ZapperZ said:
May I ask what I did to offend you? I'm thinking you have the wrong idea about the purpose of this thread (the "fake news" and "alternative facts" comments suggest that), and if so, let me go ahead and clear that up. This is strictly educational in purpose. There are no other motivations whatsoever. If you want to know, the answer is NO I am NOT an "alt-right" person, and this has nothing at all to do with the Right's desire to increase nuclear armament (I'm not even a conservative to begin with, if that even matters).
It's a series of physics questions, and nothing more. One brought about by chance reading about the TNT equivalence of the dinosaur killing comet and comparison to the same output from nuclear weapons. Suddenly what I'd been taught my entire life (and blindly accepted, it's true) didn't make sense.Anyway, yes I looked for information before coming here. Unfortunately, my search skills were not sufficient enough to find information useful to me on the specific questions I have, for example: would smaller disturbances whose net TNT equivalence is relatively small but distributed globally (such as nuclear war) be more or less destructive to life and ecosystems than a more powerful but much more localized disturbance (such as a huge comet)? (one of your articles suggest distributed disturbances could be worse than a localized one, but gives nothing but a qualitative statement regarding that).
Hopefully this thread can move beyond whatever the heck occurred here in the first few posts and on to the topic. (A first for me here... usually my threads have not annoyed people I'm seeking info from, and usually they have patiently directed me to what I wanted to know)While I appreciate the ease with which you found articles, regarding them:
https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/6714529
^I won't be able to access that paper until next year. But thanks for the effort.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v308/n5954/abs/308021a0.html
^Thanks but sadly again I can't read more than the abstract.
http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro202/TTAPS2_SciAm84.pdf
^This one is actually pretty useful to my questions. Unfortunately, it says there is no straight forward way to compare volcanic eruption dust cover to nuclear war, and little about the comparison between nuclear war and comets. It does, however, actually answer directly a question I asked regarding localized versus widespread disturbances. Also, it was informative on estimates of possible dust cover based on degree of nuclear war. It says the height of dust is dependent on the yield of the weapons.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JD094iD01p01127/full
^Again sadly I won't have access until next year. The abstract is promising, but I wonder if it's going to tell me more than "nuclear winter is the likely result of nuclear war."
Summarizing the best article you posted (http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro202/TTAPS2_SciAm84.pdf)
with respect to the questions I had, in case someone stumbles upon this thread wanting to learn, based on what I understood of it (since again, I only made this thread because I wanted to learn):
1. Optical depth of an aerosol can serve as an indicator of it's climatic effects.
This has relevance to comparisons to volcanoes, since according to the article, while their particle size is idea for causing havoc in the local climate, the optical depth is relatively low. Also it has relevance to comets, as their optical depth of their dust is very high, according to the article.
2. The article also answers in the affirmative that spread out disturbances could cause more problems than localized ones of equal net energy.
3. The article provides a clue regarding my most pertinent question: how does nuclear war compare to a large comet. The largest
optical depth provided in this article for nuclear war scenarios is 10, while it mentions that the optical depth of dust from a comet could be as much as 1,000 for a short period of time. This suggests to me that a large comet could be much worse.
It also says that the longer the optical depth is obtained, the more likely a new climate equilibrium will be reached. The article also states that the time the particles are at a high optical depth is dependent on the height. However I didn't notice it going into much detail regarding what differences there might be from particles expelled from a comet versus nuclear wars.
This article states that they only considered one dimensions in this analysis, unfortunately. It suggests future studies might give better and more precise results. While it was useful, because it certainly offered some clues, I'm wondering if maybe my simple questions are ones that aren't known entirely. At least based on this article (which is old).
4. Widespread fires would alter the albedo, and I doubt that a single giant comet impact would have widespread fires like a global nuclear conflict.
Conclusions relative to the original question:
*By at least one variable, a comet would be far worse than nuclear war (optical depth of dust cloud).
*However, many small disturbances could be worse than one large one of equal energy.
*There is a lot more that needs to be studied on this topic (at least with respect to the article you posted that answered the most questions).
Anyway, thanks for the articles.