As the National Review asked, "Why did they have to make all the survivors look just like Senator Alan Cranston?"
Posted on 03/01/2007 5:22:58 PM PST by blam
'Nuclear winter' may kill more than a nuclear war
19:00 01 March 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie
A regional exchange of relatively small nuclear weapons could plunge the world into a decade-long "nuclear winter", destroying agriculture and killing millions, according to a new study.
Weapons experts to consider that small-scale nuclear exchanges are now more likely than the massive US-Soviet exchanges feared during the Cold War.
In the 1980s, scientists calculated that such exchanges would put enough smoke into the atmosphere to shade the Earth from the Sun, causing a nuclear winter.
Now scientists have re-calculated the likelihood of nuclear winter using modern, vastly improved climate models and a more likely modern scenario for small-scale nuclear war. Brian Toon, head of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Jersey, both in the US, predict less cooling than the 1980s modellers. However, they predict the cooling would last longer, with potentially devastating consequences.
Different targets
The pair modelled the impact of 100 explosions in subtropical megacities. They modelled 15-kilotonne explosions, like the Hiroshima bomb. This is also the size of the bombs now possessed by India and Pakistan, among others.
The immediate blast and radiation from the exchange of 100 small nuclear bombs killed between three million and 16 million people, depending on the targets. But the global effect of the resulting one-to-five million tonnes of smoke was much worse. “It is very surprising how few weapons are needed to do so much damage,” says Toon.
(Excerpt) Read more at environment.newscientist.com ...
I like that term. Can I use it? Earth could become like Arrakis, the desert planet in the Dune series of books. We could all get rich harvesting the lucrative spice, Melange.
Remember Carl Sagan and the Kuwaiti oil wells burning? "It could be the worst ecological disaster man has ever known".
BZZTT. Nuclear Winter is hogshiznit.
Would these be the modern, vastly improved climate models that predicted the horrendous 2006 Atlantic Hurricane Season?
Didn't Carl Sagan assert that if the Iraqis torched the Kuwaiti oil wells in 1991 that "nuclear winter" was sure to follow?
Harumph.
If it kills off the mosquitoes then I'm all for it.
Not at Al Gore's estate. I will assume they will be nice and toasty.
They have a new crop of poorly educated youngsters to dupe about this and half a dozen or so other old canards -- and it's working
Nuclear winter. That is so 1982.
The spice that comes from a dangerous source? (only started reading the first book in the series, and then stopped after a few chapters).
As the National Review asked, "Why did they have to make all the survivors look just like Senator Alan Cranston?"
Anyone remember Carl Sagan promising about the same thing if Saddam H. set the oil fields on fire? It's just always something isn't it?
Yes, he did, and I just posted that question before reading the thread. I'm never the first in these things, still I post before I read....looks like I'd learn.
Oyez has not read all the books and is not considered to be an expert on the subject, but he did work a midnight shift with a pair of Dune scholars, who spoke of little else)
And Malsua beat me by "One Minute, 31 Seconds"... :-P
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