> On Oct 27, 2015, at 7:08 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> So . . .
>
> What about when the now-very-much-cooler-than-normal planet comes back OUT of the particle cloud, into full sunlight?
>

It warms up; slowly, if there are oceans large enough to spawn huge hurricanes.

Water is a HUUUUUGE heat sink; it takes decades or centuries to heat it up (we’ve been working hard on it for about a hundred years, burning up millions of years worth worth of decomposed carbon-sink forest, and converting it to CO2) and it’s “only” raised the global temperatures about ten degrees.  However that’s enough to start altering the rate and size of hurricanes.

The effect of an extended blackout would be the opposite; it would start cooling the planet and the biggest issue would be the ‘nuclear’ winter effect on plant life. Native life would have certainly evolved to cope; non-native plants (like human crops) would not fare so well. Coming back out would likely wake up the native life that might well start growing at an accelerated rate to take advantage of the newly opened forest and nutrrients of everything that died during the ‘long night’.

Imagine if just as the beleaguered settlers were able to start planting crops again, everything native starts growing like kudzu on steroids.

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs