Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change: Part Two
On Feb. 25, I posted a blog arguing that nuclear weapons are the most important and urgent environmental threat today—even more important than climate change caused by greenhouse gasses. I received quite a bit of feedback from environmentalists—many of whom took umbrage with my thesis.
Interestingly, no one argued that the predictions of climate change following a limited nuclear war (50-100 Hiroshima-sized bombs) was unsound—after all, scientists use some of the same climate modeling techniques to predict the global cooling from nuclear fallout and soot as they use to chart the future of global warming from carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. Many environmentalists felt simply that the chances of nuclear war were so small that worrying about its effect on the climate was a waste of time. Joe Romm's sentiments on the Climate Progress blog were typical: "So the scenario being offered is that some accident or other event leads to India and Pakistan suicidally using most of their nuclear weapons on each other. Something to worry about? Absolutely. Likely? Not terribly. Preventable through the political efforts of U.S. environmentalists? Gimme a break!"...
Why Nukes are the Most Urgent Environmental Threat Part I
Environmentalists: Wake up! There is a greater and more urgent threat to the climate than even global warming: the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
Why are nuclear bombs an environmental problem? We have long known that a large-scale nuclear war would lead to a sudden change in climate—called a nuclear winter—that could threaten all life on earth. But in the past decade, climate scientists have used advanced climate modeling to show that even a small exchange of nuclear weapons—between 50-100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, which India and Pakistan already have their in arsenal—would produce enough soot and smoke to block out sunlight, cool the planet, and produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history.
Scary? It gets worse. New research by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) suggests that the above scenario of a "limited" nuclear war would also burn a hole through the ozone layer, allowing extreme levels of ultraviolet radiation to reach the Earth's surface, which would greatly damage agriculture and most likely lead to a global nuclear famine....
