Global Warming: The Sky is Falling

Lubos is flacking for an improbable sounding global warming scenario propounded by Vladimir Shaidurov here.

His theory, posited with no quantitative content and only the vaguest suggestion of a mechanism, is that the comet that exploded about six miles above Tunguska Russia in 1908 started the current period of global warming. This, supposedly, triggered unspecified changes in the mesosphere leading to global warming. This trend was temporarily interrupted by water vapor injected into the stratosphere by nuclear and thermonuclear tests in the period 1945 - 1970 or so. He also suggests an ameliorative mechanism based on combustion of Hydrogen in the Mesosphere.

Such an idea is not entirely nuts, but it doesn't seem very likely either, especially in the absence of a mechanism for comet induced mesospheric changes. The effects of water vapor injected into the stratosphere by nuclear tests should be readily calculable though, and I would be surprised if they rival the effect of a medium sized volcanic explosion.

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