How fast could a climatic change forced by a civilization happen?
A Civilization with semi advanced Technology should be able to start climatic changes on a earth like Planet (same land mass to water surface ratio).
What would the fastest way be and How?
Some little restrictions:
No radiation, no burning down of all the forests, no burning of resources at all (electric based transportation) and no Magic. The Planet should be intact after the treatment and while the treatment is in progress it should be possible to live on it in some fortificated places to observate the Progress. Fauna and Flora are doomed but will be replaced after.
Definition of "advanced Technology": Normal energy resources like Atomic Power Plants and Solar technology. No fancy stuff like Fusion. But the civilization is able to build massive Buildings (up to some km in height). Space travel is established so there are also power sources in orbit.
Start Point: -10C° ~ 10C° at equator. -40C° everywhere else (poles are not relevant)
End Point: about 20C° to 30C° everywhere and blue sky afterwards (so no massive cloud factory).
TL;DR : A Icy planet transformed in a caribic summer vacation post card shoot in the fastest possible way.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/11580. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Volcanoes
This is the way that comes to mind first. Drop bombs in every volcano you can find, empower full enough to cause an eruption, and detonate them simultaneously.
This does obviously have its difficulties: it is probably quite hard to stop a bomb detonating once it's in lava. The alternative is you schedule all the drops for the same time. As long as they are reasonably close together it shouldn't matter too much.
This works because when the volcanoes erupt they'll produce huge ash clouds which can cause climate change by blocking the sunlight. A quick google search for volcanic winters should bring up plenty of these - an ash cloud can easily block out sunlight for a month or two, by which time most plant life is dead and thus other life can't support itself.
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