Global Warming – the Nuclear Option

Apparently, all is not lost in the war against global warming. Scientists from NASA and a number of other institutions have recently been modeling the effects of a war involving a hundred Hiroshima-level bombs, or 0.03 percent of the world's current nuclear arsenal, according to National Geographic. The research suggests five million metric tons of black carbon would be swept up into the lowest portion of the atmosphere.

The result, according to NASA climate models, could actually be global cooling.

While the global cooling caused by superpower-on-superpower war could be catastrophic (hence the term "nuclear winter") a small scale, planned detonation, could have an impact on the world climate. Models suggest that though the world is currently in a warming trend, small detonations could lower global temperatures by 2.25 degrees C for two-to-three years following war.

In more tropical areas temperatures could fall 5.4 to 7.2 degrees C.

Then we would just need to decide which 1300Km2 of the planet we are happy to sacrifice to this holocaust.

The calculations would have to be finely tuned as an over ‘correction’ would tip the planet into a nuclear winter which would have devastating effects on the planet’s weather and crop production.

Let’s hope we are not forced into taking such desperate measures.



It won’t get any better than this

Thank you to John who added a link to a previous posting on Global Warming Warning.

In short, New Scientist has recently had a short article on the "Limits to Growth", revisiting the 1972 book by Meadows et al.  The book gives an account of a computer model of how the world's population, resources and economy would function over the coming 130 years.  It predicted a disaster in the twenty first century if nothing were changed.  At first the book created a stir and world leaders all agreed that action was needed.  It then attracted ferocious attacks on ideological grounds; the media carried uniform condemnation and declared the predictions to be incorrect.

Guess what, the models are now proving to be an accurate representation of what is occurring in the World today.

Unfortunately, the World’s population will not experience the full force of the depletion of resources until just before they run out (see Margaret Atwood’s Amoeba’s Tale) We have a few more years ahead of us where living in denial will still be possible.

So from here on in, as the population rises and developing nations catch up with developed society in their rate per capita that finite resources are being used up, we are racing towards crunch time. Things will not be getting better than they are today.

The full article in all it’s gory detail can be found here.