I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN WIRED WAS A LIBERTARIAN-ORIENTED MAGAZINE: Dimming the Sun Would Help Lower the Risks of El Niño. No, Really.

This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be among the strongest on record, and it’s set to create chaotic weather around the world.

A new study suggests that there could be a way to mitigate some of the impacts of future El Niños and global warming: dimming the sun.

El Niño develops naturally in the tropical Pacific every few years, caused by weakened trade winds that push heat from the ocean toward the coast of South America. This tilts the odds toward higher-than-average global temperatures, as well as droughts in some regions, intense rains and floods in others, and more cyclones in the Pacific. Piled on top of warming driven by burning fossil fuels, a strong El Niño can mean hundreds of billions in economic losses.

The new study argues that deflecting solar energy could cool the ocean and help moderate El Niño events before they become too strong, staving off the worst impacts.

“El Niño is one of these things where something happens in the tropical Pacific, and then it rearranges the way the entire global atmosphere is holding energy that year,” says Katherine Ricke, a coauthor of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and a climate scientist at UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s an ultimate pressure point in the climate system.”

Ricke and her coauthors looked at using marine cloud brightening, or MCB, as a way to dim the sun in the Pacific. The technique entails spraying seawater into marine clouds to enhance the clouds’ reflectivity. While some pilot projects and randomized controlled trials have tested the technique’s efficacy, they’ve only been on very small scales.

To boldly go to a place that even Barack Obama thought was too bonkers to implement during any of his three terms:

Still though, why bother with half-measures?