicated to a variety of global hotspots. He’s just left Iraq for Afghanistan, and his Iraq posts give you an excellent sense of the state of the country as the American combat presence slowly winds down. Check out “Striking Camp.”

Graeme also has an article in the latest issue of The Atlantic on geoengineering that is well worth your time. David Victor is leading a project on the international implications of geoengineering at the Council on Foreign Relations. And for a visionary take on the subject, I recommend futurist Jamais Cascio, who alienated and enraged a lot of readers with his recent polemic in the Wall Street Journal. 

Here is Graeme’s description of one of the most attractive geoengineering proposals.

Stephen Salter, a Scottish engineer, has mocked up a strategy that would cool the planet by painting the skies above the oceans white. Salter’s designs—based on an idea developed by John Latham at the National Center for Atmospheric Research—call for a permanent fleet of up to 1,500 ships dragging propellers that churn up seawater and spray it high enough for the wind to carry it into the clouds. The spray would add moisture to the clouds and make them whiter and fluffier, and therefore better at bouncing sunlight back harmlessly into space. Salter, who has investigated the technical feasibility of this idea minutely (down to the question of whether ship owners would mind affixing spray nozzles to their hulls with magnets), estimates the cost to build the first 300 ships—enough to turn back the climatological clock to James Watt’s era—to be $600 million, plus another $100 million per year to keep the project going.

The one that seems the most effective, however, is rather less attractive. Read the article, which will give you a broader perspective on efforts to mitigate climate change.