DYER: Many good reasons to put such a project in the hands of Africans

you particularly cool the surface of the ocean under those clouds. There’s already a small team from Southern Cross University in Queensland experimenting with this technology as means of cooling the waters off north-eastern Australia and saving the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.

The big ‘named’ tropical storms typically form in well-defined areas of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans that are not unmanageably large for mobile fleets of spray-vessels. Just drop the sea-surface temperature by one degree or less, and most of the storms that are forming will never get big enough to earn a name.

It’s well worth a try, and maybe southern Africa is new enough to this kind of weather to believe that it could be stopped. South Africa would have to take the lead, because that’s where most of the money and the scientific and engineering skills are, but it’s an issue that matters to the whole east coast of the continent.

In fact, it’s a technology that matters to the whole world. We will almost certainly need technologies to hold the global temperature down while we work to eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions, and this would be a relatively gentle, controllable and affordable form of geoengineering.

It would also be a project of global scientific and political importance led by Africans, which is something that is long overdue.