I am starting to see articles with titles similar to "What would Nuclear Winter look like" popping up on my news feeds.
The idea of catastrophic cooling of the weather fell out of fashion and all of the cool kids have been modeling Global Cooling for the last 12 years. So there is not a lot of recent research in the area.
One peer reviewed article circa 2007 suggests the following:
Depending on the amount of soot blown into the upper atmosphere, measurable cooling will last for well over a decade. Yeah, I know. You don't trust computer models.
The region between 30 degrees and 60 degrees (basically, the temperate regions of both northern and southern hemispheres) will be most impacted.
The growing season will be drastically shortened. For example, in the US mid-West, a growing season of 90 days and temperatures of 50F could be expected the second summer after warheads are exchanged. That is for one of the mid-range events.
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| Black trace is baseline temperature without Nuclear Winter. Horizontal lines are 10 degrees C or about 18F apart. Vertical lines are three months apart. Purple line is mid-range scenario of 50 Tg of carbon injected into the stratosphere. |
It might be possible to grow and harvest barley, rye, canola, dried peas, short-season wheat and very short-season potato varieties, turnips and maybe buckwheat as well as forage crops like grass and red clover in the US mid-West by the second summer after a mid-level nuclear exchange. Russia and northern Europe will not be so lucky.
Soot injected into the upper atmosphere will stay suspended in the atmosphere much longer than volcanic ash/aerosols stay suspended due to their much smaller diameters and the fact that the solar energy they absorb will drive "lift" that will mix and suspend them.
Even in regions not heavily impacted by cooler temperatures/shorter growing seasons will experience severe agricultural challenges. The model predicts that the monsoons will fail for five-years-in-a-row in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian sub-continent and mainland China.
I put no more credence in these predictions than I do in the evil shills that distort weather data and claim climate change then blame it on human actions.
ReplyDeleteLikewise the entire medical profession and government has blown its credulity.
Beets, Peas, Cabbages, garlic and onions should also do OK
ReplyDeleteGrowing tips and plant varieties that grow well in Alaska (spring, summer, fall) gardens may offer useful tips.
DeleteI have no idea how bad it will be - and neither does anyone else, because it depends so much on how many weapons go off where.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that it would be analogous to the year without a summer/ mini ice age of the early 1800s.
I've read that is the reason that Northern Europe drinks more beer than wine - because the cold killed off vineyards but hops could still grow.
The difference between then and now is that people are more distant from their food sources; the travel and trade disruptions are likely to be worse than the temperature fluctuations in my opinion.
Jonathan
The study attempted to comprehend three scenarios. One approximates a total "dump" of US and Russian arsenals and involved 150Tg of elemental carbon injected into the atmosphere. The second scenario involved 50Tg which might be the total destruction on-the-ground of one sides and significant malfunction/destruction of the other sides. The third scenario involved and exchange on the order of a limited strategic exchange or a three-way between Iran, India and Pakistan.
DeleteOne thing to contemplate is who gains relative advantage? Not Russia. They are locked in an ice-box. Not China. They lose the monsoons. The relative winner, and therefore the one with the most incentive to make the riskiest bets is the US. Incidentally, Hawaii comes out smelling like a rose in terms of relative damage, climate wise. Not sure I would want to be downwind of Pearl Harbor, though.
Question about these current nuclear winter articles and thinking: I wonder how or if they have updated their "initial conditions" for WW III since the 1980s when Carl Sagan wouldn't shut up about it. In round figures I recall then they said it would take about 1000 MT (1000 megatons) of detonations to raise the amount of smoke & dust etc to make enough where maybe nuclear winter would be plausible. At that time, the US had about 20,000 weapons and the USSR about 30,000 with much much smaller numbers from the UK, France etc and the rest.
ReplyDeleteSo since peak Cold War in the 80s with those numbers, the numbers now in existence I read about are less than 20% of those numbers, ie perhaps 2000 or 3000 for the US and a comparable number for Russia. China has been and is building up their bomb fleet but supposedly isn't up to these levels yet. There's more to it than just numbers of bombs of course in this, what's the yield of the stockpile? But just ballparking at 100 kT per bomb (reasonable for most SLBM/ICBM), the US would have about 300 megatons of explosive power if every bomb was set off. The Russians maybe a bit more but not a lot more. So if the US and Russia set off every single bomb both have, you might maybe just be starting to get up to the level of where a nuclear winter effect is even getting plausible (stipulating it's a sound hypothesis or theory to begin with).
Is perhaps nuclear winter a thing that became barely even theoretically possible then after the Cold War- just not enough bombs in the world now to reach around 1000 megatons?
Nuclear Winter was a club to try and beat Reagan into unilaterally disarming. Nothing more. He up-ended MAD by saying we could build missile defense systems (which we have) and they never forgave him for that.
DeleteBoth the US and Russia by treaty are supposed to have around 1700 "deployable" warheads and that many again in storage or inactive. Both are falling well behind their targets in getting rid of the rest.
DeleteOther countries have at most a couple hundred warheads.
I read years ago that it was estimated it would take 1000 to destroy the US or Russia.
Jonathan
Given our fragilities, I bet it would take fewer than 1000 nukes to make the US unrecognizable.
Delete50% of our economic activity is concentrated in 75 counties (2.5% of total). Another 75 counties adds an additional 12%.
Read the novel "War Day" published back in the eighties. I remember it postulated a handful (less than ten) of warheads on a few U.S. targets with catastrophic results to the economy and society. Scary stuff.
DeleteWhat was the impact of the oil field fires in Iraq after the Gulf War? They turned out to be a climate nothingburger as I recall.
ReplyDeleteExactly.
DeleteThe claims that it would destroy our planet's ecosystem turned out to be a big fail. Same same the real aerosolized sulfur tossed out with all the volcanic ash over the years with all the large eruptions.
Turns out the models were way off in both the amount of sunlight blocked and the persistence of the dust in the atmosphere. in those instances.
Further, the :Nuclear Winter" models assumed ground contact with the warheads...which was untrue as they will all be airbursts for maximum effect, greatly reducing the amount of both fallout and simple dust thrown into the atmosphere.
Much like Glowbal Warming models, they are terribly incorrect and don't really work to show real world effects because the basic assumptions are just plain wrong.
There are some soft-spots in the work but not where you are poking.
DeleteThe underpinning assumption is that the EM energy flash will thermally crack the organic matter on the ground to plasma and the first thing to reassemble will be carbon (which has a very, very high vaporization temperature) while the hydrogen will scavenge the oxygen so much of the carbon will not form CO2 but will be dispersed as <0.1um particles of elemental carbon.
The weakness, or sensitivity, involves the amount of carbon in the layer most exposed to the flash. Asphalt based roofs? Yep...without a doubt. Lots of soot. Concrete silos in Montana? Nope. Oil refineries along the Gulf of Mexico? Yep, huge amounts of carbon. Taiga in Russia? Yep...LOTS of carbon because ground is peatmoss. And so on and so forth.
Not to belabor the point, but the US narrative has always been that enemy warheads are primarily targeted at our missile silos and SAC assets. It is my opinion that this is disinformation intended to reduce the panic the majority of the population would experience if they knew where most of the warheads were going to land.
We don't know what a "nuclear winter" would look like because we've never seen one. The closest we can do is approximate using past years where massive volcanic eruptions altered the weather. The significant difference between the two would be the massive amount of radioactivity and fallout a nuclear war would create. And for that ALL we have is models, speculation and guesses. The only thing that is certain about such an event is the death toll will be almost incalculable and life for survivors will suck beyond description.
ReplyDeleteA few considerations, the year with out a summer was caused by one volcano. The dinosaur extinction event caused by one cosmic impact. Nuclear attacks will impact supply chains including food distribution, fertilizer and fuel availability etc. how much land down wind of local bombs may leave land unsafe for food production. Survivors in cities likely have no idea how to grow food even if there are enough degree to grow it and if they could find seeds and a place to plant them (Y2K type seed packets would probably be even more useless than they would have been if the had hit the impeller back then). All in all the third world might be better off than the west!
ReplyDeleteBut we do have an idea of what a nuclear winter might look like: The historical experiences of the Krakatoa and Pinatubo eruptions, which have occurred within modern human history. If I recall correctly, Krakatoa was the more severe event: Krakatoa's blast ruptured the eardrums of sailors some thousands of miles away, and the blast registered on seismographs in London. The following years were measurably cooler and crops struggled worldwide.
ReplyDeleteLots of other technologies out there to grow foodstuffs other than in a field. Mind you the infrastructure to allow such is increasing in its fragility.
ReplyDeleteThis scenario neglects the fact that America generally has central heating, and sufficient untapped room in our larger-than-the-rest-of-the-world houses to provide us the opportunity for indoor gardening to stretch out the seasons. Add to that compact grow lights of the LED type (low power usage), sufficient available water, and large pvc containers, and we might manage to double that time to grow vegetation.
ReplyDeleteWith heirloom seeds, management of compost and soil, careful attention to the plants, and some base intelligence, we might survive it.
But, it's probably a good thing to start NOW, before it becomes critical, and get the expertise when the stakes are low.
ReplyDelete