Imagine standing outside in sunlight. Above the clouds in the course of the sun is a faint band a bit wider than the sun. Specks, motes. Thousands of them. Across the band some glitter, some are dark - like dark specks. Those covering the sun are almost all dark. If you carefully look at them through a filter that let's you see the sun's disk, you can make out a fuzzy outline not too unlighy the continents, with a few extra spots in between. Earth has a ring. An artifical one, much wider than the ones Saturn has - more like a ribbon, actually. The motes are each large flat reflective surfaces. Flat disks made of reflective plastic films. Microns thick with as much area as is practical to make launch and unfold at scale. They orient themselves using current flowing around their rim using electricity generated from solar power on their main body. The current in the rims orient them relative to earth's magnetic field. They also act like solar sails when needed, using solar wind for minor maneuvering and they use small micro ion drives for positioning. Each is a pixel. It can reflect sunlight completely away from the surface of the earth. Or to a targeted spot on it. They can match their rotation to their orbit and cast a variable shadow: from a slim wisp to their full area. All in all. All of them together can dim the sunlight falling on the earth by up to 2%, but with precise control per region. Many targeted on the same spot can boil (or slowly evaporate) large bodies of water or heat large volumes of air within specific control. They can be weapons. Terrible ones: melting metal and rock for small focused regions. But mostly they are tools - gardening tools. Weather, and more importantly climate is something that they are used to steer. After wrecking the sort of balance we found when we started here we were responsible for establishing a new balance.
Most of their work is reducing the incident solar radiation falling on the earth's surface. They dim the radiant energy on the surface in line with the current climate control program. For the continents they mostly just reduce incoming energy. Over the ocean some areas are dimmed less to help cloud formation. This extends their influence immensely as we then increase the earth's albedo using the extra cloud cover, reflecting a lot more light than ocean does. They fiercely shield whatever glaciers we could save. The ones on the night side are used for controlled lighting in a few cases. The baby drone-planted forests are sometimes given extra sunlight. And a few cities are given the occasional extra light when safe. The ones not positioned for blocking sunlight focus light and heat to manage weather systems. Parts of the garden's weather systems can be managed. On the one side of a continent clouds are formed by heating the ocean. These clouds are shielded and shepherded through shielded corridors and allowed to condense and rain in the interior. In places large inland water bodies were made. In other places river like canals were melted through rock. The natural forests and areas we could save are given special status:Bonsai, and we try to keep them vaguely in line with what they originally were, at great cost. But much desert is farmable and a lot of previously rough terrain is being manicured. Some spots of the garden are never tame and recalcitrantly fights back. There is a degree of success in using them to manage ocean currents, but it's difficult and doesn't always work. They don't have the strength and finesse required to do that at scale. We need other tools for that. Wind currents are easier. They follow simple temperature gradients and with trial and error and a lot of computer modeling these are mostly directly managed. Weather is at a coarse (and often fine) level controllable within the constraints set by climate regulation control. A new stable balance against the current level of atmospheric composition can be maintained - within reasonable constraints. We still need to spend decades or centuries cleaning up our carbon dioxide mess. New forests, huge atmosphere altering factories and sublimation pits help, but it is a long term project.