A city council meeting in Alameda, California, on Tuesday will take center stage in the global controversy over whether to try to cool the planet by making clouds brighter.

One idea is marine cloud brightening (MCB), and a new study says that MCB could also create cloud cover, making it an even better ‘painkiller’ for climate change that previously thought.

The experiment in Alameda did not involve brightening clouds; it was only testing the way sea-salt particles emitted through a spraying device behave under different atmospheric conditions.