From a reader:

Well, couple things. Nit picky, and not one of your nits anyway, but I think Earth’s albedo is 0.39. Maybe the land masses are 0.29, but the actual number’s less important than the spirit of the thing. Where to start? It’s kinda rambling, but here’s some things you might want to noodle. James Lovelock, the Gaia dude, prophesied that Mother Gaia will start to cover her surface with dark poppies or suchlike to counteract the coming ice age (yeah, I read the Gaia Hypothesis way back when we were doomed to a frozen, wintery, snowball-like future). If Mother Gaia can manipulate global climate by engineering darker plants, by golly we can make ‘em whiter. Indeed, every percent of increased albedo can do some good. We don’t need to engineer plants that will grow and create a mat of 0.10 albedo. Just a few percent below 0.39, over larger areas is feasible. The laws of unintended outcomes could easily come into play with painting roofs though – large concrete metropoli actually affect local weather somewhat, since they’re huge storage radiators. If you reflect radiation (hopefully, if successful, it’ll ne a LOT of radiation), you’ll reduce the storage effect, although I think you’d have to go quite some way before you made the city less of a radiator than the countryside. The microclimatologists would have to look carefully at places like California where onshore breezes are vital to inland agriculture, and the idea of passing more sunlight back up thru’ the pollution could cause problems. Although the further degradation of air quality in SoCal would be a small price to pay to save the planet, IMHO. In overall terms, changing the albedo progressively over the course of a decade or so sounds like the kind of process that would be relatively straightforward to control, and at least as easy to monitor as watching polar bears drown. And, if it doesn’t work, all we’re out is a couple million tons of whitewash. The only question is whether whitewashing roofs is work Americans Will Not Do (TM). From the article, I’d link the libertarian method of adoption to a modest tax-credit system that put money, even if only a few dollars, in people’s pockets to thank them for saving the planet. I think Milton would approve. The odd thing about the ‘darker ice’ issue is that it’s not really news to geologists. They’ve been using some of these deposits to correlate volcanic events. What they haven’t been doing is going out socializing with the environmental guys who see *other* strata of ‘darker ice’ as an indicator of increasing pollution. I’m sure there’s some kind of message there. Lastly, more a geeky fantasy fiction/counterculture thing. Be careful bandying ‘Gorean’ around, although I suspect Tigerhawk is well aware of the subplot here. There’s a whole community of people who love the ‘Gor’ Fantasy Fiction series by a guy named John Norman. Cutting to the chase, it’s a sort of Barbaric Lake Wobegone where all the men are heavily muscled, beloinclothed and coated in baby oil, and all the women are chained, subservient sex-toys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorean The problem now is that I *have* now merged the Gorean/Al Gore think in my mind. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sleep again.