Albert Zijlstra, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester, suggests shifting Earth further back from the sun by about three million miles.
At the moment, Earth is orbiting the sun at a distance of 93 million miles (150 million km) but this needs to extended to at least 96 million miles (155 million km), he says.
This movement would extend a year to 380 days, meaning we'd have to insert an extra 15 days into a calendar year somewhere.
Professor Zijlstra's concept for moving Earth away from the sun would involve a gravity assist or 'slingshot' manoeuvre, commonly used already for speeding up spacecraft after they've been launched from Earth.
By approaching a planet, such spacecraft can make use of the planet's gravitational pull to increase its velocity, which in turn makes the planet itself slow down slightly in its orbit.
And as we know, due to the laws of physics, as a planet slows down, it moves closer to the sun.
It's a little-known fact that gravitational slingshots can also be used to reduce the speed of the spacecraft, which have the opposite effect on the planet, speeding it up in its orbit.
And when the planet speeds up in its orbit, it drifts further away from the sun.
This is the basic concept on which the project would work, but instead of a spacecraft (which would be much too small) Professor Zijlstra suggests using a massive asteroid – about 30 miles (50 km) in diameter, the size of a major city.
He proposes somehow altering the orbit of the asteroid while it's still in space, perhaps by nudging it with a robotic probe at a certain angle and speed.
If nudged successfully, the asteroid would do a loop around the sun and head back towards Earth, before slingshotting itself on Earth's orbit.
'Do this once every thousand years, and over a billion years we can move the Earth enough to keep its temperature constant while the sun brightens.'
Professor Zijlstra stresses that there are two types of global warming to contend with.
The first, which is well-publicised, is caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, such as burning fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, the second, less well-known form of global warming involves the natural brightening of the sun, which, as it stands, will make Earth too hot to live on in around one billion years.
Professor Zijlstra says 'This concept is not a solution to the current, human-caused global warming. It takes much too long to help us now – we need to solve human-caused global warming in other ways. But it will solve the long term changes in the sun.'