Image: Richard Lee
In Brief
- Nuclear bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas in a fight between India and Pakistan would start firestorms that would put massive amounts of smoke into the upper atmosphere.
- The particles would remain there for years, blocking the sun, making the earth’s surface cold, dark and dry. Agricultural collapse and mass starvation could follow. Hence, global cooling could result from a regional war, not just a conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
- Cooling scenarios are based on computer models. But observations of volcanic eruptions, forest fire smoke and other phenomena provide confidence that the models are correct.
Twenty-five years ago international teams of scientists showed that a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could produce a “nuclear winter.” The smoke from vast fires started by bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would envelop the planet and absorb so much sunlight that the earth’s surface would get cold, dark and dry, killing plants worldwide and eliminating our food supply. Surface temperatures would reach winter values in the summer. International discussion about this prediction, fueled largely by astronomer Carl Sagan, forced the leaders of the two superpowers to confront the possibility that their arms race endangered not just themselves but the entire human race. Countries large and small demanded disarmament.
Nuclear winter became an important factor in ending the nuclear arms race. Looking back later, in 2000, former Soviet Union leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev observed, “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.”
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40 Comments
Add CommentThis is a great solution to global warming. Since the USA and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons we just have to explode the correct number each year to offset global warming and return thermal balance. Being a democracy, I think we should vote each year on where to drop our bombs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article said there could be no cleansing of soot in the upper atmosphere because rain falls below that point. It seems to me that water vapor precipitates out because it is able to radiate thermal energy to space. If that is blocked by dust, it looks like it would go higher before being able to drop out. I also consider that likely to be a mitigating factor in global warming, allowing vapor to condense only after getting cold enough, no matter how high that winds up being.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAhh I belive they are suggesting that it would be colder on the earth so atmospheric water would condense more easily not less easily. Also, I hereby submit my vote for the "Nuclear Winter vs Global Warming" movement. If we just bombed one or two non-populated forests a year it would go along way towards making our earth a better place to live. Really we are ethically amiss if we didn't nuke the earth. Nuclear winter is the answer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjarred7747:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have global warming because we have destroyed the forests, they are the earth's organs that regenerate our atmosphere. They also absorb a huge quantity of solar energy and convert CO2 to sugars. Without forests guess what happens to that energy? Further forests support biodiversity essential for a functioning living planet.
The principal driver of global warming is the homo sapien population level. If you want to nuke anything, nuke the most highly populated areas on our planet. Bangladesh with a population density of 1126 humans per square kilometre is a tempting target. Surprise surprise its South Asia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is a bunch of hogwash. Even when the US, Russia had 50k nukes it was barely possible. Now it's a joke to think we woulds have nuke winter. Maybe a little cooling and barely a good volcano's worth from all the nukes Pakistan, India have.
Nukes now are quite small, needing 2-6 just to take out a good size town.
Even in Japan the firebombing raids were far more deadly than the nuke hits. But that was against paper houses. Modern cities don't burn so well. And any nuke attack is likely to be very limited.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is a bunch of hogwash. Even when the US, Russia had 50k nukes it was barely possible. Now it's a joke to think we woulds have nuke winter. Maybe a little cooling and barely a good volcano's worth from all the nukes Pakistan, India have.
Nukes now are quite small, needing 2-6 just to take out a good size town.
Even in Japan the firebombing raids were far more deadly than the nuke hits. But that was against paper houses. Modern cities don't burn so well. And any nuke attack is likely to be very limited.
"Ahh I belive they are suggesting that it would be colder on the earth so atmospheric water would condense more easily not less easily"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, they said there would be no cleansing because water doesn't go that high, not that it wouldn't go that high because of colder air. If the dust cloud is cutting off energy influx, it is also cutting off energy efflux.
"If you want to nuke anything, nuke the most highly populated areas on our planet. Bangladesh with a population density of 1126 humans per square kilometre is a tempting target. Surprise surprise its South Asia."
I wish I could be confident this was just sarcasm and not a real attitude. Doesn't New York City have a higher population density? No, I don't want to kill them either.
As technology develops, we will more and more discover all our waste is simply resources we weren't properly using and we will find good ways to clean up after ourselves unless some sub-genius sends us back to the Dark Ages first.
I hope one of the SciAm editors is going to respond to the ill-informed postings. Don't just provide a platform for ignorance and expect your other readers to try to educate the people you attract.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo address the global warming issue by reducing population you have to factor in the emissions per head of the target. For Bangladesh it's about 2 tonnes per head per year, now for the USA it's ten times that. You only need to nuke one American for every ten Bangladeshis to get the same result. New York would be a much more efficient target than Chittagong!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi!: the sole contribution of Albert Einstein's pushing the development of the bomb he conceived is the concept of mutual granted destruction in a nuclear war, that has been one of major contributors to the non-repetition of a world war. India and Pakistan are more apart from a war since both have the bombs, the concepts expressed in this note have the main consequence as giving somebody the opportunity to live the good life without any real contribution to the rest of mankind. The issue today is that bomb owners seem feeling they are better than the rest of the world, and try to impose their supremacy by all available pressure ways. The US attack to Irak was probably no more morally acceptable than the North Korea invasion of the South or the USSR invasion of Ceskoslovensko. Preventive wars, and probably any war that is not a response to an actual attack, are hardly if at all justifyed. The one who seeds winds, will collect storms, and the world is becoming so complex as almost impossible to fully control. The wrong choice is the provocation of violents. Nice year 2010, salud +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHuman intelligence, no matter how ingenious in inventing technology, still lacks practical wisdom, and has invented religion as a justification for its foolishness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Preventive wars, and probably any war that is not a response to an actual attack, are hardly if at all justifyed. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf someone has a ten percent chance of starting a world killing nuclear war within ten years, would stopping him never be justified?
"Human intelligence, no matter how ingenious in inventing technology, still lacks practical wisdom, and has invented religion as a justification for its foolishness."
The USSR and China made a point of rejecting religion and then killed tens of millions for idiological purposes. Khmer Rouge in former Cambodia would have done so as well but lacked ten million to kill. So religion is not needed to justify foolishness.
Let's not give the fossil fuel industry a new propaganda tool. Cutting CO2 emissions to near zero is still necessary. Annual nuclear explosions on uninhabited desert islands is a desperate way to stop global warming. It would become a new addiction, like curing opium addiction with heroin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere may be something wrong with your computer code if you think global warming can be stopped so easily. Is the code published for all to check? Were formal methods used in writing it? Is it open source?
Let's not give the fossil fuel industry a new propaganda tool. Global warming is the threat that really can make us extinct. We still have to stop burning fossil fuels to stop global warming. We must reduce our CO2 output to near zero to stop global warming. No other solution will do because the only safe thing to do is the natural one of returning the CO2 content of our atmosphere to its pre-industrial level. Annual nuclear explosions on desert islands would become a new addiction, like curing opium addiction with heroin, and it would waste precious nuclear fuel. We need the nuclear fuel to replace coal as an energy source.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's not give the fossil fuel industry a new propaganda tool. Global warming is the threat that really can make us extinct. We still have to stop burning fossil fuels to stop global warming. We must reduce our CO2 output to near zero to stop global warming. No other solution will do because the only safe thing to do is the natural one of returning the CO2 content of our atmosphere to its pre-industrial level. Annual nuclear explosions on desert islands would become a new addiction, like curing opium addiction with heroin, and it would waste precious nuclear fuel. We need the nuclear fuel to replace coal as an energy source.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere may be something wrong with your computer code. The effects you are stating are too large for the number of nuclear bursts. Did you use formal methods in the development of the code? Is the code published for others to check? Is the code open sourced?
This is a similar case to amniocentesis for finding chromosomal aberrancies in unborn fetuses. The procedure has a fetal loss rate that is variable, but can be near 1%, higher than the incidence of most common genetical diseases it can unveil, evenmore it has a false positive rate (diagnosis of abnormality that does not exist at all) of about 3%. The case of preventive war is similar, in that it eliminates a worry and a cause of nuisance rather than a real harm, at the cost of destruction and lives. President Bush jr stated that "War is a dangerous place", when asked about a journalist death, but, is anybody so sure its civilization, political system are the best and that the fact that he/she has an unbeatable military power justifyes any kind of use?. War has its own dynamics, and once you start it, the consequences can easily escape your control. Probably, the amount of deaths in WWII caused by allied forces liberation efforts exceeded the deaths caused directly by the enemies they fought, and I think that counting deads is some kind of a mean gesture, as all humans are irrepetible and a single violent dead is in itself a tragedy. Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisForelornehope:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not simply the energy consumption of the individual that matters, its the environmental space they take up that also effects the global balance.
CO2 generated globally from all sources is reprocessed by a very inefficient process known as photosynthesis. An individual homo sapien not generating much CO2 could deter the process by clearing away vegetation that processes CO2. In poor nations worldwide, explosive population growth, fuelled by food aid, force populations to seek new habitat, they destroy the forests and occupy the land. They just manage to survive to breed further. This loss of CO2 processing capacity is as bad as generating CO2.
Remember the solar energy not consumed processing CO2 heats the planet. It takes a lot of energy to convert CO2 to sugars and oxygen, this makes life as it exists on earth possible. You can not get a net energy output by burning carbon and then reprocessing the CO2 back to carbon.
"Probably, the amount of deaths in WWII caused by allied forces liberation efforts exceeded the deaths caused directly by the enemies they fought, and I think that counting deads is some kind of a mean gesture, as all humans are irrepetible"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a good example to consider. You say we may have killed more fighting the Nazis and Japanese than they killed before we stopped them. Even if true, it does not change the fact that they were in the process of systematically killing millions and there is no reason to think they would have stopped if we just let them continue eliminating all Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Chinese. It is also noteworthy that we did not fight them to save those groups even though that was a side effect of opposing their world conquests.
" they destroy the forests and occupy the land. They just manage to survive to breed further. This loss of CO2 processing capacity is as bad as generating CO2."
Most people don't realize a mature forest releases exactly as much carbon dioxide as it consumes as old plants die and decay to be replaced by new plants. The only way to have plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to see to it that the vegetable matter does not decay. You could do this by cutting trees or wheat stalks, it's all the same and storing them somewhere where they won't decay, deep seal burial should be the best option.
To be carbon neutral you would use them as your energy source. Thus they would not remove any carbon dioxide but they wouldn't actually add any either.
"Remember the solar energy not consumed processing CO2 heats the planet. "
or is reflected back into space or evaporates water which carries it high enough to radiate it out into space or give the energy to other molecules which radiate it out into space. Ultimately, the amount of energy absorbed by the planet plus the energy given off by the interior heat transfer will balance the amount of energy radiated away. The slight difference yielded all the coal beds, oil and gas fields over millions of years.
Don't want to say this, but the nazi party dissapeared in 1945. The current scenario is that violence comes from other agents, and that some want to justify or to endorse preventive wars, such as Irak. Under this rationale, someone will come tomorrow trying to emasculate you because they fear you can violate or let pregnant or just stimulate the sexuality of his daughters and relatives and tribe members. You won't believe, but this is happening today, and among us
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, while the world breathed a collective sign of relief when the cold war ended believing that the threat of nuclear war had all but disappeared with it, we have now entered a time where a nuclear attack is even more likely. To quote "Sum of all Fears", which got the quote from somewhere else but I forget where, "I don't fear the country with a thousand bombs; I fear the man with one." We have enemies now who would welcome mutually assured destruction. In fact, they practice it daily. They hold the belief, "kill them all and let god sort them out." This is why countries like North Korea and Iran are so dangerous. They would gladly give the technology of mass destruction to anyone willing to target their enemies. This is why it is important that the world stop playing politics and instead demand results in disarming these aggressive nations. I find it revealing that while the US justified attacking Iraq because of WMD and al Qaeda and with the implied blessing of the people none of which turned out to be true, that they have dealt with Iran differently, who we know is developing nuclear weapons, who we know is sponsoring international terrorism, who we know has a population that has taken to the streets to protest its illegitimate government. Support the people of Iran and North Korea. Remove the despots.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe cold war is coming back, as Russia is again testing weapons. The fact is that there are a lot of Madoffs plaguing the economical system, and have enough money to pay politicians and have their friends protected by paying a pocketful of mumbles to people forced to risk their lives in conflicts alien to their interests, many times because they can't find a better job
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisy'know, as i read this article, i was quite un-facetiously thinking - HEY!!! GLOBAL COOLING!!! when everyone is concerned about WARMING, why doesn't this article even mention the OBVIOUS connection that most people would make - why not use particulates as a COUNTER TO CO2 CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING?!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi mean come on, the article is basically SCREAMING THAT from first word to last.
OF COURSE, using nukes is out of the question because of the radiation problems... but we probably have plenty of CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS that can create big enough blasts right? and since forest fires and volcanoes also cause solar shielding, what about ORCHESTRATING burns and other soot causing phenomena to turn the temp down.
ESPECIALLY when everyone is saying that we're already too far gone as it is.
if that is true, if there's nothing that we can practically do at this point in terms of emission reduction to tip the balance back to safe, why not thinking of active... TERRAFORMING (for lack of a better word).
I would like to submit a rejoinder to all those here who say there shouldn't be so many humans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBe the shining example. Off yourselves first. Eliminate your personal carbon footprint.
Then maybe the rest of us will get some peace.
So the logic here is, if you yourself don't want to die, the world is not overpopulated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this?
Let's consider some facts:
1. The world's human population has quadrupled since 1900.
2. The world's human population has doubled since the 1960s.
3. Despite the dropoff in rate of increase in Western nations by and large, today the world's total human population is increasing at the rate of 10 more people every 4 seconds.
And that's sustainable how?
4. Approximately 1B of the world's nearly 7B humans are starving.
5. As a direct result of the number of humans on Earth today, the Earth is experiencing the largest species die-off since the cataclysm that took out the dinosaurs.
6. Human overpopulation is destorying the Earth's ability to sustain human life, agritechnology advances notwithstanding, and much of this degradation is irreversible or nearly so. Some examples:
a. Well overpumping is permanently collapsing porous aquifers worldwide, leading to a steady reduction in available well water that will never return.
b. CO2 being absorbed into ocean water is reducing its Ph. At the current rate of change hard corals and shellfish will be unable to deposit their shells by 2050, leading to the large-scale extinction of vast ecosystems that currently produce much of the world's protein in tropical coastal diets.
c. Rainforest destruction is also irreversible, since tropical soils are much shallower than temperate zone soils; after a few years of crops or pasturage, monsoons wash away the thin topsoil, leaving barren expanses that contribute to global warming as well as eliminating the food sources once provided by the missing rainforest. Locals forage into surrounding rainforest, using roads built into cleared areas, and exterminate populations of edible animals in those remaining forest areas as well.
d. Reef bombing eliminates coral reefs as fish/crustacean nurseries for centuries; if bombing stops, the reefs that return are relatively minor, because large hard coral reefs can't grow from the rubble left by the bombers. The practice is extremely widespread in IndoPacific waters.
e. Normal human agriculture is inherently destructive; add vast amounts of fertilizers and pesticides and these produce dead rivers and life-annihilating plumes that stretch into the oceans around major river mouths (such as the Mississippi).
The only moral conclusion is that we should encourage all activities that kill statistically significant numbers of people.
The fact that this conclusion goes against our instincts doesn't make it false.
Ehkzu:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow. Being able to hold diametrically opposed views simultaneously is either a sign of genius or insanity.
My vote for you is the latter.
Are you an example as to the humanity hating face of eco-nazism? Good thing Nopenhagen tanked.
Hope clouds observation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI doubt that nuclear winter theory. Combustion produces CO2 and H2O both are greenhouse gas. They would offset the cooling effect of aerosols. Why didn't scientists realize this? Because nuclear winter was proposed in the 1970s when global cooling was in vogue. Now global warming is the craze. In the spirit of high fashion, car manufacturers should develop a catalytic converter that produces non-polluting aerosols to fight global warming. This would offset the CO2 emission of cars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'd wager that 99% of actual Scientific American readers would know that what darkens the skies is particulates, as is true of volcano eruptions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't think comments like this spring from observation and introspection. Seems more likely that nonsense this red herring excursion come from uneducated people getting their ideas from "thought leaders" trying to cultivate American anti-intellectualism in the service of non-ideological commercial interests.
It takes a lot of lack of education to think you know something about climate science that all them scientist fellers don't realize. Note the implication that scientists are a pack of grant-seeking idiots chasing after the latest fad theory. This mix of contempt for smart people mixed with conspiracy theorizing is all too familiar to me.
I grew up in blue-c0llar suburbs, where other kids assumed I got my vastly better test scores by cheating. Smart people can imagine people who are even smarter than themselves. Stupid people can't. It's one aspect of humanity's bell-shaped intelligence curve that's discontinuous.
www.blogzu.blogspot.com
You have hit upon the up side of atomic war; it would do wonders for over population. However, the fallout and nuclear winter would also trim America's population. Also, the world population pressure would stay the same, even in whatever was left of Pakistan and India, as natural resources would be so depleted there would be a lot less to go around.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTermites would be a good supply of food if a nuclear winter were to occur.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe authors raise the point that obviously you can't test the models. The closest thing, however, would be to investigate the climate impact of the above-ground testing that ended in '63 with their current models. They don't give the yield of the 100 bombs detonated but I don't think they would equal the 10 M ton "Mike" test the US conducted in '52, since I don't think India or Pakistan have anything above 100k tons in their arsenal. Granted "Mike" was in the Pacific (unpopulated) but it did send an island into the air (approx 80 million tons). "Oak" in '58 created an underwater crater 200 ft deep and a mile wide. How much smoke would they have sent up? The US and Soviets conducted over 400 tests aboveground between '45-63, many in the megaton range. Granted the tests were conducted in deserts (esp. Soviets) and oceans, how much accumulated smoke would have gone up? How much would have gone up in one or two years of testing? If according to the authors smoke would stay up for about 10 years, is there any way to figure out what the accumulated effects of the 18 years of above-ground testing would have been? Are current modelling programs utilizing climate data from that period and do they take into account the "anomalous" effects testing would/could have on climate data? If one volcano can affect climate, what would 10 big tests in a year do? I'm curious because questions about climate and nuclear testing are the closest thing to testing a climate model of nuclear war, and especially because the stakes are so high.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI know this might be a stretch, but could the higher than average temps the last 20 years be attributed in part to particulates from testing finally settling out of the atmosphere?
By the way, the stats about testing are from the book of photographs, "100 Suns," that SciAm reviewed several years ago (R Rhoades' Dark Sun is also good). For a truly frightening view of nuclear winter, read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, which won the Pulitzer a couple of years ago.
By the way, I think nuking a forest to halt global warming doesn't solve the root of the problem which is human greed fueling too much consumption of resources. I hope the commentators were being at least a little facetious.
Nuclear detonations within urban and industrial areas would ignite immense firestorms which would burn everything imaginable and create millions of tons of thick, black smoke. Much of this smoke would rapidly be lofted above cloud level, into the stratosphere, where it would block warming sunlight from reaching the lower atmosphere and surface of the Earth. Sunlight would then markedly heat the upper atmosphere and cause massive destruction of the protective ozone layer, while darkness below would produce average surface temperatures on Earth characteristic of those experienced during an Ice Age.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe deadly climate change caused by a nuclear-war induced stratospheric smoke layer would not provide a long-term "solution" to global warming; the smoke would be gone in about 10 years, and eventually the Ice Age weather conditions it produced would subside.
But the environmental consequences of this event would be monumental. 5 million tons of smoke in the stratosphere, from the India-Pakistan exchange could kill up to a billion people from nuclear famine. A large exchange involving the strategic nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia could put up to 180 million tons of smoke above cloud level; this would be a mass extinction event which humans would not survive.
Thus the operationally deployed nuclear arsenals represent a well-maintained self-destruct mechanism for humanity.
for a more detailed explanation see www.nucleardarkness.org
Forlornehope:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEmissions per head is not the sole criterion determining global warming. An individual with very small emission but preventing the reprocessing of CO2 is equally destructive of the environment.
In Bangladesh with a population of over a thousand people per sq Km. there is not much space for any other life-forms, other than the homo sapien and his essential to life species.
Don't forget biodiversity is necessary to maintain the status quo.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRadioactivity is a factor that should also be included in this study.
How radioactive will that smoke be cloaking the earth and blocking the sun.
Will it be carried in the same span of area?
Ignoramus. It would take only a small portion of Russia - US nuclear arsenal to wipe out all life on the planet. Also consider this. This article is in Scientific American, not some blog written by an idiot like you. They don't publish hogwash.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIgnoramus. It would take only a small portion of the US-Russia nuclear arsenal to destroy all life on the planet, not just human life. Also, consider the source of this article. This Scientific American, not some blog written by a brainless amoeba like you. They don't publish hogwash. The sign of basic intelligence is respect for opinions of people who know more then you. That's something you obviously do not possess.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCmucmullen had an interesting point about the global warming which was observed to be increasing up until about 1998 was perhaps due to particulates from nuclear testing finally thinning out enough to stop reflecting away solar heat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn associated question would be this: scientists assume that many tons of space dust enter the upper atmosphere every year in a perfectly natural away, some of it coming in as meteriotes that explode and never reach ground level. But is it correct to assume that the SAME amount of space dust comes down every year, or every decade, or every century? Perhaps our planet wanders through regions that are thicker or thinner in such dust. Since our whole solar system is boogeying through space at 66,000 mph or so, we never pass through exactly the same region twice. Even our whole galaxy is on the move and we pass in and out of its spiral arms every so many hundred million years.
We need to start doing better dust counts in outer space near our planet and make sure we know what is going on!
My comment/question takes the import of this and draws it into a larger time span. If in fact such a limited inferno could cause a global climatic change it would surely follow that anything producing such conditions could do this as well. What about the firebombings in Japan and Germany where I believe over 100 cities were destroyed with the Hamburg firestorm and nuclear bombings in Japan being best known.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs there evidence that in the following years say through the 1950s that any climatic change occurred as a result of this? Was there any discernible pattern of increased or decreased storm activity, droughts, etc? In the immediate aftermath of the war I would expect all eyes were on the ground and rebuilding but has anyone looked to the historical record to compare whether the particulate matter in the massive bombing campaigns had an effect on the global atmosphere in the way a significant volcano might or a small nuclear war?
I may be mistaken but in the post 1945 time frame there were massive bombings in Vietnam for instance but not with the firestorm effect as you had in Germany and Tokyo.
Part of the reason I ask this is that if our current output of material detrimental to the atmosphere is having such an effect it really make me wonder about the entirety of the industrial age. I've heard it said that humanity expanded during the last century in part because it did not face the kind of pressure it did in The Little Ice Age. The atmospheric changes we often discuss usually focus on the here and now without considering it's been building steadily for longer than generally acknowledged.
Like the great fires in the wars we fought in the last century I wonder whether out current global climate situation really hearkens back to the advent of coal fueled industrialism itself.
It would suggest to me that the incline in the slippery slope may be steeper at this point than is generally supposed. As certain things magnify one another the pace of change quickens thus if the start date is pushed back a century or two it might tend to point to elements of gathering storm the magnitude of which is not appreciated even among the pessimists of today.
Add to it deforestation and things like the denuding of the high plains in North America and you start to get an image of a much longer period for such an echo chamber of change to develop.
Just saying. The topic of this article does not exist in a vacuum, it out to open our eyes to a new view of other events that have actually occurred already.
Do people really think we should bomb parts of the world in order to try and rectify damage that has been done to our planet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat a sad day for all of humanity. Yes, let's bomb innocent people simply because of where they live. That makes sense.
Here's a better idea: let's bomb the arrogrant, selfish, narcissistic and ignorant. You know, like those that think it is a good idea to just randomly cull the population through genocide.
If you are so cynical and angry anyway, the world would probably do a lot better without your negative energy!
Yes, I have to agree, nonsense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsider that India and Pakistan's ~200 fission-only weapons have a collective yield at ~50ktons each of 10,000 ktons, which is still far less than the USSR's *single* largest atmospheric weapons test (Tsar Bomba) of 50,000 ktons. Then together there have been exactly 521 atmospheric weapons test, most of the yield in the two years '61-'62.