Hacker News Reader

I don't understand, honestly, why this is a new study. I thought the fallout (hah!) from a nuclear war was known to be catastrophic to the planet. That's why everyone is so hesitant to use them (on top of MAD).

What about this study is new? Is it the scientific detailing and modeling?

View on HN

There's mixed scientific consensus on the full impact of nuclear winter. This paper shows evidence that it would be really bad (in the sense of several billion dead).

As I understand it, the contention with the nuclear winter hypothesis is not whether a ton of soot in the atmosphere would wreck the climate, but rather whether a nuclear war would actually loft that amount of soot into the stratosphere.

And this study suggests it would, in fact, loft a lot of soot into the stratosphere.

To my reading, no. That's not the question the study is addressing. The study is examining the climate impact of six soot-injection scenarios, not the premise of soot injection itself. It cites other papers (some modern, some from the 80s) to justify the six soot-injection scenarios considered, but this study is about applying climate models to those scenarios.

There has recently been people disputing the scale or probability of nuclear winter, so this is relevant and useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com