Title text:
Once you add the balloons into the model, it makes forecasting easier overall--the forecast is always 'cold and dark, with minimal solar-driven convection.'
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3107/
It looks like the dart took out about a half dozen lights and a dozen people in about two seconds, so let's say 10 strikes per second. At that rate it would take 10^11 seconds to pop a trillion balloons. That's more than 3000 years!
Of course I did say "make a tiny dent," but even to eliminate 0.1% of the balloons would take the dart 3 years. One trillion is a number that we use a lot, for example talking about the US national debt, but it is not an ordinary number that lends itself to intuitive understanding. Even a billion is hard to grasp intuitively.
Let's just light the atmosphere on fire. Sounds like the quickest solution. Surely there can't be any downsides.