If I realy wanted to cool down the planet fast id just do the following.

Take a large set of pipelines from the ocean to the top of very tall mountains.

Pipe warm surface water up the mountain and shoot it out to form snow releasing all the heat into the air way up there where it can more readily go back into space.

Let the brine travel back down a set of concrete "rivers" to the ocean.

Now when the snow melts you have dams along the way to catch about 70% of the energy you used to put the water up there.

Now just plant 1 million windmills to power the sucker.

Now you have all the power you want all the fresh water you want and cool the planet all at the same time.

Tada!

But what happens if we just phase out the internal combustion engine and go all-electric or fuel cell?

Nothing. Earth has been on a cooling trend over the past eight years. That is with internal combustion engines increasing in use. The Earth warms and cools in cycles based on Sun activity. Please see Ohio covered by glaciers tens of thousands of years ago for evidence of Global Warming pre-SUV. Don't let the Globalwarmists newfangled religion warp your thinking.

We need to focus on energy independence and cutting back on pollution. Throwing away trillions of dollars on an already discredited Global Warming scheme should be a crime.

Cheapest and quickest option - white paint.

One recommendation I had seen was to bury trees in deep oxygen poor mines.

Winter,
What would it cost to make crampons and fitting from stainless to handle the salt.
Surely freshen the water first, algae, potable , irrigation.

ejj,
agreed - but I think transport (and ice) only accounts for 15%

ai vin,
Shouldnt we be concerned about smell from the Avon pit?

Gee, Mark, influence of solar and cosmic ray activity over numerous parameters of climate is common knowledge. If you want references, there are hundreds of published articles referenced here:

http://www.co2science.org/subject/e/summaries/extraterrestrial.php

http://www.co2science.org/subject/e/extraterrestrial.php

http://www.co2science.org/subject/s/solartempglobal.php

http://www.co2science.org/subject/s/subject_s.php

You AGW deniers could be setting yourselves up for a big fall. Let's say you're right and Earth has been on a cooling trend over the past eight years. Well if the Earth warms and cools in cycles based on the Sun's activity then the cooling trend could end and reverse itself when the Sun's activity cycles back, right?

And the thing you're not facing is the fact of how hot it is; 2008 [a cold year] was still the 10th hottest on record. If the record goes back 150 how many of these cycles did we go through and why were all 10 of the hottest years only in the last 15?

A few things about the temperature record: "The reliable instrumental record only goes back 150 years in the CRU analysis, 125 in the NASA analysis. This is a simple fact that we are stuck with. 2005 was the warmest year recorded in that period according to NASA, a very close second according to CRU. Because of this limit, it is not enough to say today that these are the warmest years since 150 years ago, rather one should say 'at least': 1998 and 2005 are the warmest two years in at least the last 150."

"But there is another direct measurement record available that can tell us things about temperature over the last 500 years, and that is borehole measurements. Basically, this involves drilling a deep hole and measuring the temperature of the earth at various depths. This gives us information about century scale temperature trends as warmer or cooler pulses from long term surface changes propagate down through the crust. Using this method we can see that temperatures have not been consistently this high as far back as this method allows us to look. This way of inferring surface temperatures does smooth out yearly fluctuations and even short term trends, so we can not know anything directly about individual years. But given the observable range of inter-annual variations recorded over the last century, it is quite reasonable to rule out single years or even decades being far enough above the baseline to rival today.

Thus, using this record, we can extend our timeframe and reasonably conclude that it is warmer now than any time in at least the last 500 years."

How many of these cycles did we go through in the last 500years?

"It is possible to make reconstructions of temperature much further back, using what are called proxy data. These include things like tree rings, ocean sediment, coral growth, layers in stalagmites and others. The reconstructions available are all slightly different and provide sometimes more and sometimes less global versus regional coverage over the last one or two thousand years. Note: this covers the period often referred to as the Medieval Warm Period. As noted, all these reconstructions are different, but: they all show some similar patterns of temperature change over the last several centuries. Most striking is the fact that each record reveals that the 20th century is the warmest of the entire record, and that warming was most dramatic after 1920
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleolast.html
Thus we can reasonably say it is warmer now than any other time in at least the last one thousand years."

How many of these cycles did we go through in the last 1000years?

"The only other candidate for a higher temperature period going back through the entire Holocene (~10,000bp to now) is called the Holocene Climatic Optimum some 6000 years ago. It is not known exactly what the temperatures were then, the farther back in time we try to look, the greater the uncertainties there are to deal with. Even so, the Holocene Climatic Optimum has long been cautiously thought to be almost as warm or even warmer than now. That conclusion is starting to look less likely as it has been determined that the anomalous warmth of that time was actually confined to the northern hemisphere and occurred only in the summer months.

Robert Rohde's website, Global Warming Art has a nice graph- http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Holocene_Temperature_Variations_Rev_png -of many reconstructions of Holocene temperature, regional and global, all super-imposed with an average of all of them combined, shown below. This represents the best estimate available of global temperatures in the Holocene.

Thus one can reasonably believe that it is warmer now than at any other time in at least the last 10,000 years."

How many of these cycles did we go through in the last 10,000years?

"Before the current interglacial the planet was in the grip of a much colder glacial period with ice sheets well down into the continental US. This period only just ended some 11,000 years ago. The record of glacial-interglacial cycles can be read in Antarctic ice core analysis and it shows these cycles over many 100Kyr periods. The IPCC offers a good version of this graph-
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig2-22.htm
Thus we can say that if our reading of the Holocene is correct, it is warmer now than at any other time in over the last 100,000 years."

How many of these cycles did we go through in the last 100,000years?

Oh, now Mark_BC... if you start going back and seeing what the people who actually did the research wrote, how will you every learn anything about anything? Just because someone else deployed the instruments, collected the data, made the models, tested the assumptions doesn't mean that the editors at CO2Science don't do a better job of drawing conclusions...

Global warming in a short simple analogy starting with a fact: CO2 traps heat. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is like putting a lid on a pot of water on a cooktop. It may be impossible to predict where every vapor bubble will form and rise and where every water droplet will condense and fall, but it is a physical certainty that the pot will get hotter and boil faster.

Since about 2000 the additional heat trapped by excess CO2 has been going into the deep ocean and warming the water there. As we have few instruments there, this causes an in-obvious form of global warming. Once the deep ocean has absorbed enough heat, circulation patterns will change, most of the heat will again go into the atmosphere, and obvious (that is, atmospheric) global warming will resume with a vengeance.

Global warming deniers are invited to demonstrate the strength of their convictions by buying ocean front property.

The Gores have money, they can live wherever they want to and move whenever they need to and are probably well insured against any losses.

But the millions of poor people crowded into low coastal land around the world? - Not so lucky.