1 tone of (combustible) artifacts per every person in on Earth—went up in smoke—would be the same mass. A very unrealistic assertion—but still nothing like “decade of nuclear winter”.
5 cubic kilometres of material is very vague measure. What matters is the mass of tiny particles that stay airborne for significant length of time and get significantly high in atmosphere, and those are small fraction of the total ejected material (almost all of which falls out nearby).
Also, even though you personally don’t own a lot of (combustible) asphalt, your city does. And even though you don’t keep tons of gasoline, coal, etc. your car does, over its lifetime. There is a lot of combustible stuff per person, it’s just that we delegate it’s storage to other people. You have electricity powering your pc, that means there is a big powerplant out there that you got to count, and rest of infrastructure.
Here http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs113-97/ they say, the Pinatubo ejected 5 cubic kilometers of ash into the air.
1 tone of (combustible) artifacts per every person in on Earth—went up in smoke—would be the same mass. A very unrealistic assertion—but still nothing like “decade of nuclear winter”.
5 cubic kilometres of material is very vague measure. What matters is the mass of tiny particles that stay airborne for significant length of time and get significantly high in atmosphere, and those are small fraction of the total ejected material (almost all of which falls out nearby).
Also, even though you personally don’t own a lot of (combustible) asphalt, your city does. And even though you don’t keep tons of gasoline, coal, etc. your car does, over its lifetime. There is a lot of combustible stuff per person, it’s just that we delegate it’s storage to other people. You have electricity powering your pc, that means there is a big powerplant out there that you got to count, and rest of infrastructure.