If the sun stopped shining today with the extra heat trapping CO2, how many days would it take to freeze over?

Question

With these two questions I want to know if the extra man-made CO2 has the capacity to conserve energy on a planetary scale for a millisecond, an extra day, a week or more. I know it is an estimate. I am just curious as to how strong the CO2 influence is considered to be.

By freeze over lets just say land based water or fresh water.

Answer 1

Depends on what you mean by freeze over.

But not many. Consider it to be similar to night. Temperatures drop 10-30 degrees F (depends mostly on humidity) until the dew point is reached.

Then water precipitates out (often as fog). That process releases heat (a whole lot of it) and holds temperature pretty constant for a while.

When enough water gets squeezed out that way, the temperature will fall again. Things will start to ice over in a few days. Maybe several.

The oceans will take a while to freeze solid.

CO2, of course, doesn't generate heat. It simply holds a little bit more heat from the Sun close to Earth. More CO2, more heat held in.

EDIT - I understand a bit better. CO2 wouldn't change the rate of cooling enough to matter. The way CO2 works is to hold just a bit more (1% of the total? less?) of the energy of the Sun close to the Earth. Switching off the Sun would be a much much larger change.

People have a hard time understanding how 400 parts per million of CO2 is so powerful. The answer is that it leverages the Sun. It's like judo.

Answer 2

It would take you about 8 minutes after the sun stopped for you to even know. Then darkness.

The Earth's atmosphere has some capacity to hold in heat but not much of one. A relatively simple calculation would show that the Earth's surface temperature would drop by a factor of two about every two months if the Sun were shut off. The current mean temperature of the Earth's surface is about 300 Kelvin (K). This means in two months the temperature would drop to 150K, and 75K in four months. To compare, the freezing point of water is 273K. So basically it'd get too cold for us humans within just a few weeks. Some bacteria seem to be capable of surviving at extremely cold temperatures in space, so there would probably still be some limited bacterial life left on Earth. But anything else would die pretty quickly (even the rats :).

We could probably survive if we went deep underground where the Earth's internal heat is higher or if we built totally isolated habitation domes, but at the moment I don't think we're capable of something like that on any appreciable scales.

Answer 3

Depends on what you mean by "freeze over". Inland locations would likely drop below freezing in a couple of days. Just look at how quickly the temperature drops at night. The oceans (and adjoining coastlines) might take a couple of months to freeze over completely.

Answer 4

This is a good question. It points out the significance of the sun's impacts on the climate.

Perhaps we should learn more about it before put all our eggs in one basket concerning AGW.

Answer 5

The Sun is not responsible for the warmth on Earth. Only man is.

The extra thick blanket (400ppm) of co2 will soon reach the tipping point. Once we reach that tipping point, the Earth just continually heats up on its own.