Nuclear winter is a real and present danger

[bananas]

Alan Robock, May 19, 2011, Nature, Vol 473, pp 275-276
PDF file: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/NatureNuclearWinterComment.pdf

Nuclear winter is a real and present danger

Models show that even a ‘small’ nuclear war would cause catastrophic climate change. Such findings must inform policy, says Alan Robock.

In the 1980s, discussion and debate about the possibility of a ‘nuclear winter’ helped to end the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. As former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview in 2000: “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 honour and morality, to act.”

As a result, the number of nuclear weapons in the world started to fall, from a peak of about 70,000 in the 1980s to a total of about 22,000 today. In another five years that number could go as low as 5,000, thanks to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia, signed on 8 April 2010.

Yet the environmental threat of nuclear war has not gone away. The world faces the prospect of a smaller, but still catastrophic, nuclear conflict. There are now nine nuclear-weapons states. Use of a fraction of the global nuclear arsenal by anyone, from the superpowers to India versus Pakistan, still presents the largest potential environmental danger to the planet by humans.

That threat is being ignored. One reason for this denial is that the prospect of a nuclear war is so horrific on so many levels that most people simply look away. Two further reasons are myths that persist among the general public: that the nuclear winter theory has been disproved, and that nuclear winter is no longer a threat. These myths need to be debunked.

<snip>

[FirstLight]

1. so what about meltdowns?

aren't they a more insidious threat?

[RC]

2. No they are not. Meltdown do not put many tons of dirt and debris in the air, blocking the sun.

[bananas]

3. A "regional" nuclear war would cause a global famine that could kill one billion people.

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/the-climatic-consequences-of-nuclear-war

The climatic consequences of nuclear war
By Steven Starr | 12 March 2010

<snip>

Alan Robock and Brian Toon, the foremost experts on the climatic impact of nuclear war, warn that the environmental consequences of a "regional" nuclear war would cause a global famine that could kill one billion people.

<snip>

Martin Hellman estimates the failure rate of deterrence between the US and USSR at 1% per year: www.nuclearrisk.org

Here is a group engaged in civil disobedience: http://disarmnowplowshares.wordpress.com/

Here is a group which doesn't engage in civil disobedience: http://www.globalzero.org

[Nihil]

5. And one scary aspect of that point ...

> A "regional" nuclear war would cause a global famine that could
> kill one billion people.

... is that such a result would be deemed "a convenient benefit".

On the other hand, there are plenty of other ways that a billion
people can be killed over the next couple of decades simply by
various forms of greed disguised as "business as usual" that aren't
going to get any form of major protest (obedient or not).

:shrug:

[brooklyn297]

4. scary stuff