Nuclear winter
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Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged
General
"Nuclear winter", or as it was initially termed, "nuclear twilight", began to be considered as a scientific concept in the 1980s after it became clear that an earlier hypothesis predicting that
After the failure of the predictions on the effects of the 1991
As nuclear devices need not be detonated to ignite a firestorm, the term "nuclear winter" is something of a misnomer.
A much larger number of firestorms, in the thousands,[
On the fundamental level, since the advent of photographic evidence of tall clouds were captured,
A suite of satellite and aircraft-based firestorm-soot-monitoring instruments are at the forefront of attempts to accurately determine the lifespan, quantity, injection height, and
Currently, from satellite tracking data, it appears that stratospheric smoke aerosols dissipate in a time span under approximately two months.
Mechanism
The nuclear winter scenario assumes that 100 or more city firestorms[30][31] are ignited by nuclear explosions,[32] and that the firestorms lift large amounts of sooty smoke into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere by the movement offered by the pyrocumulonimbus clouds that form during a firestorm. At 10–15 kilometres (6–9 miles) above the Earth's surface, the absorption of sunlight could further heat the soot in the smoke, lifting some or all of it into the stratosphere, where the smoke could persist for years if there is no rain to wash it out. This aerosol of particles could heat the stratosphere and prevent a portion of the sun's light from reaching the surface, causing surface temperatures to drop drastically. In this scenario it is predicted[by whom?] that surface air temperatures would be the same as, or colder than, a given region's winter for months to years on end.
The modeled stable inversion layer of hot soot between the troposphere and high stratosphere that produces the anti-greenhouse effect was dubbed the "Smokeosphere" by Stephen Schneider et al. in their 1988 paper.[2][33][34]
Although it is common in the climate models to consider city firestorms, these need not be ignited by nuclear devices;
As the incendiary effects of a
While the
Aerosol removal timescale
The exact timescale for how long this smoke remains, and thus how severely this smoke affects the climate once it reaches the stratosphere, is dependent on both chemical and physical removal processes.[12]
The most important physical removal mechanism is "
Once in the stratosphere, the
The
and which also occur at greater concentrations when air is heated to high temperatures.Historical data on residence times of aerosols, albeit a
Soot properties
Sooty aerosols can have a wide range of properties, as well as complex shapes, making it difficult to determine their evolving atmospheric optical depth value. The conditions present during the creation of the soot are believed to be considerably important as to their final properties, with soot generated on the more efficient spectrum of burning efficiency considered almost "elemental carbon black," while on the more inefficient end of the burning spectrum, greater quantities of partially burnt/oxidized fuel are present. These partially burnt "organics" as they are known, often form tar balls and brown carbon during common lower-intensity wildfires, and can also coat the purer black carbon particles.[48][49][50] However, as the soot of greatest importance is that which is injected to the highest altitudes by the pyroconvection of the firestorm – a fire being fed with storm-force winds of air – it is estimated that the majority of the soot under these conditions is the more oxidized black carbon.[51]
Consequences
Climatic effects
A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2006 found that even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could disrupt the global climate for a decade or more. In a regional nuclear conflict scenario where two opposing nations in the subtropics would each use 50 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons (about 15 kilotons each) on major population centers, the researchers estimated as much as five million tons of soot would be released, which would produce a cooling of several degrees over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain-growing regions. The cooling would last for years, and, according to the research, could be "catastrophic",[20][56] disrupting agricultural production and food gathering in particular in higher latitude countries.[57][15]
Ozone depletion
Nuclear detonations produce large amounts of
A 2008 study by Michael J. Mills et al., published in the
Nuclear summer
A "nuclear summer" is a hypothesized scenario in which, after a nuclear winter caused by aerosols inserted into the atmosphere that would prevent sunlight from reaching lower levels or the surface,[61] has abated, a greenhouse effect then occurs due to carbon dioxide released by combustion and methane released from the decay of the organic matter such as corpses that froze during the nuclear winter.[61][62]
Another more sequential hypothetical scenario, following the settling out of most of the aerosols in 1–3 years, the cooling effect would be overcome by a heating effect from
Other more straightforward hypothetical versions exist of the hypothesis that nuclear winter might give way to a nuclear summer. The high temperatures of the nuclear fireballs could destroy the ozone gas of the middle stratosphere.[62]
History
Early work
In 1952, a few weeks prior to the
The implications for civil defense of numerous surface bursts of high yield
The 1966
In the
In the 1985 report, The Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear Exchange, the Committee on the Atmospheric Effects of Nuclear Explosions argues that a "plausible" estimate on the amount of stratospheric dust injected following a surface burst of 1 Mt is 0.3 teragrams, of which 8 percent would be in the
In 1969,
In the section of this 1975 NRC book pertaining to the issue of fireball generated NOx and ozone layer loss therefrom, the NRC presented model calculations from the early-to-mid 1970s on the effects of a nuclear war with the use of large numbers of multi-megaton yield detonations, which returned conclusions that this could reduce ozone levels by 50 percent or more in the northern hemisphere.[63][80]
However, independent of the computer models presented in the 1975 NRC works, a paper in 1973 in the journal Nature depicts the stratospheric ozone levels worldwide overlaid upon the number of nuclear detonations during the era of atmospheric testing. The authors conclude that neither the data nor their models show any correlation between the approximate 500 Mt in historical atmospheric testing and an increase or decrease of ozone concentration.[81] In 1976, a study on the experimental measurements of an earlier atmospheric nuclear test as it affected the ozone layer also found that nuclear detonations are exonerated of depleting ozone, after the at first alarming model calculations of the time.[82] Similarly, a 1981 paper found that the models on ozone destruction from one test and the physical measurements taken were in disagreement, as no destruction was observed.[9]
In total, about 500 Mt were atmospherically detonated between 1945 and 1971,[83] peaking in 1961–1962, when 340 Mt were detonated in the atmosphere by the United States and Soviet Union.[84] During this peak, with the multi-megaton range detonations of the two nations nuclear test series, in exclusive examination, a total yield estimated at 300 Mt of energy was released. Due to this, 3 × 1034 additional molecules of nitric oxide (about 5,000 tons per Mt, 5 × 109 grams per megaton)[81][85] are believed to have entered the stratosphere, and while ozone depletion of 2.2 percent was noted in 1963, the decline had started prior to 1961 and is believed to have been caused by other meteorological effects.[81]
In 1982 journalist Jonathan Schell in his popular and influential book The Fate of the Earth, introduced the public to the belief that fireball generated NOx would destroy the ozone layer to such an extent that crops would fail from solar UV radiation and then similarly painted the fate of the Earth, as plant and aquatic life going extinct. In the same year, 1982, Australian physicist Brian Martin, who frequently corresponded with John Hampson who had been greatly responsible for much of the examination of NOx generation,[11] penned a short historical synopsis on the history of interest in the effects of the direct NOx generated by nuclear fireballs, and in doing so, also outlined Hampson's other non-mainstream viewpoints, particularly those relating to greater ozone destruction from upper-atmospheric detonations as a result of any widely used anti-ballistic missile (ABM-1 Galosh) system.[86] However, Martin ultimately concludes that it is "unlikely that in the context of a major nuclear war" ozone degradation would be of serious concern. Martin describes views about potential ozone loss and therefore increases in ultraviolet light leading to the widespread destruction of crops, as advocated by Jonathan Schell in The Fate of the Earth, as highly unlikely.[63]
More recent accounts on the specific ozone layer destruction potential of NOx species are much less than earlier assumed from simplistic calculations, as "about 1.2 million tons" of natural and anthropogenic generated stratospheric NOx is believed to be formed each year according to Robert P. Parson in the 1990s.[87]
Science fiction
The first published suggestion that cooling of the climate could be an effect of a nuclear war, appears to have been originally put forth by
1980s
The 1988 Air Force Geophysics Laboratory publication, An assessment of global atmospheric effects of a major nuclear war by H. S. Muench, et al., contains a chronology and review of the major reports on the nuclear winter hypothesis from 1983 to 1986. In general, these reports arrive at similar conclusions as they are based on "the same assumptions, the same basic data", with only minor model-code differences. They skip the modeling steps of assessing the possibility of fire and the initial fire plumes and instead start the modeling process with a "spatially uniform soot cloud" which has found its way into the atmosphere.[12]
Although never openly acknowledged by the multi-disciplinary team who authored the most popular 1980s TTAPS model, in 2011 the American Institute of Physics states that the TTAPS team (named for its participants, who had all previously worked on the phenomenon of dust storms on Mars, or in the area of asteroid impact events: Richard P. Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack and Carl Sagan) announcement of their results in 1983 "was with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control".[91] However, "the computer models were so simplified, and the data on smoke and other aerosols were still so poor, that the scientists could say nothing for certain".[91]
In 1981, William J. Moran began discussions and research in the
As part of a study on the creation of
It was after being confronted with these results that they "chanced" upon the notion, as "an afterthought"
After reading a paper by N. P. Bochkov and
In the same year Alexander Ginzburg,
On 31 October 1982, Golitsyn and Ginsburg's model and results were presented at the conference on "The World after Nuclear War", hosted in Washington, D.C.[96]
Both Golitsyn[98] and Sagan[99] had been interested in the cooling on the dust storms on the planet Mars in the years preceding their focus on "nuclear winter". Sagan had also worked on Project A119 in the 1950s–1960s, in which he attempted to model the movement and longevity of a plume of lunar soil.
After the publication of "Twilight at Noon" in 1982,
Interest in the environmental effects of nuclear war, however, had continued in the Soviet Union after Golitsyn's September paper, with Vladimir Alexandrov and G. I. Stenchikov also publishing a paper in December 1983 on the climatic consequences, although in contrast to the contemporary TTAPS paper, this paper was based on simulations with a three-dimensional global circulation model.[54] (Two years later Alexandrov disappeared under mysterious circumstances). Richard Turco and Starley L. Thompson were both critical of the Soviet research. Turco called it "primitive" and Thompson said it used obsolete US computer models.[103] Later they were to rescind these criticisms and instead applauded Alexandrov's pioneering work, saying that the Soviet model shared the weaknesses of all the others.[12]
In 1984, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) commissioned Golitsyn and N. A. Phillips to review the state of the science. They found that studies generally assumed a scenario where half of the world's nuclear weapons would be used, ~5000 Mt, destroying approximately 1,000 cities, and creating large quantities of carbonaceous smoke – 1–2×1014 g being most likely, with a range of 0.2–6.4×1014 g (NAS; TTAPS assumed 2.25×1014). The smoke resulting would be largely opaque to solar radiation but transparent to infrared, thus cooling the Earth by blocking sunlight, but not creating warming by enhancing the greenhouse effect. The optical depth of the smoke can be much greater than unity. Forest fires resulting from non-urban targets could increase aerosol production further. Dust from near-surface explosions against hardened targets also contributes; each megaton-equivalent explosion could release up to five million tons of dust, but most would quickly fall out; high altitude dust is estimated at 0.1–1 million tons per megaton-equivalent of explosion. Burning of crude oil could also contribute substantially.[104]
The 1-D radiative-convective models used in these[
All[
1990
In a 1990 paper entitled "Climate and Smoke: An Appraisal of Nuclear Winter", TTAPS gave a more detailed description of the short- and long-term atmospheric effects of a nuclear war using a three-dimensional model:[106]
First one to three months:
- 10–25% of soot injected is immediately removed by precipitation, while the rest is transported over the globe in one to two weeks
- SCOPE figures for July smoke injection:
- 22 °C drop in mid-latitudes
- 10 °C drop in humid climates
- 75% decrease in rainfall in mid-latitudes
- Light level reduction of 0% in low latitudes to 90% in high smoke injection areas
- SCOPE figures for winter smoke injection:
- Temperature drops between 3 and 4 °C
Following one to three years:
- 25–40% of injected smoke is stabilised in atmosphere (NCAR). Smoke stabilised for approximately one year.
- Land temperatures of several degrees below normal
- Ocean surface temperature between 2 and 6 °C
- Ozone depletion of 50% leading to 200% increase in UV radiation incident on surface.
Kuwait wells in the first Gulf War
One of the major results of TTAPS' 1990 paper was the re-iteration of the team's 1983 model that 100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter.[109]
Following Iraq's
In articles printed in the Wilmington Morning Star and the Baltimore Sun newspapers in January 1991, prominent authors of nuclear winter papers – Richard P. Turco, John W. Birks, Carl Sagan, Alan Robock and Paul Crutzen – collectively stated that they expected catastrophic nuclear winter like effects with continental-sized effects of sub-freezing temperatures as a result of the Iraqis going through with their threats of igniting 300 to 500 pressurized oil wells that could subsequently burn for several months.[111][112]
As threatened, the wells were set on fire by the retreating Iraqis in March 1991, and the 600 or so burning oil wells were not fully extinguished until November 6, 1991, eight months after the end of the war,[113] and they consumed an estimated six million barrels of oil per day at their peak intensity.
When
Sagan listed modeling outcomes that forecast effects extending to South Asia, and perhaps to the Northern Hemisphere as well. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "It should affect the war plans."[114] Singer, on the other hand, anticipated that the smoke would go to an altitude of about 3,000 feet (910 m) and then be rained out after about three to five days, thus limiting the lifetime of the smoke. Both height estimates made by Singer and Sagan turned out to be wrong, albeit with Singer's narrative being closer to what transpired, with the comparatively minimal atmospheric effects remaining limited to the Persian Gulf region, with smoke plumes, in general,[107] lofting to about 10,000 feet (3,000 m) and a few as high as 20,000 feet (6,100 m).[115][116]
Sagan and his colleagues expected that a "self-lofting" of the sooty smoke would occur when it absorbed the sun's heat radiation, with little to no scavenging occurring, whereby the black particles of soot would be heated by the sun and lifted/lofted higher and higher into the air, thereby injecting the soot into the stratosphere, a position where they argued it would take years for the sun-blocking effect of this aerosol of soot to fall out of the air, and with that, catastrophic ground level cooling and agricultural effects in Asia and possibly the Northern Hemisphere as a whole.[117] In a 1992 follow-up, Peter Hobbs and others had observed no appreciable evidence for the nuclear winter team's predicted massive "self-lofting" effect and the oil-fire smoke clouds contained less soot than the nuclear winter modelling team had assumed.[118]
The atmospheric scientist tasked with studying the atmospheric effect of the Kuwaiti fires by the National Science Foundation, Peter Hobbs, stated that the fires' modest impact suggested that "some numbers [used to support the Nuclear Winter hypothesis]... were probably a little overblown."[119]
Hobbs found that at the peak of the fires, the smoke absorbed 75 to 80% of the sun's radiation. The particles rose to a maximum of 20,000 feet (6,100 m), and when combined with scavenging by clouds the smoke had a short residency time of a maximum of a few days in the atmosphere.[120]
Pre-war claims of wide scale, long-lasting, and significant global environmental effects were thus not borne out, and found to be significantly exaggerated by the media and speculators,[121] with climate models by those not supporting the nuclear winter hypothesis at the time of the fires predicting only more localized effects such as a daytime temperature drop of ~10 °C within 200 km of the source.[122]
Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World that his predictions obviously did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6 °C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared."[123]
The idea of oil well and oil reserve smoke pluming into the stratosphere serving as a main contributor to the soot of a nuclear winter was a central idea of the early climatology papers on the hypothesis; they were considered more of a possible contributor than smoke from cities, as the smoke from oil has a higher ratio of black soot, thus absorbing more sunlight.[93][101] Hobbs compared the papers' assumed "emission factor" or soot generating efficiency from ignited oil pools and found, upon comparing to measured values from oil pools at Kuwait, which were the greatest soot producers, the emissions of soot assumed in the nuclear winter calculations were still "too high".[120] Following the results of the Kuwaiti oil fires being in disagreement with the core nuclear winter promoting scientists, 1990s nuclear winter papers generally attempted to distance themselves from suggesting oil well and reserve smoke will reach the stratosphere.
In 2007, a nuclear winter study noted that modern computer models have been applied to the Kuwait oil fires, finding that individual smoke plumes are not able to loft smoke into the stratosphere, but that smoke from fires covering a large area[quantify] like some forest fires can lift smoke[quantify] into the stratosphere, and recent evidence suggests that this occurs far more often than previously thought.[7][22][124][125] The study also suggested that the burning of the comparably smaller cities, which would be expected to follow a nuclear strike, would also loft significant amounts of smoke into the stratosphere:
Stenchikov et al. [2006b][126] conducted detailed, high-resolution smoke plume simulations with the RAMS regional climate model [e.g., Miguez-Macho, et al., 2005][127] and showed that individual plumes, such as those from the Kuwait oil fires in 1991, would not be expected to loft into the upper atmosphere or stratosphere, because they become diluted. However, much larger plumes, such as would be generated by city fires, produce large, undiluted mass motion that results in smoke lofting. New large eddy simulation model results at much higher resolution also give similar lofting to our results, and no small scale response that would inhibit the lofting [Jensen, 2006].[128]
However, the above simulation notably contained the assumption that no dry or wet deposition would occur.[126]
Recent modeling
Between 1990 and 2003, commentators noted that no peer-reviewed papers on "nuclear winter" were published.[109]
Based on new work published in 2007 and 2008 by some of the authors of the original studies, several new hypotheses have been put forth, primarily the assessment that as few as 100 firestorms would result in a nuclear winter.[3][20] However, far from the hypothesis being "new", it drew the same conclusion as earlier 1980s models, which similarly regarded 100 or so city firestorms as a threat.[129][130]
Compared to climate change for the past millennium, even the smallest exchange modeled would plunge the planet into temperatures colder than the Little Ice Age (the period of history between approximately 1600 and 1850 AD). This would take effect instantly, and agriculture would be severely threatened. Larger amounts of smoke would produce larger climate changes, making agriculture impossible for years. In both cases, new climate model simulations show that the effects would last for more than a decade.[32]
2007 study on global nuclear war
A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in July 2007, titled "Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences",[19] used current climate models to look at the consequences of a global nuclear war involving most or all of the world's current nuclear arsenals (which the authors judged to be one similar to the size of the world's arsenals twenty years earlier). The authors used a global circulation model, ModelE from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which they noted "has been tested extensively in global warming experiments and to examine the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate". The model was used to investigate the effects of a war involving the entire current global nuclear arsenal, projected to release about 150 Tg of smoke into the atmosphere, as well as a war involving about one third of the current nuclear arsenal, projected to release about 50 Tg of smoke. In the 150 Tg case they found that:
A global average surface cooling of −7 °C to −8 °C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still −4 °C (Fig. 2). Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about −5 °C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land .... Cooling of more than −20 °C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than −30 °C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.
In addition, they found that this cooling caused a weakening of the global hydrological cycle, reducing global precipitation by about 45%. As for the 50 Tg case involving one third of current nuclear arsenals, they said that the simulation "produced climate responses very similar to those for the 150 Tg case, but with about half the amplitude," but that "the time scale of response is about the same". They did not discuss the implications for agriculture in depth, but noted that a 1986 study which assumed no food production for a year projected that "most of the people on the planet would run out of food and starve to death by then" and commented that their own results show that, "This period of no food production needs to be extended by many years, making the impacts of nuclear winter even worse than previously thought."
2014
In 2014, Michael J. Mills (at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR), et al., published "Multi-decadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict" in the journal Earth's Future.[131] The authors used computational models developed by NCAR to simulate the climatic effects of a soot cloud that they suggest would be a result of a regional nuclear war in which 100 "small" (15 Kt) weapons are detonated over cities. The model had outputs, due to the interaction of the soot cloud:
...global ozone losses of 20–50% over populated areas, levels unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years. We calculate summer enhancements in UV indices of 30–80% over Mid-Latitudes, suggesting widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Killing frosts would reduce growing seasons by 10–40 days per year for 5 years. Surface temperatures would be reduced for more than 25 years, due to thermal inertia and albedo effects in the ocean and expanded sea ice. The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine.
2018
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory published the results of a multi-scale study of the climate impact of a regional nuclear exchange, the same scenario considered by Robock et al. and by Toon et al. in 2007. Unlike previous studies, this study simulated the processes whereby black carbon would be lofted into the atmosphere and found that very little would be lofted into the stratosphere and, as a result, the long-term climate impacts were much lower than those studies had concluded. In particular, "none of the simulations produced a nuclear winter effect", and "the probability of significant global cooling from a limited exchange scenario as envisioned in previous studies is highly unlikely".[132] This study has been contradicted by results in several subsequent studies claiming the 2018 study to be flawed.[133][134][135][136]
Research published in the peer-reviewed journal Safety suggested that no nation should possess more than 100 nuclear warheads because of the blowback effect on the aggressor nation's own population because of "nuclear autumn".[137][138]
2019
2019 saw the publication of two studies on nuclear winter that build on previous modeling and describe new scenarios of nuclear winter from smaller exchanges of nuclear weapons than have been previously simulated.
As in the 2007 study by Robock et al.,[19] a 2019 study by Coupe et al. models a scenario in which 150 Tg of black carbon is released into the atmosphere following an exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia where both countries use all of the nuclear weapons treaties permit them to.[139] This amount of black carbon far exceeds that which has been emitted in the atmosphere by all volcanic eruptions in the past 1,200 years but is less than the asteroid impact which caused a mass extinction event 66 million years ago.[139] Coupe et al. used the "whole atmosphere community climate model version 4" (WACCM4), which has a higher resolution and is more effective at simulating aerosols and stratospheric chemistry than the ModelE simulation used by Robock et al.[139]
The WACCM4 model simulates that black carbon molecules increase to ten times their normal size when they reach the stratosphere. ModelE did not account for this effect. This difference in black carbon particle size results in a greater optical depth in the WACCM4 model across the world for the first two years after the initial injection due to greater absorption of sunlight in the stratosphere.[139] This will have the effect of increasing stratospheric temperatures by 100K and result in ozone depletion that is slightly greater than ModelE predicted.[139] Another consequence of the larger particle size is accelerating the rate at which black carbon molecules fall out of the atmosphere; after ten years from the injection of black carbon into the atmosphere, WACCM4 predicts 2 Tg will remain, while ModelE predicted 19 Tg.[139]
The 2019 model and the 2007 model both predict significant temperature decreases across the globe, however the increased resolution and particle simulation in 2019 predict a greater temperature anomaly in the first six years after injection but a faster return to normal temperatures. Between a few months after the injection to the sixth year of anomaly, the WACCM4 predicts cooler global temperatures than ModelE, with temperatures more than 20K below normal leading to freezing temperatures during the summer months over much of the northern hemisphere leading to a 90% reduction in agricultural growing seasons in the midlatitudes, including the midwestern United States.[139] WACCM4 simulations also predict a 58% reduction in global annual precipitation from normal levels in years three and four after injection, a 10% higher reduction than predicted in ModelE.[139]
Toon et al. simulated a nuclear scenario in 2025 where India and Pakistan engage in a nuclear exchange in which 100 urban areas in Pakistan and 150 urban areas in India are attacked with nuclear weapons ranging from 15 kt to 100 kt and examined the effects of black carbon released into the atmosphere from airburst-only detonations.[5] The researchers modeled the atmospheric effects if all weapons were 15 kt, 50 kt, and 100 kt, providing a range where a nuclear exchange would likely fall into given the recent nuclear tests performed by both nations. The ranges provided are large because neither India nor Pakistan is obligated to provide information on their nuclear arsenals, so their extent remains largely unknown.[5]
Toon et al. assume that either a firestorm or conflagration will occur after each detonation of the weapons, and the amount of black carbon inserted into the atmosphere from the two outcomes will be equivalent and of a profound extent;[5] in Hiroshima in 1945, it is predicted that the firestorm released 1,000 times more energy than was released during the nuclear explosion.[6] Such a large area being burned would release large amounts of black carbon into the atmosphere. The amount released ranges from 16.1 Tg if all weapons were 15 kt or less to 36.6 Tg for all 100 kt weapons.[5] For the 15 kt and 100kt range of weapons, the researchers modeled global precipitation reductions of 15% to 30%, temperature reductions between 4K and 8K, and ocean temperature decreases of 1K to 3K.[5] If all weapons used were 50 kt or more, Hadley cell circulation would be disrupted and cause a 50% decrease in precipitation in the American midwest. Net primary productivity (NPP) for oceans decreases from 10% to 20% for the 15 kt and 100 kt scenarios, respectively, while land NPP decreases between 15% and 30%; particularly affected are midlatitude agricultural regions in the United States and Europe, experiencing 25-50% reductions in NPP.[5] As predicted by other literature, once the black carbon is removed from the atmosphere after ten years, temperatures and NPP will return to normal.[5]
2021
Coupe et al. report the simulation of a
2022
According to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Food in August 2022,[15] a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, which together hold more than 90% of the world's nuclear weapons, would kill 360 million people directly and more than 5 billion indirectly by starvation during a nuclear winter.[144][145]
Another paper published that year, from the
2023
Since 2023, the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine has established an Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War. The aim is to evaluate all research on nuclear winter, and the final report will be issued in 2024.[147]
Criticism and debate
The five major and largely independent underpinnings that the nuclear winter concept has and continues to receive criticism over are regarded as:[132][148]
- Would cities readily firestorm, and if so how much soot would be generated?
- Atmospheric longevity: would the quantities of soot assumed in the models remain in the atmosphere for as long as projected or would far more soot precipitate as black rain much sooner?
- Timing of events: how reasonable is it for the modeling of firestorms or war to commence in late spring or summer (this is done in almost all US-Soviet nuclear winter papers, thereby giving rise to the largest possible degree of modeled cooling)?
- Darkness and opacity: how much light-blocking effect the assumed quality of the soot reaching the atmosphere would have?[148]
- Lofting: how much soot would be lofted into the stratosphere?[132]
While the highly popularized initial 1983 TTAPS 1-dimensional model forecasts were widely reported and criticized in the media, in part because every later model predicts far less of its "apocalyptic" level of cooling,
A major criticism of the assumptions that continue to make these model results possible appeared in the 1987 book Nuclear War Survival Skills (NWSS), a civil defense manual by Cresson Kearny for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.[152] According to the 1988 publication An assessment of global atmospheric effects of a major nuclear war, Kearny's criticisms were directed at the excessive amount of soot that the modelers assumed would reach the stratosphere. Kearny cited a Soviet study that modern cities would not burn as firestorms, as most flammable city items would be buried under non-combustible rubble and that the TTAPS study included a massive overestimate on the size and extent of non-urban wildfires that would result from a nuclear war.[12] The TTAPS authors responded that, amongst other things, they did not believe target planners would intentionally blast cities into rubble, but instead argued fires would begin in relatively undamaged suburbs when nearby sites were hit, and partially conceded his point about non-urban wildfires.[12] Dr. Richard D. Small, director of thermal sciences at the Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation similarly disagreed strongly with the model assumptions, in particular the 1990 update by TTAPS that argues that some 5,075 Tg of material would burn in a total US-Soviet nuclear war, as analysis by Small of blueprints and real buildings returned a maximum of 1,475 Tg of material that could be burned, "assuming that all the available combustible material was actually ignited".[148]
Although Kearny was of the opinion that future more accurate models would, "indicate there will be even smaller reductions in temperature", including future potential models that did not so readily accept that firestorms would occur as dependably as nuclear winter modellers assume, in NWSS Kearny summarized the comparatively moderate cooling estimate of no more than a few days,[152] from the 1986 Nuclear Winter Reappraised model by Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider.[153] This was done in an effort to convey to his readers that contrary to the popular opinion at the time, in the conclusion of these two climate scientists, "on scientific grounds the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishing low level of probability".[152]
However, a 1988 article by Brian Martin in Science and Public Policy[150] states that—although Nuclear Winter Reappraised concluded the US-Soviet "nuclear winter" would be much less severe than originally thought, with the authors describing the effects more as a "nuclear autumn"—other statements by Thompson and Schneider[154][155] show that they, "resisted the interpretation that this means a rejection of the basic points made about nuclear winter". In the Alan Robock et al. 2007 paper, they write that, "because of the use of the term 'nuclear autumn' by Thompson and Schneider [1986], even though the authors made clear that the climatic consequences would be large, in policy circles the theory of nuclear winter is considered by some to have been exaggerated and disproved [e.g., Martin, 1988]."[19] In 2007 Schneider expressed his tentative support for the cooling results of the limited nuclear war (Pakistan and India) analyzed in the 2006 model, saying, "The sun is much stronger in the tropics than it is in mid-latitudes. Therefore, a much more limited war [there] could have a much larger effect, because you are putting the smoke in the worst possible place", and "anything that you can do to discourage people from thinking that there is any way to win anything with a nuclear exchange is a good idea".[156]
The contribution of smoke from the ignition of live non-desert vegetation, living forests, grasses and so on, nearby to many
A paper by the United States Department of Homeland Security, finalized in 2010, states that after a nuclear detonation targeting a city "If fires are able to grow and coalesce, a firestorm could develop that would be beyond the abilities of firefighters to control. However experts suggest in the nature of modern US city design and construction may make a raging firestorm unlikely".[167] The nuclear bombing of Nagasaki for example, did not produce a firestorm.[168] This was similarly noted as early as 1986–1988, when the assumed quantity of fuel "mass loading" (the amount of fuel per square meter) in cities underpinning the winter models was found to be too high and intentionally creates heat fluxes that loft smoke into the lower stratosphere, yet assessments "more characteristic of conditions" to be found in real-world modern cities, had found that the fuel loading, and hence the heat flux that would result from efficient burning, would rarely loft smoke much higher than 4 km.[12]
Russell Seitz, Associate of the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, argues that the winter models' assumptions give results which the researchers want to achieve and is a case of "worst-case analysis run amok".
The improbability of a string of 40 such coin tosses coming up heads approaches that of a pat
Seitz cited Carl Sagan, adding an emphasis: "In almost any realistic case involving nuclear exchanges between the superpowers, global environmental changes sufficient to cause an extinction event equal to or more severe than that of the close of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs and many other species died out are likely." Seitz comments: "The ominous rhetoric italicized in this passage puts even the 100 megaton [the original 100 city firestorm] scenario ... on a par with the 100 million megaton blast of an asteroid striking the Earth. This [is] astronomical mega-hype ..."[149] Seitz concludes:
As the science progressed and more authentic sophistication was achieved in newer and more elegant models, the postulated effects headed downhill. By 1986, these worst-case effects had melted down from a year of arctic darkness to warmer temperatures than the cool months in
Murphy's lesser-known Second Law: If everything MUST go wrong, don't bet on it.[149]
Seitz's opposition caused the proponents of nuclear winter to issue responses in the media. The proponents believed it was simply necessary to show only the possibility of climatic catastrophe, often a worst-case scenario, while opponents insisted that to be taken seriously, nuclear winter should be shown as likely under "reasonable" scenarios.[170] One of these areas of contention, as elucidated by Lynn R. Anspaugh, is upon the question of which season should be used as the backdrop for the US-USSR war models. Most models choose the summer in the Northern Hemisphere as the start point to produce the maximum soot lofting and therefore eventual winter effect. However, it has been pointed out that if the same number of firestorms occurred in the autumn or winter months, when there is much less intense sunlight to loft soot into a stable region of the stratosphere, the magnitude of the cooling effect would be negligible, according to a January model run by Covey et al.[171] Schneider conceded the issue in 1990, saying "a war in late fall or winter would have no appreciable [cooling] effect".[148]
Anspaugh also expressed frustration that although a managed forest fire in Canada on 3 August 1985 is said to have been lit by proponents of nuclear winter, with the fire potentially serving as an opportunity to do some basic measurements of the optical properties of the smoke and smoke-to-fuel ratio, which would have helped refine the estimates of these critical model inputs, the proponents did not indicate that any such measurements were made.[171] Peter V. Hobbs, who would later successfully attain funding to fly into and sample the smoke clouds from the Kuwait oil fires in 1991, also expressed frustration that he was denied funding to sample the Canadian, and other forest fires in this way.[12] Turco wrote a 10-page memorandum with information derived from his notes and some satellite images, claiming that the smoke plume reached 6 km in altitude.[12]
In 1986, atmospheric scientist Joyce Penner from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published an article in Nature in which she focused on the specific variables of the smoke's optical properties and the quantity of smoke remaining airborne after the city fires. She found that the published estimates of these variables varied so widely that depending on which estimates were chosen the climate effect could be negligible, minor or massive.[172] The assumed optical properties for black carbon in more recent nuclear winter papers in 2006 are still "based on those assumed in earlier nuclear winter simulations".[19]
John Maddox, editor of the journal Nature, issued a series of skeptical comments about nuclear winter studies during his tenure.[173][174] Similarly S. Fred Singer was a long term vocal critic of the hypothesis in the journal and in televised debates with Carl Sagan.[175][176][12]
Critical response to the more modern papers
In a 2011 response to the more modern papers on the hypothesis, Russell Seitz published a comment in Nature challenging Alan Robock's claim that there has been no real scientific debate about the "nuclear winter" concept.
Policy implications
During the
However, according to Robock, insofar as getting US government attention and affecting nuclear policy, he has failed. In 2009, together with Owen Toon, he gave a talk to the United States Congress, but nothing transpired from it and the then-presidential science adviser, John Holdren, did not respond to their requests in 2009 or at the time of writing in 2011.[185]
In a 2012 "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" feature, Robock and Toon, who had routinely mixed their disarmament advocacy into the conclusions of their "nuclear winter" papers,
An originally classified 1984 US
Altfeld and Cimbala also argued that belief in the possibility of nuclear winter would actually make nuclear war more likely, contrary to the views of Sagan and others, because it would serve yet further motivation to follow the existing trends, towards the
Alleged Soviet exploitation
In an interview in 2000 with Mikhail Gorbachev (the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991), the following statement was posed to him: "In the 1980s, you warned about the unprecedented dangers of nuclear weapons and took very daring steps to reverse the arms race", with Gorbachev replying "Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation."[203]
However, a 1984 US Interagency Intelligence Assessment expresses a far more skeptical and cautious approach, stating that the hypothesis is not scientifically convincing. The report predicted that Soviet
In 1985,
In 1986, the
There is some doubt as to when the Soviet Union began modelling fires and the atmospheric effects of nuclear war. Former Soviet intelligence officer
Mitigation techniques
A number of solutions have been proposed to mitigate the potential harm of a nuclear winter if one appears inevitable. The problem has been attacked at both ends; some solutions focus on preventing the growth of fires and therefore limiting the amount of smoke that reaches the stratosphere in the first place, and others focus on food production with reduced sunlight, with the assumption that the very worst-case analysis results of the nuclear winter models prove accurate and no other mitigation strategies are fielded.
Fire control
In a report from 1967, techniques included various methods of applying liquid nitrogen, dry ice, and water to nuclear-caused fires.[210] The report considered attempting to stop the spread of fires by creating firebreaks by blasting combustible material out of an area, possibly even using nuclear weapons, along with the use of preventative Hazard Reduction Burns. According to the report, one of the most promising techniques investigated was initiation of rain from seeding of mass-fire thunderheads and other clouds passing over the developing, and then stable, firestorm.
Producing food without sunlight
In the book
Large-scale food stockpiling
To feed portions of civilization through a nuclear winter, large stockpiles of food storage prior to the event would have to be accomplished. Such stockpiles should be placed underground, at higher elevations and near the equator to mitigate high altitude UV and radioactive isotopes. Stockpiles should also be placed near populations most likely to survive the initial catastrophe. One consideration is who would sponsor the stockpiling. "There may be a mismatch between those most able to sponsor the stockpiles (i.e., the pre-catastrophe wealthy) and those most able to use the stockpiles (the pre-catastrophe rural poor)."[216] The minimum annual global wheat storage is approximately 2 months.[217]
Climate engineering
Despite the name "nuclear winter", nuclear events are not necessary to produce the modeled climatic effect.
Potential climatic precedents
Similar climatic effects to "nuclear winter" followed historical
Similarly, extinction-level
This global "impact firestorms" hypothesis, initially supported by Wendy Wolbach, H. Jay Melosh and Owen Toon, suggests that as a result of massive impact events, the small
The global firestorm winter, however, has been questioned in more recent years (2003–2013) by Claire Belcher,[228][230][231] Tamara Goldin[232][233][234] and Melosh, who had initially supported the hypothesis,[235][236] with this re-evaluation being dubbed the "Cretaceous-Palaeogene firestorm debate" by Belcher.[228]
The issues raised by these scientists in the debate are the perceived low quantity of soot in the sediment beside the fine-grained
In part due to the
It is difficult to successfully ascertain the percentage contribution of the soot in this period's geological sediment record from living plants and fossil fuels present at the time,[237] in much the same manner that the fraction of the material ignited directly by the meteor impact is difficult to determine.
See also
- 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which caused approximately 1 kelvin of global cooling for 2 years due to sulfate emissions.
- Dalton Minimum, 1790 to 1830, a period of prolonged solar minimum activity, resulting in Earth receiving lower insolation values.
- Doomsday device
- Global dimming, global reduction in ground insolation, due to the atmospheric injection of aerosols from various sources.
- Impact winter
- Laki, 1783 eruption of an Icelandic volcano which produced continentally localized cooling for 1–2 years.
- List of states with nuclear weapons
- Little Ice Age, a period of low temperatures from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, partially overlapping with the Maunder Minimum of solar activity, 1645 to 1715.
- Nuclear famine
- Nuclear holocaust
- Nuclear terrorism
- Toba catastrophe theory, a controversial hypothesis that a volcanic winter produced by the eruption of a volcano in Toba, Indonesia, created a human population bottleneck approximately 80,000 years ago.
- Volcanic winter
- Year Without a Summer, 1816, created by a volcanic eruption in Tambora.
- Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, a controversial hypothesis that an impact event & fires triggered the last ice age.
Documentaries
- On the 8th Day – Nuclear winter documentary (1984) filmed by the BBC and available on Internet video hosting websites; chronicles the rise of the hypothesis, with lengthy interviews of the prominent scientists who published the nascent papers on the subject.[238]
Media
- The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War: A book co-authored by Carl Sagan in 1984 which followed his co-authoring of the TTAPS study in 1983.
- docu-dramathat Carl Sagan assisted in an advisory capacity. This film was the first of its kind to depict a nuclear winter.
- A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race: A book authored by Richard P. Turco and Carl Sagan, published in 1990; it explains the nuclear winter hypothesis and, with that, advocates nuclear disarmament.[239]
- Nuclear Winter is a mini documentary by Retro Report that looks at nuclear winter fears in today's world.
Explanatory notes
- ^ "This relation arises from the fact that the destructive power of a bomb does not vary linearly with the yield. The volume the weapon's energy spreads into varies as the cube of the distance, but the destroyed area varies at the square of the distance"
General references
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External links
- The Encyclopedia of Earth, Nuclear Winter Lead Author: Alan Robock. Last Updated: July 31, 2008
- Nuclear Winter Simulation Animation
- Studies of climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflict from Alan Robock