Seeding maritime clouds to enhance albedo?

The first method I want to focus on tries to increase the earth’s albedo to prevent a further rise in global temperature as presented in Latham et. al (2008). In order to achieve this goal scientists try to seed low-level maritime stratocumulus clouds.

Clouds can contribute to the cooling of the earth’s temperature through albedo, but can also have a warming effect by reflecting long-wave radiation from the surface into space. The method of seeding clouds seeks to increase the albedo and thus the cooling effect of the cloud layer by increasing the natural droplet number concentrations. (Latham et al. 2008). This methods works as follows:

• Seawater droplets from the ocean surface are disseminated into the air to form cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). CCNs are solid particles in the atmosphere that are needed for water to coalesce droplets. In this case salt, that remains after the disseminated water particles evaporate, acts as the solid particle.
• Thus additional droplets can be formed and the enhanced total droplet surface of a cloud leads to an increase in albedo.
• As an additional effect it is possible that clouds are more stable and persist longer.
• The technical implementation of cloud-seeding requires ships for the dissemination of seawater. Scientists suggest to use ships with special ‘Flettner rotors’ which allow unmanned and remote-controlled vessels. These rotors are ‘vertical spinning cylinders that use the Magnus effect to produce forces perpendicular to the wind direction’ (Salter et al. (2008)).

 (source: Salter et al. (2008): 3998, figure 8)

Latham et al. suggest that ’doubling of the natural droplet concentration (...) would produce cooling sufficient roughly to balance the warming associated with CO₂ doubling.’ (Latham et al. (2008): 3971)

According to the essay of Latham et al. the method is not yet fully developed and ready to be applied at a global scale, but the authors are positive that cloud-seeding could stabilise the average global temperature, once all open questions are answered.

To get a better insight in how the implementation of such an idea could look like I recommend watching the following BBC report. It summarises the idea of cloud-seeding and shows the technical implementation:

So could this method really stop global warming? On the first sight it sounds like a ‘mild’ form of geo-engineering as no chemicals or big machinery is used and the dissemination of seawater can be stopped relatively quick. But on the other hand there may be other side effects caused by a higher salt concentration in the air. This could have an influence on ecosystems and soils if transported towards the land. I think these side effects need to be considered but if they are not significant and cloud-seeding really has good results in enhancing albedo it may be a good way to at least slow down global warming.
What do you think? Should we use this method in future times?

Literature:

• Latham, J., Rasch, P., Chen, C.-C. J., Kettles, L., Gadian, A., Gettelman, A., Morrison, H., Bower, K. & Choularton, T. (2008): Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low-level maritime clouds. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 366, 3969–3987. Available online: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/3969.abstract?sid=43023fa5-b6bb-436b-9101-8ab82698ff60

• Salter, S., Sortino, G. & Latham, J. (2008): Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 366, 3989–4006. Available online: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/3989