Have been catching up on my subscriptions since I got back. I saw an item I wanted to post here, then another, then another...then I gave up.

Hell, just read Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, or Discover. Or all of them. More cool ideas than you can shake a stick at, or post on a board. The websites don't suck if you can't get the magazines themselves.

Just pulling something out at random, last month's Popular Science had ideas for modifying climate. My favorite was this one.

Pumping large areas of cold water onto the sea surface could actually work. The heat would still be there underneath, of course, but at the critical water-air interface...

$5 billion vs. a 23 percent damage reduction might be a pretty good trade. Particularly when you bring lives into the equation.

Bad news, of course, is that like all large-scale climate modification methods, you are putting your finger on the scale of the balance of nature. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it makes things worse. The power of a hurricane is heat energy being drawn from the ocean and dissipated as wind and rain. Artificially "damping down" this heat (pumping cold water from the deep doesn't remove the heat from the sea, it just moves it around). Might this just result in a long-term accumulation of heat energy to much greater depths, and possible "super hurricanes?"