"Chris Handscomb"
wrote in message
...
From a scientific viewpoint, what would happen
if the sun just stopped
producing light and heat in an instant? What
would happen on the day and
night sides of the Earth respectively? How long
would it take for the Earth
to freeze - what would the lowest temperature
be? What would happen to the
weather systems in the atmosphere, how long
would it take for life to become
extinct? Would there still be electricity? For
how long? Forgetting about
the social and political aspects of it?

Anyone want to be curious about this and give
some answers?

A bit of guessing here, given some kind of cosmic
fire extinguisher thing......

Surface temperature would be below zero across the
whole surface of the earth within a few days. The
oceans hold an enormous amount of heat and what we
would probably recognise as weather systems would
continue until they froze to a great enough depth
to insulate what heat remains trapped below to
such an extent that there was little to
differentiate between frozen water and land (in
the order of 10's of metres, which would take
several months). Thereafter there would be little
meridonal flow (N-S/S-N). After a year or two or
three surface temperature would be 100K, or less
with little or no wind at the surface. Life as we
know it would have ceased, but some deep ocean
beasties may survive. I doubt access to
nuclear/fossil fuels would help us much. Some
bacteria may survive in deep freeze for millennia,
most gasses would have liquefied/solidified at
this kind of timescale, with temperature not far
off cosmic microwave background radiation values.

You could run a GCM (global circulation model) and
swich off the sun, there are a few avilable that
will run on a PC, but I don't think any that will
deal with the freezing of the oceans in a
resonable way.