DUST IN YOUR EYES

But hold on: energy is not everything, and this writer certainly does not plan to be a Carl Sagan multiplied by minus one. For example, you need very little energy to light a match with which to blow up an ammunition dump. (An incidental interesting point which we will not use against Sagan: an ammunition dump is a very unnatural, man-made phenomenon of pent-up energy ready to be released; such imbalances are rare in nature and get redressed in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, not by anything as feeble as a few thousand megaton bombs.)

The Saganites manufacture the Nuclear Winter by using the dust kicked into the atmosphere, without recourse to radioactivity (they use that in separate rapes of physics). This, they lament, would so obscure the sun that plants could not make a living from photosynthesis, and the subzero "unbroken and deadly gloom would persist for weeks." Could it not be that the minuscule amount of the Sagan threshold, though unable to cause such a disaster directly, would suffice just to kick up the dust, and nature would then be diverted from its usual course on its own energy budget?

Alas, even on that count the Sagan Saga is out of luck, for we have experience with megatons of dust kicked up, too. When Mt. Tambora erupted in 1815 at a (conservative) 2,400 Sagan Thresholds, it ejected some 25 cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere; ash was encountered at sea for as long as four years afterward, and "climatologists rank the eruption as the greatest producer of atmospheric dust between 1600 and the present. The dust circled the earth in the high atmosphere for several years, reflecting sunlight back into space and thereby reducing the amount of it reaching the ground."(3)