How to Destroy Life on a Planet in 3 easy steps.
First you must discover how to use nuclear fission for bombs and generation of electricity.
Second step is to spread the radioactive products all over the planet’s surface environment, that is; the water, ground, and throughout the lower and especially the upper atmosphere.
Third step is simply to wait. While you are waiting, it will help to speed up the project if you increase the radioactive contamination in the environment to a level as high as possible.
What will happen and why.
When there is sufficient amount of radioactive material in the environment, the disintegrating nuclei will emit enough alpha, beta, and gamma radiation that will, in turn, irradiate all available atoms in the environment. The radioactively irradiated atoms will have gained energy from the alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, any kinetic energy increase of atoms and molecules can be considered as increase of their heat content. Hot molecules move faster than cold molecules, and global scale heating of air molecules will have various effects on the atmosphere. The resulting climate changes will be inconvenient but the real danger will come at the point when the quantity of nuclear disintegrations will be sufficient to accelerate the upper atmospheric molecules into space, when that happens and the molecules do not come back, then the atmospheric density will decrease and the climate changes will become more pronounced. Eventually the atmospheric condition will be reached where it will be very difficult if not impossible to be in the sunshine without special clothing, the sun’s rays will be very intense because the thin atmosphere will not filter the sun’s rays. The thin atmosphere will have the opposite effect at night and in the winter, letting the thermal energy radiate into space with very little of it being trapped in the atmosphere.
Then on the other hand; perhaps the greenhouse gasses will save the planet by trapping the sun’s rays and keeping the ground warm enough to grow food.
Questions to ponder about.
1) How much mass has been converted to energy during our nuclear age?
2) What has happened to all the energy that was converted from the mass of all the nuclear reactions, during our nuclear age?
Radioactive decay.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/radact.html
Cold weather and snow in Florida and Texas, very hot in Australia, these will become common occurrences in the future years, in fact as time goes by, the temperature extremes will become worse; that is, if the laws of physics remain true.
Cold weather in US January 2014
http://weather.aol.com/2014/01/28/early-week-polar-plunge-could-be-winters-coldest/
http://t.news.ca.msn.com/world/us-deep-south-hit-by-deep-freeze-ice-and-snow
Hot weather in Australia January 2014
http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/tennis/25724815