A massive carbon footprint

[polaris93]

During a discussion about future possibilities, an acquaintance of mine and I got to talking about nuclear war. My friend brought up Carl Sagan's work predicting that a killing-cold nuclear winter would follow such a war. I reminded him that since a nuclear war would target most major cities in the world, as a result of the burning of those

Comments

[jordan179]

That's a good point. Also, the asteroidal winter was in fact followed by global warming in the Early Paleocene, and then massive global warming in the Late Paleocene (I wonder if the methane burp was a delayed reaction to the mass extinction event -- perhaps it came from biomass killed at the KT and took millions of years to come to the ocean surface).

And yeah, that would be really bad for the survivors. The only solution I can think of offhand would be for them to deploy orbital shades, and that's currently beyond our infrastructure and a little beyond our technology.

[polaris93]

And, of course, after a nuclear war it would be impossible to deploy orbital shades, so you'd have to do it beforehand -- and then everyone would wonder what you were up to with that . . .

[jordan179]

I'm thinking that a country not involved in the war might deploy the shades after the war. Or a victorious Power in the war, if its defenses were good enough that it still had orbital launch capability after the counterstrike.

But as I said this is beyond our current technology. Frustratingly, it's not that far beyond it, but it is beyond it.

[polaris93]

Yep. Otherwise we should be doing that now, to stave off global warming already occurring.