[halsap21 (OP)]

Could any of these help climate change: floating large balloons around which were coated in something that absorbs some of the CO2.
have say a 100's of oil tanker size ships full with water take them to the North or South Pole then let the water out and somehow rebuild the Ice caps. With the deserts use 100's of oil tanker size ships full with water then dump this in the Sahara or the deserts of the world.
Get the Americans to farm with smaller sized fields like we do in the UK.
maybe a bit mad but we do need to take big steps to sort it out.
be interested to know if any of could be used.
Regards Lee

[another_someone]

While there remain more questions than answers, even about whether global warming exists (although it probably does), let alone the causes of it, it seems unlikely that we can have simple solutions; furthermore, any experiment that we undertake that is powerful enough to change the Earth's climate will almost certainly have significant unanticipated side effects of equal magnitude.

Yes, we might be able to absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere (I would advise against trying to float such a thing up in a balloon, because that will take energy itself - but plants do it quite well at ground level).  The problem is that once we have that CO₂, what do we do with it, and where do we get the energy from to do it with (plants get their energy from sunlight - so we could try and built synthetic plant life to do the same thing, although other's might argue we may as well use the natural one's we have).

Not sure what you would wish to achieve with the water in the sahara?

Are you talking about fresh water (which presently is in short supply, unless you are thinking of tapping into the massive amount of fresh water locked up in the ice of the Arctic and Antarctic - but removing ice from there would have its own consequences).

Using salt water would not be helpful for the limited amount of life that already exists in the deserts, and it would likely pollute their limited fresh water supplies.

If there was a way of flooding the desserts, then you would cool the local environment through the evaporation of water, but then what happens to the water vapour after that is crucial.  Water vapour can in some circumstances help reflect sunlight back out into space, and so further cool the planet, but in other circumstances it can be an even more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂.

Smaller farms are certainly valuable for wildlife conservation (although farms in the UK have also gotten bigger, but will never become the size of US farms because we simply do not have the space), but I am not aware that smaller farms do anything specifically with regard to global warming.

[halsap21 (OP)]

Thanks for your reply you obviously know your science. We must have to get better at desalination I think it is called so we have got more water to go round. with the US it just seems that maybe it would somehow change the air currents so they behaved differently. Our ancesters did amazing things in the 1600's-1700's creating shelters belts like you see at heligan and other large gardens. (hopefully this isn't complete rubbish)
regards Lee

[paul.fr]

The problem with desalination is the energy cost. Energy use requirements for desalination plants are high. For example, an estimated 50 million kWh/yr would be required for full-time operation of the City of Santa Barbara's desalination plant to produce 7,500 AF/yr of water (acre-feet per year )

[dentstudent]

Our ancesters did amazing things in the 1600's-1700's creating shelters belts like you see at heligan and other large gardens. (hopefully this isn't complete rubbish)

Could you explain what you mean about shelter belts and helping climate change? Shelter belts in this case are lines of trees and shrubs planted in such a way as to reduce and deflect the wind in order to protect more vulnerable areas. On a very local basis, this of course can be said to affect "climate", but it's more of a micro-climate than perhaps the issue in question. I'm happy to answer any tree related issues!