We don’t exactly know where the tipping point towards a Venus Scenario is. We just know it’s somewhere past +12℃, and before +16℃.
And the problem isn’t so much that we will reach that temp - we will go extinct long before that point - but rather the warming process - with all of the feedback loops that it kicks off - will push the planet into a Venus Scenario.
So no. The planet is not fine. The “friction” of prior warming events that would slow its “inertia” - the slowly-migrating, slowly-adapting biospheres that continue to draw down CO2e - won’t have that capability this time around. It’s just all happening far too fast for them to migrate or adapt.
We have literally “cut the brakes” with the speed and inertia of the current warming we have created. And one very real consequence may be a dead planet with a superheated atmosphere.
Honestly, if we’re talking about mostly or completely surface blasts, and not atmospheric detonations, that might be what saves the planet.
Nuclear winter is very much a thing by how the thrown-up dust reflects most incoming light, and with most detonations being in cities, the kicked-up dust would contain plenty of iron… which is the major limiting factor of phytoplankton, the largest single converter of CO2 to O2. All it has to do is fall out of the atmosphere and into the oceans during the spring to summer. So we need a late winter or early spring nuclear war.
The planet is fine it’s the people who are fucked
We don’t exactly know where the tipping point towards a Venus Scenario is. We just know it’s somewhere past +12℃, and before +16℃.
And the problem isn’t so much that we will reach that temp - we will go extinct long before that point - but rather the warming process - with all of the feedback loops that it kicks off - will push the planet into a Venus Scenario.
So no. The planet is not fine. The “friction” of prior warming events that would slow its “inertia” - the slowly-migrating, slowly-adapting biospheres that continue to draw down CO2e - won’t have that capability this time around. It’s just all happening far too fast for them to migrate or adapt.
We have literally “cut the brakes” with the speed and inertia of the current warming we have created. And one very real consequence may be a dead planet with a superheated atmosphere.
Maybe we kick off a nuclear winter before we go out
Honestly, if we’re talking about mostly or completely surface blasts, and not atmospheric detonations, that might be what saves the planet.
Nuclear winter is very much a thing by how the thrown-up dust reflects most incoming light, and with most detonations being in cities, the kicked-up dust would contain plenty of iron… which is the major limiting factor of phytoplankton, the largest single converter of CO2 to O2. All it has to do is fall out of the atmosphere and into the oceans during the spring to summer. So we need a late winter or early spring nuclear war.