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Wouldn't the reflectivity degrade almost immediately, as dust landed on said painted surface?

Geo-engineering is an extremely flawed way to approach the climate change problem, for a million reasons including this one.

The Nazi’s had an idea of launching a sun gun (Sonnengewehr) made of sodium metal I think. It would then fry the Allies with focused sunbeams. They were also on meth by the way.

However maybe we could build a bunch of similar mirrors in the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point (reflecting light straight back at the Sun of course!)

A few trillion small reflective solar sails (for station keeping) at L1 would do it[1]. Someone should tweet at musk to get approximate launch costs for that.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

That number sounds nuts but it only adds up to 20 million tonnes. Actually, that sounds even more nuts.

But if you can grab the 20 million tons from asteroids, maybe it's achievable.

Naturally you paint a few million floating balls and throw them into the ocean!

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