It's possible...



I was a little worried that I got rusty on using the Flow tool. The gear first looked "squared" when I Projected it to the sphere.
I provided a base plane that was made of a Network of four Arcs so that the corner control points were closer in proportion to the center and de-warped the resultant object.
In practice - if I was to construct a model of gears based on a sphere I would use actual shape-to-sphere surface cuts that matched the radial proportions of the sphere.