Ole Doc Brown only needed 1.21 gigawatts.
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This is a milder version of an idea I first read about in “The Ministry For The Future”, which I highly recommend.
The idea in the book was to use oil rigs to bore through the ice and pump out encroaching seawater onto the top of the ice. As pointed out in the book, to be effective, the idea needs a lot of rigs and a lot of money.
But this is the science of mitigation, which is a sticking-plaster, although a much-needed one, while we hopefully tackle the larger problem of carbon production.
Oh, look, my glass is half-full. 
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Ministry of the Future is a great book. What I really appreciate about it, is his optimism and laying out a plausible path that includes both changing our energy systems, grassroots activism (both peaceful and violent), and these sorts of pie in the sky type plans…
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I liked the bits about drones and private jets… 
Joking aside, I wish some of the Powers That Be were made to read this, or something similar.
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I’m sure some did, and some will come away with the exact wrong lesson from it, sadly. Seems to be a running theme these days, looking at sci-fi and coming away with the exact wrong idea! Like, all these people who think that cyberpunk books were handbooks! 
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That’s just inspiring despair. I’ve lived in a few of the cities they mention that are pedestrian and bicycle oriented and it was really, really nice.
I now live in the 
poster-city for “car dependence”.
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Too late!
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Well, it’s true, given a million years or so to recover, the world will be fine. It will be lacking in a certain upright hairless ape who got too big for its britches, but it will, eventually, be fine. Somehow, I find that less reassuring than I guess I am supposed to.
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I think her main argument is not that things are going to be fine for us, but that we expect silver bullets to these problems, and by doing so, we’re refusing to do anything, which is going to lead to a worse outcomes for us in the short term. It’s the “let’s not make perfect the enemy of the good” and I don’t think she’s wrong on that. We’re not all going to be driving electric cars or eating vegan over night. She also argues that the biggest bang for our buck is on the large scale - decarbonizing our electric grid and making changes to our food production on a systemic level.
She points out that we’re wallowing in pessimism, because the problem seems to big, rather than making more incremental changes that gets us where we want to go in the long run…
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Sorry, but from what I have seen looking at the other mass extinction events, I don’t believe a million years will be at all enough for biodiversity to recover. Make it a dozen – and of course with the usual caveat that some clades will be replaced by others, because the dead do not come back.
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“we”?
Oh sorry… MANY PEOPLE… better?
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Per my mentor, who is so smart it scares me:
‘The world’ itself will be just fine; it has survived at least 7 extinction level events.
Everything that’s living on the surface of the planet, however? That’s another story…
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