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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a crystal ball, but I think that a major war that kills enough wealthy people to more than offset its own carbon cost is relatively unlikely during the next ten years. Unfortunately the next ten years are what determines whether we will be able to limit global warming to two degrees or not.

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Modern war also produces a lot of carbon. Tank fuel usage is measured in gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon. An M1 abrams gets 0.6 mpg, a F-22 at military power gets 0.4. Now imagine the fuel usage required by two post-industrial countries having it out rather than the US running counter-insurance operations.

I suspect that even if modern war dropped populations enough to dent CO2 production, the war itself would burn enough oil to offset it.

Honestly this is a drop in the bucket compared to what normal automobile traffic produces. Not that war shouldn't be avoided, but carbon emissions are the last of the reasons we'd want to worry about.

It’s more than a drop. The world produces a bit short of 100 million barrels of oil per day, and the US military alone consumes a bit north of 100 million barrels per year (109). This means that the US military consumes a bit over one days worth of oil consumption alone in just fuel. This isn’t even accounting for the 30,000 GWH they consume in electricity, and what carbon emissions they might produce.

And remember, the US military is not running at full speed. It’s currently involved in a few counter insurance missions, which while not cheap are a far cry from the resources required for 2 modern nations having it out. There are fewer than 20,000 soldiers in hot spots as of 2017, out of the 1.3 million active duty personnel available. You can bet if the US were to go against China or Russia our oil usage would go through the roof.

I wonder what the peak energy usage was in WW2, say in 1941, when both the European and Pacific fronts were still ongoing.

A lot.

I couldn’t find hard numbers, but the range appears to be about a billion barrels of oil per year for the US, maybe higher.

Interestingly, we used a lot less fuel per soldier then. The normal back then was 1 gallon per soldier per day. By desert storm we were up to 4, and by 2007 we consumed 16 gallons per soldier per day[0].

Now obviously we have a smaller army now, which goes a long way to explain the lower total consumption than in WW2, but it is mildly terrifying to consider what a WW2 sized engagement would consume at 16x the per-soldier fuel consumption.

0: https://www.forbes.com/2008/06/05/mileage-military-vehicles-...

> I don't have a crystal ball, but I think that a major war that kills enough wealthy people to more than offset its own carbon cost is relatively unlikely during the next ten years.

A nuclear war will:

1. Kill hundreds of millions of wealthy people.

2. Is the most likely kind of 'real' conflict between wealthy people.

I don't think that 2) is true, and I don't think a conflict between wealthy people is going to happen in the next ten years.

Nuclear war may or may not be the "most likely" kind of war, but it's still, as the person you're responding to said, "relatively unlikely."

(I would say it's very unlikely.)

Given how many close calls we have had, and given how there's thousands of nuclear weapons, pointed at eachother, on hairtrigger alert, and given that a number of countries allow themselves to use nuclear weapons in a first-strike scenario, I strongly feel that the possibility of a nuclear war in any given year is ~1-2%.

1. The US and Russia are currently doing their best to antagonize eachother.

2. The US is currently doing its best to extract itself from the tyrrany of MAD (By building ICBM defenses.) [1] If MAD breaks down, the whole house of cards that justifies the existence of nuclear weapons as a guarantor of peace collapses.

3. The Russians have an automated retaliatory-strike system - should they be attacked, it will end the world. Hopefully, there aren't any bugs with it. (But knowing how software projects go, of course there are bugs with it.) [2]

4. The decision to launch, once made by either country's leadership, cannot be second-guessed by saner subordinates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

> possibility of a nuclear war in any given year is ~1-2%

If it were that high, we'd likely have had one by now. I think it's an order of magnitude lower than that.

Well, nuclear weapons have been around for 74 years, and there's been either zero or one nuclear war, depending on your definition. So ~1% and ~1‰ chance per annum are both supported by the data; 1% is more likely if you're in the "one" camp and 1‰ if you're in the "zero" camp.

But much more importantly, we've all been discounting the cooling effects of nuclear winter.

This is the poster child for survivorship - in its most literal sense - bias.

I mean, I'm not trying to be rude, but it doesn't really matter what you "strongly feel" -- your estimate of 1-2% is just a wild guess.

I "strongly feel" it's not very likely, whatever very and likely mean, so there.

Except that we have 6.5 billion excess people, killing off a a couple hundred million won't change the fact that the permafrost is melting and will start spewing massive amounts of carbon and methane into the upper atmosphere.

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