Carl Sagan Warned the World About Nuclear Winter
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4244
https://www.nature.com/articles/475037b
https://www.quora.com/How-many-nukes-would-it-take-to-cause-...
Nuclear winter may be less plausible than people believe but I'm not sure a nuclear war can be described as "quite survivable". The potential disruption to transportation networks that are essential for food distribution and delivery of medical supplies etc would be catastrophic in a nuclear war. I have no doubt that a nuclear exchange would be accompanied by electronic warfare - disruption/destruction of the power grid in the north could kill millions in the winter, especially if the petroleum supplies required to evacuate were also disrupted.
Does that mean you'll have a 99% chance to survive even if you do any special preparation? If so, nuclear war definitely does not qualify.
Does it mean you'll have a greater than 50% chance to survive with good preparation? Nuclear war probably qualifies.
Or does it just mean that nuclear war won't result in human extinction? Nuclear war definitely qualifies.
An all-out nuclear war would definitely kill tens of millions immediately, and tens if not hundreds of millions with the after-effects. You may not see years-long crop failures due to nuclear winter, but you'll get the same ultimate effect from lack of fertilizer, machinery, and distribution infrastructure. And fallout. A good chunk of the US's productive agricultural land is downwind from ICBM sites which would be targeted for extremely dirty ground burst attacks.
No that’s pretty much your game I think, unless you just didn’t read the paper.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...
I wrote to Dr. Robock and asked him about his model (explicitly on the record, so I'm not disclosing a private conversation). I asked specifically why did the Iraq oil well fires from the Gulf War not inject soot into the stratosphere and cause climatic effects. He wrote back that the difference lies in the formation of firestorms. I draw from this by implication that he believes there remains enough combustable material to start a firestorm in enough places to matter. It's worth noting that while cities have changed a lot, a firestorm did develop in one of the two Japanese cities bombed. I'll have more to say about this in a month or so once I do more research and review your materials.
Here's a link to some of their work: http://ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html
"Affects." Saying it affects 2B people without saying how much means very little. The tailpipe emissions from my single car family affect 7B+ people, just very slightly.
I think we should start with lives lost as an easy to understand measure.
Thanks for linking the source.
Me: "I understand that you've conducted 100 Hiroshima simulations that describe a nuclear autumn that could lead to mass starvation. Is it known where the crossover point is located between deaths due to direct effects and incidental effects of nuclear war? Furthermore, is this even a useful question to ask?"
Dr. Robock: "We simulated one case of an India-Pakistan nuclear war. We estimated 20,000,000 direct casualties, and Ira estimated 1,000,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 indirect deaths. We have a new project to do much better jobs of investigating more credible scenarios and quantifying the impacts on agriculture and food availability."
I'd recommend digging into the paper for more info. Probably in a month or two, I'll have an article that explores this question based on available credible sources in more depth.
He has a TEDx talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54
EDIT: added TEDx link
It would be interesting to see how California would manage during dry 'fire season' if nuclear bombardment caused massive forest fires all over the place. If large fires create massive combined updraft it could be a global catastrophe.
We already know that large-area wildfires sometimes cause firestorms that throw soot into the stratosphere.
Well recently the world has learned just how combustible many buildings are (Grenfell Towers) because they are covered in flammable cladding. We might not have a lot of wood construction anymore, but we've moved on from the concrete jungle as well.
It's not science gone wrong. It's an example of politics co-opting and exploiting science because science has the credibility that politics doesn't. The elites wanted to scale back nuclear spending and needed a cover to convince the masses and the soviets to support "denuclearization".
History is full of "science" being exploited to advance a political agenda. One of the most poignant examples is nazi germany using social darwinism to justify their political agenda. Modern global warming scaremongering industry is the newest example of "science" being co-opted for a political agenda.
Certainly, human activity is affecting the environment, but the doomsday nonsense peddled by al gore, dicaprio and the media isn't science, it's a politically driven scaremongering tactic to get the world under one "system" ( carbon tax, trade, etc ).
I think you're wrong on climate change, but for understandable reasons. We're been peddling lies under the name of science for so long now (see the role of sugar in nutrition) that science has lost much of the credibility it needs to drive the changes we need to address climate change. I don't blame people for distrusting counter-intuitive science generally these days.
Maybe that's why we keep talking about ineffective emissions regulations instead of prototyping effective geoengineering remedies for the carbon forcing and ocean acidification.
"It's not science gone wrong. It's an example of politics co-opting and exploiting science because science has the credibility that politics doesn't. The elites wanted to scale back nuclear spending and needed a cover to convince the masses and the soviets to support "denuclearization"."
Who are 'the elites.' The Illuminati? Carl Sagan and company? Ronald Reagan who began the START treaty process? So Carl Sagan and other scientists entered into a conspiracy with Ronald Reagan to defraud the public with a poorly crafted scientific paper to boilster nuclear disarmament.
Look, for example, at the current sorry state of social science research, much of which does not reproduce. Ego depletion, stereotype threat, the IAT: all "scientific" ideas that are politically convenient but fiction, and which went unquestioned for a long time because, deep down, most researchers didn't want these ideas to be wrong. That doesn't make these researchers conspirators.
But I'm sorry the sentence I quoted isn't blatant crankery but it is loaded with conspiracy innuendo.
That's highly debatable. I'm 1/2 way through Command and Control (the book) and one criticism I have throughout for both history (the military and politicos), as well as the author, is no mention of the massive refugee crisis that would emerge as a result of a nuclear war. It makes Mad Max look more realistic, not so much the widespread wasteland, as much as the total breakdown of civil society.
If "civil" society, modern governments, do this thing, they forfeit moral high ground. They've failed. So why wouldn't they be immediately dismantled? Why trust anyone? I think it would be such high order betrayal people would take up a new religion that commands them murder is a gift from god, do it as often as possible in order to survive.
Matt Farrell: It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome.
Additionally, the absence of nuclear winter does not imply that "nuclear war is quite survivable". Nuclear war is almost certainly survivable, with or without nuclear winter. The question is though: what survives? Even without nuclear winter, crop yields are going to plummet drastically immediately, due to the collapse of world trade, industry, and commerce. And that's a positive feedback loop due to population effects. Our current state of industry and agriculture results in nuclear war causing an initial death-toll followed by a delayed death toll as things settle into a drastically different economic/industrial/agricultural equilibrium. Or, to make things clearer: the sustainable population level of a post-nuclear war scenario is vastly lower than the initial surviving population. What happens after that is still, somewhat thankfully, an open question. The human race may survive, but how long it takes civilization to recover to the same level of technology is unknown. It might take years, decades, centuries, or millenia. Indeed it might never happen, for various reasons. Nuclear war is more than likely going to result in everyone currently alive never seeing this level of technological sophistication, affluence, comfort, etc. in their lifetimes.
My understanding is that the major source of confusion was the headline of a 1990 NYT article that made it look like nuclear winter was wrong, but the actual contents were much more moderate.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...
The Nature letter was written by Russell Seitz, who is also skeptical against the harm cigarette smoking can do, that climate change has, and so on. I don't know of any scientific views not aligning with profits of military contractors and big business that he is not skeptical of. He is associated with the Marshall Insitute, founded by his cousin Fred Seitz, who himself was skeptical of cigarette's harm, global warming, deterioration of the ozone layer etc.
The Skeptoid link references the same thing as the Quora link - that nuclear stockpiles have decreased to where a full-scale war would be less than in the 1980s, when the stockpiles were much higher.
For political reasons, it was necessary from the 1940s to 1980s to minimize fears of the impact of a full-scale nuclear war. I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report which said that if the US and USSR had a full nuclear exchange, the US would get back to current GNP levels - in five years!
I don't know how this is science gone wrong - two of the links you put say this is no longer applicable due to post-Cold War drawdowns, and the other one is by someone who is skeptical not only of this, but that cigarettes are harmful, that climate change is happening and on and on.
Nuclear war certainly isn't desirable, but it doesn't do any good to exaggerate its likely effects.
Provided such merits exist and arguments are indeed scientific.
Short term, or long term? In the long term, that's a lot of hungry people with no org chart above them. Short term, a lot of people will die, be gravely injured, and probably haunted.
Your definition of survival is pretty opaque.
For example, failure to restore cooling to the Fukushima pools could have necessitated the evacuation of 35MM people.
http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs24vonhippel.p...
Even in a pure-counterforce exchange that avoided targeting population centers, the resulting damage to infrastructure could result in the denial of current urban centers to habitation for many decades.
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“Our baseline case, as in many other studies, was a 5000-megaton war with only a modest fraction of the yield (20 percent) expended on urban or industrial targets… In the baseline case, the amount of sunlight at the ground was reduced to… too dark for plants to make a living from photosynthesis.
“Land temperatures, except for narrow strips of coastline, dropped to minus 25 Celsius (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit) and stayed below freezing for months -- even for a summer war... virtually all crops and farm animals, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, would be destroyed, as would most varieties of uncultivated or domesticated food supplies. Most of the human survivors would starve.
“But what if nuclear wars can be contained, and much less than 5000 megatons is detonated? Perhaps the greatest surprise in our work was that even small nuclear wars can have devastating climatic effects. We considered a war in which a mere 100 megatons were exploded, less than one percent of the world arsenals, and only in low-yield airbursts over cities. This scenario, we found, would ignite thousands of fires, and the smoke from these fires alone would be enough to generate an epoch of cold and dark almost as severe as in the 5000 megaton case. The threshold for what Richard Turco has called The Nuclear Winter is very low.
—
I think the reason the Carl Sagan was widely panned afterwords is that the science was just plain bad. The scale of the predictions he made were so off the charts from almost forty years of previous nuclear experience, that he was obviously was wrong. He predicted essentially the end of the humanity from a mere 100 megatons of nuclear explosions, and yet twenty years before article, the Soviet Union had tested a 50 megaton bomb with no more than the usual local effects.
Using bad science to advance a public policy goal is exactly what got us to the current "distrust of science"
It's not completely clear to me just how bad the science was; like the article says there is still a debate today, so it's not completely settled even now. Wikipedia has a lot of discussion.
He's good for kids, but not someone adults should look to for science, given it's scriptwriters and producers putting forth the "science" with him as frontman.
Nuclear winter might qualify, but given that it's merely the difference between "everyone dies" and "humanity survives, but civilization is wrecked and we really must ensure that this never happens," it doesn't seem huge.
What else is there?
I know that those "don't count", because they actually got addressed, but they still feed into an unfortunate perceptual pattern.
Part of this blame falls on the media. It amplifies the "gloom and doom" voices because that is what sells.
The problems with DDT and the ozone hole were averted because people took action in response to them, not because the warnings were incorrect.
The "new ice age" thing was never a mainstream prediction. The idea that scientists were warning about global cooling in the 70s is a myth.
Peak oil and the doomsday clock are both absolutely correct, they just haven't happened yet. Oil reserves are finite on human timescales, and global thermonuclear war would devastate human civilization and the chance of it happening is still disturbingly large.
AI is too early to say, but already pegging it as an incorrect warning now, when nothing even close to human-level AI exists, seems a bit premature. (One could also argue that the warning is premature, but that's different from being wrong.)
The Scientific American articles from the 80s still exist. Myth, is not the appropriate term.
Please be a little more careful there: you are very close to shifting goalposts from "bad science" to "bad journalism"— those two are very separate things yet you don't bother to make a clear distinction.
And the Doomsday Clock is a strange example of a false prediction, since it doesn't actually make strong predictions, just estimates the level of nuclear tension at any given time. You can hardly argue that we haven't been close to nuclear war several times in the past 50 years.
About the coming Ice Age, https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
Oh, like every time there's a bird flu epidemic? The WHO cries Wolf about every couple of years.
There are 4,416 cities on the planet with 150k+ population. 10 100kt bombs are more than enough to destroy most cities on the planet, at least when you define "destroy" as "most everything is broken and/or on fire and most people are dead within 1 year's time".
After your 10-nukes-per-city campaign, you've still got another 5,840 100kt bombs left in your 5,000 megaton budget to divide among the largest cities (NYC, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Tehran, etc.).
I'm stating this because I don't think it's too useful to predict the secondary effects (nuclear winter, etc.) of a war so terrible that basically everyone on the planet would already be dead (from blast, fire, etc.) or dying within a year's time (radiation, starvation from infrastructure collapse, etc.).
But in judging Carl Sagan's claims, we look at what he actually wrote to the public, and it's the specific climate claims that Carl Sagan made that appear to be wildly incorrect.
Sure, technology can survive; witness the gunsmiths in the Hindu Kush who can recreate a functioning Enfield rifle (or ak-47) from scrap metal. But the world would be set back at least 100 years or more, and much knowledge would be lost because of poor archiving, poor dissemination, and the death of experts who are invaluable.
Certainly NOT a lot. Even if you have tens of thousands of ICBM silos that's still not much density compared to whole land at your disposal.
Sure, I would almost certainly be dead, but life on Earth would continue, our species would continue, and our civilisation would continue (albeit with some major setbacks).
Besides, I don't think anyone's nuclear war plan is actually to destroy every major to semi-major city on Earth. In a realistic 1980s nuclear war, a lot of nukes would be targeted at military bases and the like. Plenty of others would destroy every major city in the US and USSR, plus each country's nuclear-armed allies. Maybe we here in Australia would get a nuke or two out of spite. But is anyone going to bother to nuke South America?
i think it's mentioned in Command and Control (book) but if I recall correctly the plan from the US perspective was not only to nuke military targets, but also all major population centers, with several thermonuclear bombs for each target, for good measure. And that was not only the USSR, but basically every ally of the USSR as well.
You can imagine that the other side was also going to do about the same thing.
Sure, some countries may have been relatively spared, but all in all the whole of Europe, US, Russia, China, would have been annihilated.
Yes.
There is this tendency to assume that, because you're ("you're" in the general sense) not thinking about a place, then that place necessarily isn't important from a geopolitical point of view.
Not taking into account the geopolitical value of maintaining military bases on the US's southern flanks, it's worth noting that Brazil is the 12th largest oil producer, among its many other important economic attributes. Argentina is one of the go-to places for China to buy farm land[1]. Take those two and you're left with basically 10% of South America.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303823104576391...
The Tsar Bomba was tested over artic wildereness in Novaya Zemlya, not over a city.
Of course, thankfully, we don't really know what would happen when a large city receives a realistic attack from multiple H-bombs.
The claim is that firestorms in particular would create climate change, because a single city-sized plume could carry the soot much higher than if the city burned and released the same amount of soot in an ordinary fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...
[0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-011-1685-...
Now, that's been debunked apparently. But the hypothesis as stated is sound enough. It's not the blast itself, it's the fire.
As for the politics of the issue, mutual assured destruction has been the working theory since Eisenhower. Those who think strategic nuclear war is winnable, as well as the SDI nutters, are threats to that stability.
In any industry, if you attack/speak-against my beliefs/views/plans/theories, then I don't like it. Even if you didn't mean too. Even if you didn't know I existed or had those views.
It's not about science, it's about humans defending their worldview and beliefs. Even stamp collecting has this.
Anything people put time/effort into has this.
edit: ChuckMcM does a better job describing this.
If a person can acknowledge that this other person is smart and qualified, and recognize that they hold a belief that, if true, implies the believe that the person holds is incorrect. Then they have to deal with being wrong on something they have invested a lot of time into and believed for possibly a very long time.
Throw in a bit of imposter syndrome and I think it would be surprising is people just switched their point of view when presented with an alternative. Instead it sets up this conflict where each party tries really hard to prove the other wrong, and after one or more rounds of that one point of view or the other generally prevails (at least from the perspective of the audience). This is when really good science gets done because it does a great job of neutralizing implicit biases.
I know a physicist who despises Brian Cox with a passion. It's jealousy.
The political debate of Sagans time was unilateral nuclear disarmament and it fed eagerly on accounts of the horror of nuclear war. The unstated constraint was that it was perfectly happy to accept a significantly less restrained Soviet Union on the world stage. Science can't tell you if that's a good idea or not.
During the Eisenhower era U.S. doctrine was so called massive retaliation using a force disproportionate to the size of the attack. It was viable strategy only as long as Soviet Union did not have nuclear parity.
Kennedy realized that massive retaliation was not credible anymore and asked other options. U.S. nuclear strategy changed into so called flexible response strategy. Soviet Union had always relied in the use of tactical nukes. First use of nuclear weapons does not automatically lead to all out nuclear holocaust. There was nuclear escalation ladders even against Soviet Union.
Mutually assured destruction (MAD) is deterrence strategy only against massive decapitation attack.
Today locally limited nuclear war is more likely than ever before. It's part of Russian doctrine if Russia is outmatched in local conflicts. US has nuclear weapons and strategies dedicated for limited nuclear war.
This is assuming the case of a scientist who confidently makes incorrect assertions. If they qualify what they're saying—"So far this is what the research says, but it's preliminary, there are a few other tests I'd like to see"—then that's a lot more defensible even if they're wrong. (There is a legendary tendency for reporters to remove all the qualifiers, but at least that's not the scientist's fault.) If they state everything confidently, more confidently than the evidence justifies, but they happen to be right on all their assertions so far, then that may be mildly irritating. If they're intellectually cautious and they're right, and if there are scientists that complain about these people, then that does sound like jealousy.
The advocates of SDI and nuclear did not seem to discuss the repercussions of use, rather the fact that the power is a deterrent and useful against enemies. The repercussions are what limit the use of nuclear as a strategic weapon.
Excerpt from the article: '“People didn’t want to change the way they were thinking of [nuclear] weapons,” he says. “I see an echo of that now. What nuclear winter shows is that they’re not really weapons in the sense that other things are weapons: that you can use them to harm your adversary without harming yourself. People are not really considering that if there really were to be a nuclear conflagration, in addition to how unthinkably horrible it would be in the direct theater of the use of those weapons—say in the Korean peninsula and surrounding areas—there would also be global effects.”' - Grinspoon
You wonder why so many people don't trust "scientists" when you can see they are clearly lying to push a social cause?
> the five scientists who introduced the term ''nuclear winter'' now acknowledge that they overestimated its severity, and their concession appears to have moderated the longstanding debate.
> most discounted the extreme view that global chilling of the atmosphere would be severe enough to be described as ''winter.'' Scientists specializing in such studies also generally reject the suggestion that a ''nuclear winter,'' in itself, could bring about the extinction of the human race. Even Dr. Richard P. Turco, the physicist who coined the phrase ''nuclear winter,'' discounts the idea.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Yeah and if you detonate the at ground level there is going to be a lot of fallout. Worries are very valid.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...
My coworkers were discussing what would happen if California voted to declare independence from the United States. The hypothetical scenario instantly moved to "occupation by US Military forces", which hadn't even come up in my mind. Its not like the EU states moved to occupy Britain or anything. It seems like the obvious solution is to try to sit down, think about it, debate it, and work out the problems of the involved parties. Why turn directly to violence?
We had a war about this. US states are not allowed to secede. The Union is perpetual.