Scientists have put forward their ideas on how global warming can be tackled without cutting carbon emissions.

To maintain current lifestyles, humanity has no choice but to release more and more greenhouse gases.

We burn gas to keep our cars running, pump oil to make sure our iPods can be charged and our apartments air conditioned. We need power to maintain farms that provide the fried eggs and bacon for our breakfasts and the roast beef for our dinners. The problem is: it’s heating up the planet, or so we’re told.

But scientists are now telling us there are ways to cool the Earth without curbing emissions. In the end it’s sunlight that makes temperatures rise, so let’s fight the sunlight.

Hashem Akbari from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California has suggested a novel way to take on the sun. He proposed that the rooftops and roads of the 100 biggest cities in the world be painted white.

Vladimir Kremlev for RT. Click to enlarge.

According to his calculations, this would increase the amount of sunlight reflected by Earth by 0.03 percent and cancel out the effect of 44 billion tonnes of carbon emissions.

“Roofs are going to have to be changed one by one and to make that effort at a very local level, we need to have an organisation in place to make it happen,” Akbari told the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

Modifying crops is another solution that can help reflect light back into space. Andy Ridgwell and his team from Bristol University in Britain have modelled how the change of plants’ reflexivity can vent off some heat. If crops reflected 20 per cent more sunlight it would reduce regional temperatures by 1°C in the summer. Over 100 years, the effect would equate to eliminating 195 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, their work published in Current Biology estimates.

Both scientists admit their solutions won’t solve the problem of global warming. But they say they may give us extra time to tackle it.

David Keith, an expert on climate and energy at the University of Calgary in Canada, argues that such climate fixes may discourage people from cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.

Other geo-engineering proposals aimed at reducing the quantity of sunlight that hits the Earth include gigantic space mirrors, releasing a lot of small silvery balloons, and pumping reflective dust into the upper layers of the atmosphere.