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[Zrk2]

a big enough gun could push the planet farther from the sun , dropping temperature and therefore decreasing sea level due to larger ice caps.

It may also crack open the crust and cause untold destruction.

If we're going to kill ourselves can we please do it this way?

[Frumple]

Well, with something big enough you could just vaporize enough water...

Don't think that would actually work... general system's closed enough flash frying chunks of the ocean shouldn't really get rid of much of the actual water, once the whole meteorology thing finishes up a cycle or two. It'd just rain like the bugger and we'd be back where we started, except probably worse.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah... I don't know what mainiac is reading, but the stuff I see is climate scientists so overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem that many are beginning to speak publicly about suffering from depression as a direct result of their work and feelings of hopelessness.  When questioned frankly outside the sterilized language of scientific papers, there's a lot of very apocalyptic language used.

[mainiac]

I don't know what mainiac is reading

Just the general sort of impression I got while an employee for the EPA.  Many neckties, not too many nooses.  People were a little worried about McCarthy before she came in but once she settled into the role, everyone was pretty optimistic about the agency and it's mission.

[RedKing]

a big enough gun could push the planet farther from the sun , dropping temperature and therefore decreasing sea level due to larger ice caps.

It may also crack open the crust and cause untold destruction.

Y'know, at this point I'm beginning to think orbital translation may be a more practical approach than anything else we've tried. Sure, we'd have to update the calendars to our new 400-day year, but just think! That could be a great sell to get big business onboard.

"You mean we get 35 more days we can squeeze out of our workers each year? And 35 more days to report earnings, so our quarterly statements would go up? Where do we sign??"

[mainiac]

My napkin math is probably horribly off here but I think we'd need to move the earth 2.5 million kilometers per degree of Celsius we want it cooler.  So unless we want an ice age it would only be a day or two added to the calendar.

Which is the only flaw I can find in your logic.  Only.

[Grim Portent]

Which is the only flaw I can find in your logic.  Only.

Wouldn't the energy requirements of it bake the entirety of the human race alive from waste heat? I'm no astrophysicist, but I'm pretty sure moving planets out of normal orbit is rather energy intensive. 

On the note of climate change causing societal collapse.

Not going to happen. Not in the developed world anyway. There's a whole heap of unexploited resources that won't be impacted much by the change in global weather patterns, energy technology gets more efficient every year and the changes will be gradual enough that the existing governments and corporations will be adjusting as it happens, though probably by accident and for pursuit of profit rather than anything else. Lots of things will be more expensive, but there's probably going to be a rise in wages to compensate, I doubt it will equal the rise in costs by any means, but it won't be enough to cause mass hysteria or deprivation (any more than already occurs, which varies across the developed world).

The developing world is going to be pretty hard hit though. They can't adjust to fluctuations in food production, weather patterns and similar things as easily due to the lower proliferation of technology and lacking the infrastructure to exploit unused resources as easily, and an uncomfortably large proportion of the human race lives in the developing world, so we could be looking at a huge amount of death and suffering overall. 

Of course, if we can keep technology advancing fast enough to keep pace with ecological changes then we could keep up the trend we've had for the past few decades with malnutrition and poverty declining in the developing world, which would help reduce the massive cost in human life that would result from famine in the countries without a good basis for subsistence farming.

[Bauglir]

Wouldn't the energy requirements of it bake the entirety of the human race alive from waste heat? I'm no astrophysicist, but I'm pretty sure moving planets out of normal orbit is rather energy intensive. 

That why we have to do it very fast. If the heat is released quickly enough, in a small enough region, the gradient between it and the surrounding area should be steep enough to drive other machinery. Since our goal is to vent the energy from the Earth's atmosphere, I recommend lasers, pointed directly at our least favorite celestial object.

[Frumple]

*blinks* Oh. Ah, no, if we're talking legitimately practical ways to turn back climate change a bit, we actually have the tech to cool the planet off some right here and right now, relatively easily. It's a little dirty -- would acidify rain a bit on pretty much a global scale -- but we could do it without much trouble and it would (probably) fuck things up significantly less than excessive warming would.

Sulfur, I think it was, injection into... some layer of the atmosphere, iirc? Locks up (or something along those lines) greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, at a pretty phenomenal ratio, and we have both the material access (sulfur is damn plentiful) and the means to get it where it needs to go readily available. Probably a few other methods beyond that. Doing it without some kind of tradeoff is currently impossible, but we've had a few engineering solutions/drastic measures available for something like a few decades now. Just, y'know, most organizations capable of enacting that sort of thing would rather try a bit harder to find a solution without the (same degree of) side effects.

[Frumple]

We're entirely aware it very specifically won't.

E: To clarify a bit, whatever is they can do with this particular technique is tried and tested (obviously on smaller scales) -- we know pretty much exactly what will happen if we got desperate enough to implement it. Its primary downside isn't "surprise unintended greenhouse gas" it's "acid rain freaking everywhere, me hearties", which is one of the reasons folks haven't exactly decided to use it preemptively -- world's still got a few degrees to go before it starts getting bad enough those kind of side effects are offset by letting things continue their course.

First we try social engineering and smaller scale technology changes in hope of slowing down and halting the problem sufficiently, then we go to inflicting several decades/centuries of acid rain upon ourselves :V

[Egan_BW]

I do love direct solutions.

[jaked122]

I like that this is what a political thread has turned into. A discussion about how a sufficiently large gun could destroy the earth.

Nicely done.

[Moghjubar]

Well, at this point its probably worth mentioning that technically it would be less destructive to just shoot everyone against combating global warming, but of course then we get Liberal Crime Squad.

[Frumple]

... hey, when you're talking about the country that outspends the next 20 on building bigger guns, you might as well talk about ways to use do it.

[Sheb]

Yeah, of course, injecting sulfur in the athmosphere won't do jack shit to prevent ocean acidification. My favourite technology is carbon capture on a massive scale by either fracturing some specific rocks or by seeding the oceans to cause algal blooms.