Nukes also cannot kill everyone. Nuclear winter was proven to not be based on solid evidence, the earth remains very habitable after all nukes have gone off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#Likelihood_o...
Annie Jacobsen is awesome, her book about Area 51 was riveting, but I also cannot unsee "Capitalist Realism" and the idea that we keep picturing civilization-ending catastrophes because we don't want to go to work in the morning, and walking/biking everywhere and living in a small community is amazingly appealing to us at a base level. We yearn for the lifestyle of the apocalypse survivor, but none of us want to go through the apocalypse. Generally, I think we kind of say, "oh, it'll be the end of the world" because most of us (myself included) lack the imagination to really look beyond linear extrapolations of the status quo most of the time.
Then again, I'm also building my cabin in the woods.
From the wikipedia article you linked to:
"More recent studies make use of modern global circulation models and far greater computer power than was available for the 1980s studies. A 2007 study examined the consequences of a global nuclear war involving moderate to large portions of the current global arsenal.[36] The study found cooling by about 12–20 °C in much of the core farming regions of the US, Canada, Europe, Russia and China and as much as 35 °C in parts of Russia for the first two summer growing seasons. The changes they found were also much longer-lasting than previously thought, because their new model better represented entry of soot aerosols in the upper stratosphere, where precipitation does not occur, and therefore clearance was on the order of 10 years.[26] In addition, they found that global cooling caused a weakening of the global hydrological cycle, reducing global precipitation by about 45%."
So the current theory is that there will indeed be a "nuclear winter"?
Seems pretty logical to me that if you blow up extreme amounts of particles into the stratosphere, that that will cause a reduction in energy that hits the surface from the sun...
A 20C drop sounds pretty bad.