Volcanoes will cool us?

We all know that a supervolcano eruption would bring us back to ice age or something like that.

We also know that there are active volcanoes now and that there always will be active volcanoes.

How active and how many of them should there be to stop the global warming and keep us in status quo?

I have no idea.
We can't control volcanoes so I don't know how this would help us out in global warming.

Of course we cannot control volcanoes...

What I had in mind is that if a few volcanoes, or one big one, erupt, and send enough ash into the atmosphere, we may not need to worry about the global warming. This would be a natural protection from global warming.

We cannot predict such events, but volcanoes may have helped Earth in the past.

Idea #2: One big natural catastrophy may prevent Nuclear war...who will want to go to war after a natural disaster...?

Originally posted by swimmer
We all know that a supervolcano eruption would bring us back to ice age or something like that.

It's not that easy, actually. There are several different types of eruptions (including 'volcano blows its own top off'). One type of eruption doesn't throw ash into the air (causing cloudiness and cooling) but sulfur dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas and warms things up.

To make things really cool, they have to throw ash for many years. The Siberian Traps and Deccan Traps erupted for about a million years each. The big volcanos in Big Bend National Park area (here in Texas) were throwing thick clouds of ash for thousands of years.

How active and how many of them should there be to stop the global warming and keep us in status quo?

I don't know, but we really wouldn't want to live on a planet with constant ash fallout. For one thing, it'd kill a lot of plants and animals and we'd have even more problems.

Byrd's right the stuff that comes out of one of those is quite nasty. Besides who do we get to go stuff a nuke down a volcano's throat to get it to spew! Never mind, bad fall out.
A similar option would be to take the scrubbers off of coal fired power plants to allow the Ash to fly like in the better part of 1900s. One possibility would be to create a synthetic cloud that dissipated after a few days. Once a month we fill the mesosphere with theatrical smoke completely harmless but enough to reflect some of the solar radiation. Plants would just think is was an overcast day and rest for a while.