Global warming solutions? - geo-engineering? PV cells?

Professor Stephen Salter, a renowned engineer working at Edinburgh University, has hatched a plan to produce white clouds over the ocean to halt the catastrophic water heating associated with global warming.

In the worst-case scenario, where global "tipping points" such as the melting of the Arctic ice cap are reached, he claimed launching a fleet of cloud-producing drone ships could save Earth.
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Salter, who is famed for inventing the "duck", a device that generates power by bobbing on waves, said: "We've got an explosive with the detonator in it, and when one goes off, it could trigger other explosives. That's why we need to have a number of solutions. I don't mean that we should continue burning coal and then just fix the consequences, that would be terrible. Just as a revolver has many bullets, we need several ideas."
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Salter's idea, which he formed in collaboration with John Latham, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, is to build boats to sail the ocean and produce a spray of tiny water droplets around which white clouds can form. He suggested that around 400 of these wind-powered boats would be needed, at a cost of £100 million. However, the difficult part would be producing droplets small enough for clouds to form, a technique Salter has yet to master. His struggle has been a lonely one so far, and he holds little faith in government.

Salter said: "In the UK, there is one old aged pensioner, me, and one PhD student in Leeds working on cloud control, and that is it. Then there are politicians travelling the world, holding meetings to say how awful it is and the only outcome is that they organise another meeting to say the same."

One of the world's largest wave energy projects is to be unveiled off the coast of Orkney. First Minister Alex Salmond is to open the new testing facility for tidal energy at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Stromness. The site will house four wave energy converters, capable of generating electricity for 2,000 homes. The centre is said to be the first of its kind in the world to provide a purpose-built testing facility.

The solar industry is poised for a rapid decline in
costs that will make it a mainstream power option in the next few years,according to a new assessment by the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Prometheus Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Global production of solar photovoltaic cells, which turn sunlight
directly into electricity, has risen sixfold since 2000 and grew 41
percent in 2006 alone. Although grid-connected solar capacity still
provides less than 1 percent of the world's electricity, it increased
nearly 50 percent in 2006, to 5,000 megawatts, propelled by booming
markets in Germany and Japan. Spain is likely to join the big leagues in
2007, and the United States soon thereafter.

Some sunny facts on solar energy:

* The Sun has sufficient helium mass to provide the Earth with energy for another 5 billion years and, every 15 minutes, it emits more energy than humankind uses in an entire year.

* The Earth receives only one half of one billionth of the Sun’s radiant energy, but, in just a few days, it gets as much heat and light as could be produced by burning all the oil, coal and wood on the planet.

* The Sun represents 99.8% of the total mass of our solar system, its surface temperature is 6000ºC, and its total energy could melt an ice cube the size of planet Earth in just 30 minutes.

* Worldwide, some 2 billion people are still without electricity and, for these populations, it is more economically viable to install solar panels than to extend established electricity grids.

... one astronomer has come up with a radical plan to cool Earth: launch trillions of feather-light discs into space, where they would form a vast cloud that would block the sun's rays.
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Instead, University of Arizona Steward Observatory optics expert Roger Angel proposes using screens just 0.6 meters across, weighing about a gram each. These discs would be manufactured on Earth using very thin, transparent material that doesn't reflect the sun, but instead refracts it, so as to avoid having the sun's radiation push them out of orbit. The discs would also have three 0.1-meter-long protruding electronic "ears" with a solar power source so they could adjust their position, making them essentially tiny spacecraft.

About 16 trillion flyers would have to be deployed, which could be done with 20 launchers that would each send up a stack every 5 minutes for 10 years.

The same rock chambers that held oil and natural gas for millions of years also locked up carbon dioxide. For 30 years, the oil and gas industry has pumped carbon dioxide into waning oil fields to get at the last drops. By some estimates, those depleted deposits alone could hold 20 to 30 years of carbon dioxide released from all U.S. coal-fired power plants.
Coal beds that are too deep or otherwise uneconomical to mine also could hold billions of tons of carbon dioxide, while releasing methane back to the surface as an energy supply.
But the biggest reservoirs are deep, saline aquifers that underlie the Midwest, the Southeast and places like the Central Valley, some as ancient as the emergence of multi-cellular organisms and plants on the Earth and many times saltier than the ocean.
Those underwater seas are big and numerous enough to hold at least 100 years worth of U.S. emissions from all large stationary sources, from refineries to power plants to steel factories.