Step off, Al Gore. I, with a little help from an eager group of atmospheric scientists, have found a quick fix to global warming. All we need is a handful of nuclear weapons! They can even be small ones!
Youre probably thinking that the heat is messing with my mind. A slew of studies released in the past few months, though, has confirmed that using nuclear weapons could significantly — perhaps even catastrophically — cool the planet.
This phenomenon was first studied towards the end of the Cold War, in the early 1980s. The idea was that the smoke and carbon particles released by fires (in turn caused by nuclear attacks on cities, where much of the world’s fuel is stored) could have similar cooling effects to those known to be caused by the ash released in major volcanic eruptions — only worse (due to physical and chemical differences between ash and smoke). A seminal study in 1983, often called TTAPS (after its authors), confirmed this hypothesis and coined the term “nuclear winter.“
Even using extremely crude modeling, TTAPS projected that a massive nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S. could cause catastrophic cooling in the continental interiors — a change of as much as –35 degrees C (-63 degrees F). For comparison, the last global ice age, at its peak, saw average global cooling of only –5 degrees C (-9 degrees F) — though the cooling at continental interiors would have been more drastic. Later studies concluded that these changes would persist for around 3 years.
Nuclear winter studies continued until 1990 and then ceased abruptly (presumably the end of the Cold War sucked the urgency out of the issue). This fall, however, Alan Robock of Rutgers University and some of his colleagues have published several new studies on nuclear winter — the first such studies in almost 20 years.
Climate models today — and the computers to run them — are considerably more sophisticated than those of the early 1980s. Using these improved models, Robock et al. confirmed that the nuclear winter theory holds, in general. The temperature effects for a massive nuclear exchange should actually be slightly less extreme than originally predicted, but according to the new model they would last for over a decade, rather than just for a few years.
Taking a completely new approach, one study also examined a scenario no one bothered to consider during the Cold War: a regional nuclear conflict. They found that massive, superpower-style nuclear exchanges are not required to force major climate change. Even a relatively small nuclear exchange between, say, India and Pakistan, could cause average global surface cooling of over 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) and peak cooling at continental interiors of around 4 degrees C (7 degrees F).
Interestingly, the studies found that the persistence of the climate changes did not depend on the size of the nuclear exchange. In other words, the climate effects from a regional nuclear war would last just as long as those from a global nuclear war, though they would be less extreme.
Recent modeling has also confirmed that nuclear exchanges will drastically reduce global precipitation, by as much as –45% for a massive superpower exchange and –10% for a regional exchange. In the former case, for instance, Northern Hemisphere monsoon seasons would disappear entirely.
These studies have weaknesses — for instance, they assume nuclear weapons will only target cities, where most smoke-generating fuel is gathered, rather than isolated military installations — but collectively they are a reasonable step towards updating the science of nuclear winter. After such a long hiatus, with nuclear proliferation looming in Asia and the Middle East, and even though nuclear winter itself is rather terrifying, I find it reassuring that long-neglected effects of nuclear weapons are being studied anew.
– Eric Hundman
(Special thanks to Haninah for the illustration!)
UPDATE 7:10 PM: Russell Seitz says the whole nuclear winter thing has been oversold.
UPDATE 01/05/06 4:25 PM: Eric rebuts the rebuttal, here.
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Mr. Plow eagerly awaits nuclear warLeave a ReplyBy commenting on this topic you agree to the terms and conditions of our User Agreement |
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yeah. I saw that new study. But for a very long time prior to that, my response to “global warming!” has been a soft reply of “nuclear winter”.….(loved the vindication of my
smart-aleck attitude)
only.…my thought has been.…not a small nuclear exchange between warring factions.…but how bout a deliberate, many sites, attempt at setting off volcanos using nukes inside of them?
DARPA.….eat your hearts out! heh heh
Climate engineering! I hope no one has the huberous to think they can accurately predict and modify the global climate (Art Bell aside). We will one day be able to do this, but not for a few hundred years. Unless one thinks that all the land masses will either be underwater or a desert (Al Gore), why even attempt such as dangerous and unpredictable effort, regardless of the tools we have?
I believe Carl Sagan dreamt up the “nuclear winter” and his end of life scenrio to scare people of nuclear war, so now we would use them to save life. Bad idea, there are better ideas to try, if you want to block some of the sun’s energy, and effectively “cool” the planet.
Just for the record–‘hubris’ not ‘huberous’. Had to think about it for about 20 seconds, though.
Glenn
8]
I suppose when the 12th Imam finally comes out of the well, and the fun kicks off between Iran and Israel we’ll get the chance to prove or disprove this little ditty.
Just so long as we don’t get to experience the THREADS movie as well!
Has anyone attempted to validate the nuclear winter hypothesis using data from the period around World War 2? If it’s correct, I would think that the massive bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan should’ve generated some perturbation in the climate.
How many MT of warheads were detonated on the surface of the planet during the period 1945–1955?
And how much of an impact did *that* have on the weather?
Sheesh.
Seitz bases his post on a *1986* piece he wrote for the National Interest claiming that the original nuclear winter model was incorrect — he finds vindication by comparing the original results to those in Robock’s new study (which he also claims is faulty) which shows much more modest results.
While the new study he cites does show a much more modest effect, this is primarily because it depicts a radically different scenario: 100 nukes exchanged between India and Pakistan, totaling ~1.5 MT, rather than hundreds or thousands of nukes between the USSR and USA, totaling 100 MT — 5000 MT.
Seitz appears to have ignored or failed to read a companion study (also by Robock et al) which *did* revisit the scenario examined in the original study he took issue with — and it found results similar, if not identical, to the original study, even using far more sophisticated models. He never mentions this in his blog post.
Note, for example, the figure Seitz has created. The curve he links to with “All that’s left of Sagan’s Big Chill today” and attempts to superimpose on the TTAPS curve is, again, drawn from the most recent model of a *regional* nuclear exchange — not the revisitation of the TTAPS scenario. It is, at the least, misleading to compare the two directly and it is certainly incorrect to conclude on that basis that the TTAPS results have been refuted.
Seitz also makes other incorrect claims. For instance, in paragraph 8, he says “they have tweaked the software to arbitrarily loft [soot] into the stratosphere.” So far as I can tell, the authors inserted the carbon into the upper *troposphere* and the model — which contains its own module to calculate aerosol particle behavior and seems to be widely accepted as one of the best and most accurate available — showed that the particles would be lofted into the stratosphere.
In communication, Seitz also claimed that the original TTAPS study, like the new study, modeled a “regional” exchange. In fact, the old study apparently did model one scenario it called a “regional” exchange (limited to Europe), but according to Seitz himself this exchange too involved 100 MT of total yield — nearly a factor of 100 greater than that examined in the new regional exchange study.
I am certainly not an atmospheric scientist (neither, by the way, is Russell Seitz), so I never intended to claim that the new studies are without flaws. But it doesn’t take an atmospheric scientist to see the fatal flaws in Seitz’s claims — all it takes is reading the studies.
Hundman’s piece is evidently uninformed by such contemporary critiques of TTAPS and its biological consequences as: Nuclear Winter Re-appraised” by Schneider & Thompson of the National Centerfor Atmospheric Research, which appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1986, and Kerry Emmanuel’s harsh criticism in Nature :, which referred to them as having become “notorious for their lack of scientific integrity. I think he went over the top– nuclear winter may not make the grade as what philosophers of language style ” a rigid designator in the set of real phenomena” but is a cautionary example of hype, not hoax.
If anything is fatally flawed, it is Hundman’s failure to acknowledge that the old and new studies quantitatively overlap in terms of the quantity of black carbon injected into the model atmospheres. In the models , that parameter is independent of the ‘war’ scenario whether realistic or absurd.The meltdown I refer to spans not just the 30 plus degree difference between the old results and the new , but the gross difference in the optical depth and the reduction in sunlight– ‘nuclear winter’ entered the language as an apt description of the aftermath of a million fold reduction in sunlight, not one of ten watts per square meter or less.
Many disciplines deem a two order of magnitude crack-up grounds for publishing a retraction– not this one — instead we are seeing stonewalling in defense of the original exercise in semantic aggression.Paul Crutzen got it right when he published the original hypothesis in 1983 under the rubric “Twilight at Noon.
Hundman is correct to chide me for referring to the 300 Mb elevation at which Robock et al inject black aerosols as ” the stratosphere” that is off by about 10–15% depending on latitude . I should have stuck to high as Mt Everest” as the metric for kicking mass upstairs in the face of gravity — but one example of why” you don’t have to be an atmospheric scientist” to understand why many of that fraternity are growing tired of the same old cohort stretching the limits of scientific –and strategic plausibility to delay the interment of the original snow job in the factoid cemetery alongside the “Energy Crisis” and the “Population Bomb.“
Hundman simply errs in characterizing my reprinting the 1986 article verbatim as a critique of the present papers — its subject is TTAPS, and it speaks for itself.
Though relieved at not being called an atmospheric scientist, my modest contributions to the study of the large scale generation and ( rarely) global atmospheric transport of dust and smoke were published under peer review in Nature and Naturwissenschaften in 1986 and 1988. My critique of Sagan’s Winter 1983 Foreign Affairs article appeared there in 1984. I hope Hundman reads it too.
May I also make a collegial suggestion to Eric– would he please prevail upon Robock & Co to display the first 400 days od _all_ of their time-temperature curves for _all_ of their’nuclear winter’ scenarios nicely drawn atop and to the identical scale as the famous TTAPS figure?
We’ll all feel better when they do.