According to the United Nations, there are only 12 years left to prevent irreversible climate disaster, and it has urged that action must be taken now for any chance of rescuing the planet from ecocide. Collaboration between researchers, technologists, policy-makers, builders and creators is desperately needed. In light of this, one architect at Portuguese firm PARQ has proposed a new kind of planet-wide infrastructure that would be disguised as volcanoes to create man-made clouds to dim the effect of the sun over icy regions.
Cloud Maker would see these structures placed on the ocean, absorbing hydrogen and oxygen from the water through electrolysis, and converting the liquid into steam before expelling it into the atmosphere with a "rocket-shaped converging nozzle".

Speaking with DOMUS, PARQ architect Pedro Ramalho explained that although his traditional education is in the field of architecture, he can't help but worry about the future.
"As a concerned designer the idea popped in my mind, and as an architect, with the tools I have, I decided to turn the idea into a project," he explained by email. "Even with no scientific background, I decided that it might be worth sharing it with the world."
The 115-meter in diameter Cloud Maker would be shaped as "giant floating inverted funnels" that would capture gases generated by electrode structures within the water.
These would be channelled into a combustion chamber, eventually making their way up to a nozzle fitted at the top of the 'volcanoes'. The shell of the machines would be formed from a surface area of 12,000 square meter solar panels capable of generating 1000Kwh of electricity per hour, powering the extraction of 30kg of hydrogen oxide every hour from the ocean's salt water.
In theory, says Ramalho, the structures could work with other proposals for climate engineering such as marine cloud brightening, a technique that would reflect sunlight back into space by making clouds brighter, and stratospheric aerosol injections, which would see sulfate aerosols injected into the stratosphere in order to achieve global dimming.

"This concept is all about the strategical placement of these objects on the globe," Ramalho told DOMUS. "They can be seen as alien objects on the landscape or they can, with time, be seen almost as natural phenomenons. They are in a way mimicking natural processes and just taking the energy of the sun to extract one element from one place, to balance it to another place.
"Ultimately they can be seen as giant controllable irrigation systems."
Ramalho said that he believes that at present, fields like science and architecture tend to work in closed bubbles and with no real relationship between each other, and that that the time has come for geo-engineering, geo-design and geo-architecture to address global issues like climate change, solar radiation, and ocean currents.
"For this we need almost all the fields of knowledge to work together," he said. "I have faith in the human capacity to solve problems, no matter what scale."