= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Thomas comments on [LINK] Nuclear winter: a reminder - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (48)
A volcano ash is often black. The mass of already mentioned Pinatubo's dust, exceeds the mass of all human artifacts on the planet. If everything we have, go in smoke, it has less mass than the said dust, airborne in 1991.
Now you're just making stuff up. According to this http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Mt.+Pinatubo's+cloud+shades+global+climate.-a012467057 , there were 20 million tons of SO2 ejected into the atmosphere. The number of cars in the world is about 800 million cars on the road http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile, mass about 1.5 tons, so we're ahead on those alone. Even if we're generous, and include the "10 billion metric tonnes (10 cubic kilometres) of magma" in Pinatubo (most of which is not relevant for the current discussion), I haven't started counting the trucks and trains and the 300 000 tons super tankers, all the smaller ships, the roads and the railways, etc... We'll reach 10 billion tons long before we have to start counting the largest mass in human artifacts: the buildings.
Here http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs113-97/ they say, the Pinatubo ejected 5 cubic kilometers of ash into the air.
1 tone of (combustible) artifacts per every person in on Earth - went up in smoke - would be the same mass. A very unrealistic assertion - but still nothing like "decade of nuclear winter".
5 cubic kilometres of material is very vague measure. What matters is the mass of tiny particles that stay airborne for significant length of time and get significantly high in atmosphere, and those are small fraction of the total ejected material (almost all of which falls out nearby).
Also, even though you personally don't own a lot of (combustible) asphalt, your city does. And even though you don't keep tons of gasoline, coal, etc. your car does, over its lifetime. There is a lot of combustible stuff per person, it's just that we delegate it's storage to other people. You have electricity powering your pc, that means there is a big powerplant out there that you got to count, and rest of infrastructure.