A nuclear war would disrupt the global climate so badly that billions of people could starve to death, according to what experts are calling the most expansive modeling to date of so-called nuclear winter. Although the exact effects remain uncertain, the findings underscore the dangers of nuclear war and offer vital insights about how to prepare for other global disasters, researchers say....
Scientists have long known massive explosions can throw enough dust, ash, and soot into the air to affect the global climate. In 1815, Mount Tambora in what’s now Indonesia unleashed the largest known volcanic eruption in history. In the following months, its ash rose and spread worldwide, blocking enough sunlight to produce “the year without a summer”—a cold spell in 1816 that resulted in massive crop failures and famine across the globe.
For decades, scientists have warned a similar catastrophe could follow a nuclear war, as fires ignited by hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions would release millions of tons of soot, blocking sunlight and inducing global environmental effects. Worries about climate effects of nuclear warfare emerged soon after World War II, and studies took off during the Cold War.
Over the past decade, two pioneers of nuclear winter studies, Alan Robock and Brian Toon, have assembled a cross-disciplinary team of scientists to take the calculations further. They turned to the same climate models that underlie global warming studies—but used the models to simulate global cooling instead. “Now, we have the computational capacity to simulate these kinds of things in a sophisticated way,” says Jonas Jägermeyr, a climate change scientist, crop modeler, and team member at NASA and Columbia University.
So, how bad could it be? Pretty bad!
A few years after a nuclear war between the United States, its allies, and Russia, the global average calories produced would drop by about 90%—leaving an estimated 5 billion dead from the famine, the researchers report. A worst-case war between India and Pakistan could drop calorie production to 50% and cause 2 billion deaths. The team tried to simulate the impact of food-saving emergency strategies, such as converting livestock feed and household waste to food. But in the larger war scenarios, those efforts did little to save lives.
Baum urges caution in interpreting the estimates. Although the climate models are “excellent,” he says, there’s too much uncertainty in how humanity would react to such a global catastrophe to get an accurate read on the death toll. Still, the study “makes a very worthy contribution” to envisioning these scenarios, he adds.
It's interesting that some people are putting effort into envisaging how emergency food production might work, though:
The nightmarish prospects have already inspired others to look for ways to fight the hypothetical famine. David Denkenberger, who co-founded the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, is exploring ideas including scaling up “resilient foods” such as seaweed, repurposing paper factories to produce sugar, converting natural gas into protein with bacteria, and relocating crops to account for an altered climate. He and his research associate Morgan Rivers think those approaches could dramatically increase the amount of food available to humans. “Even if [a substitute] doesn’t taste as good as sweet corn, it’s better than starving,” he says.I don't know - maybe Soylent Green would actually happen in these circumstances? All very unpleasant to contemplate.
3 comments:
Deficit spending is worse than nuclear explosions in my view. But of course I can't quantify this. About this nuclear winter. This comes from Carl Sagan who was not much of a scientist really. What are the assumptions behind this? Its all about kicking up a lot of dust essentially. Why do we imagine that nuclear bombs would kick up that much dust? It cannot be compared to volcanoes because volcanoes belch out a lot of dust. But why would we assume that nuclear bombs would kick up a similar amount of dust?
I really just worry about my thyroid getting damaged by floating radioactive iodine. Strontium is a problem too but its heavier and doesn't carry as far. Nukes aren't as useful as people assume. What is a nuclear bomb? Its just a producer of X-rays and neutrons really. You get a light flash that will burn off all your skin and start fires. But if you are in a shadowed area thats not a biggie. Most of the nukes are pretty small. Israel was using nukes all the time a few years ago and were able to keep it quiet, but then you are not allowed to accuse these people of any wrong-doing. But these nukes didn't seem to lead to massive radiation problems. When they nuked us in Bali, its not clear that this area of town is facing too many ongoing problems.
Where nukes are most useful is in naval operations. Like using American submarines to nuke massed naval operations when China was trying to invade Taiwan. If you thought this was an important fight to win, then nukes might probably be useful here since water is a good shock absorber.
How about nukes in Ukraine? How could they make a difference? The Russians are only going to use them if they are being pushed back like the Nazis did and thats not going to happen. What if the Americans start attacking civilian targets with nukes? The Russians have the capacity to target regime leadership and if they go that route, which they won't do right now since Putin is a legal stickler, then the war will be over quickly. If he hit Rothschild, Rockefeller and Wallenberg estates the deep state would close the whole war down pretty rapidly
I'm not seeing where all this dust would come from to create a nuclear winter.
We are eating last years harvest now. I don't like the idea of global starvation. But we are facing that now by way of deep state shenanigans. Its not something that we need a giant firecracker to cause. The deep state is doing everything they can to restrict food production. Their attack on Dutch farmers is only one brick in that strategy.
I guess what I am saying is that we don't need a nuclear war to starve. They tried to kill us with vaccines, they are trying to kill us with food deprivation, and troglodytes like Bill Gates and Larry Fink are locking in endless energy deprivation under the guise of pretending to lock in energy production. A neat little psychopathic reversal.
If they go for nuclear war as well it will merely be the icing on the cake. Yeah and they can do it too. But they will lose any war doing it, and then the rest of us just have to rebuild, hopefully without these parasites.
We need to endow a family with sovereign powers. We need to be able to take the assets off the lunatics running things and find a way to put these assets in local sole trader hands. Because Larry and Bill are like the Mice in Mouse Utopia. This class of people will kill us all. Nukes or no nukes.
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