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Notes -
Back of envelope from another angle... SF6 is $5/kg, ~3x molar weight cf CO2. Mad scientist has $100B to play with, gets around 20M tons (ignoring that current global market for SF6 is $300M; probably not the biggest issue, plenty of S and F around), maybe 5M tons CO2 equivalent. 40B tons CO2 produced annually, gives us a factor of 8000. 24k/8k = you get 3 years worth of global warming from your $100B.
I'm surprised by how much bang for buck you get, but that's a pretty flaccid doomsday device. And you'd definitely attract attention anyway.
It's a fun problem, how to destroy all life. You only get one shot really; humans probably would be the most competitive vertebrate in most conditions and even probably most multicellular organisms, so if we can destroy ourselves, we probably have most other things covered. But you'd also want to wipe out anything that could conceivably evolve later on into something worthy of moral consideration, which seems insurmountable unless there's something like Ice-9 or a way to trigger a false vacuum collapse out there.
Also, if there's a good chance that extraterrestrial life is out there, isn't it our duty to first find and destroy them before ourselves, to save them from the vicissitudes of existence?
Damn I feel old, but -- you may be interested in the Usenet archive of the group alt.pave.the.earth and related alt.destroy.the.earth, which consist(ed) of engineering nerds endlessly hashing out this and related questions.
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