Vast fleets of oil-burning warships. Plus freighters to support them.
Diesel powered tanks. Thousand Plane bombing missions. Carried out by multi-engined bombers, burning high test.
Burning? We burned whole cities ! The word “firestorm” was, I believe, coined from that.
Given all that combustion–how much did WW2 add to Global Warming?
Also remember to take into account that, away from the front lines, gasoline was rationed. Probably still a net increase in consumption, but not by as much as it might have been.
You can see an increase in global mean temperature anomaly from 1940-1945 versus almost exclusively negative anomaly going back to 1890, and then a decline with only sporadic positive anomaly until the mid-‘Seventies. Exact correlations to CO2 emissions from shipping and warfighting efforts are difficult because while we have good records of petroleum production and refining on all sides the exact rates of consumption are pretty variable. Still, it is difficult to argue against that correlation and there are climate circulation models which show relatively good fit for those years to the extent that any model with the data for that era can make refined time-resolution projections.
The amount of transoceanic commercial tonnage which ships today dwarfs the war effort in WWII, and of course jet air travel and domestic sources of emission for transportation, electricity generation, and industrial processes are way higher than they were in the pre-war era. We also didn’t have the kind of densified industrial agriculture and global population size we have today, so agricultural-related emissions would have been a small fraction of what they are today. Estimated annual emissions rose during the war but continued to rise even higher after, so the overall contribution to the current excess atmospheric CO2 excess is in the fraction of a percent range.
Stranger
According the the model in this website, CO2 levels plateaued during WWII. While that could be a data artifact for all I know, it does remind us that levels were quite a bit lower then than they are today.
ETA: ninjad - better websites posted by Stranger.
Did the Baby Boom occur just in the US, or did it happen in the Allied European countries as well?
A somewhat global, and sudden population increase is going to accelerate global warming, and at least in the US, the Baby Boom of 1946-1964 can be laid at the feet of WWII.
For that matter, the US is a big country; a big enough increase just here might nudge up the effects of global warming all by itself.
World War II brought nuclear weapons, which in turn led to commercially used civilian nuclear power from the 1950s onwards. That may well lead to a net-negative effect on carbon emissions if taken into consideration. It’s likely, of course, that without the war, nuclear power would ultimately still have been developed, but for sure the Manhattan Project accelerated the process considerably.
(There is an Asimov novel, The End of Eternity, about a kind of police that continuously sends time travellers to various epochs to maintain a controlled development of human history. In one chapter, the text briefly alludes to a mission that led to nuclear weapons being developed as early as the 20th century, rather than the 23rd as it was in the previous timeline.)
Similar mechanism backfires badly in Ursula Leguin’s The Lathe of Heaven.
Post-WWII there was a global uplift in industrial output, because all those factories established to make munitions and aircraft were repurposed towards consumer-oriented output where possible.
Without looking at the numbers, early WWII production redirected consumer output towards the war effort, but additional resources were added as war demands ratcheted significantly upwards. In Australia (which probably has a ~1% of global wartime GDP, so it doesn’t mean that much) capitalists tried to extend legacy wartime industrialisation into domestic consumer markets, but with uneven success. All markets - whether they were Americans interested in a war-derived dividend, or Japanese and Germans who had had the bejesus bombed out of them - wanted more to reconstruct and expand their lives, and that meant factories, and that meant carbon.
According to the scuzzier parts of the internet, people did have more sex then than before, but apparently less than now.
The baby boom lasted from about 1946 to 1964 in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, while it only lasted for a few years in Europe. It would be necessary to look at the birth rates in each country to be more exact about this. The baby boom was of different length in each country.
Nuclear power for civil electrical production didn’t start until the late ‘Fifties (the SM-1 Nuclear Reactor at Fort Belvoir, Virginia came on line in 1957 and the first commercial power plant, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, started generating power in May of 1958). Growth in electrical power demand far outstripped the growth of nuclear power electrical generation, which has never been more than 20% of overall electrical production in the United States, and the extent to which nuclear power has abated atmospheric carbon emissions has to be tempered by the fact that while the actual fission reaction produces no carbon emissions (and the general operation of the plant produces a tiny fraction of what a gas, oil, or coal-fired plant does), the end to end fuel cycle including extraction, enrichment, and processing takes a lot of energy which has traditionally been produced by coal-fired plants, not considering the embodied carbon carbon footprints of the massive amounts of concrete, steel, aluminum, and energy put into building the plant. The overall carbon emissions amortized over the lifetime of the plant are a fraction of what a hydrocarbon plant would produce over the same period per unit power delivered but it is certainly not “net-negative”, and wouldn’t have any impact upon the emissions released in the WWII and immediate post-war period.
The WWII-era Manhattan Project really didn’t have much to do with the practical development of nuclear power production technology even though in later in the war effort and post-war the Project Y group in Los Alamos worked on concepts for nuclear energy producing plants, and aside from the enrichment facilities originally built to make (barely) weapon-grade uranium in the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, didn’t contribute much to civil electrical power production, and the primary interest in fission reactors was plutonium production. The real origins of electrical production using nuclear power came from the US Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program which largely dictated the development of pressurized light water reactors in favor of molten salt or high temperature gas reactors. Post-Manhattan project Oak Ridge later worked on concepts for advanced reactors including ‘full burnup’ reactors like the Molten Salt Reactor, and Hanford originally worked on gas-cooled breeder systems but little practical development came from these despite the promise they offered of going past the once-through fuel cycle of our current civil nuclear power infrastructure.
Western Europe had a much later and flatter ‘baby boom’ than the North America and Oceana owing to the economic limitations of post-war reconstruction and generally less interest in having large families in a more urbanized society. The East Bloc and adjacent Eastern European nations had essentially no ‘baby boom’. However, in the ‘Sixties much of the developing world experienced large population growth owning largely to the ‘Green Revolution’ allowing much larger crop yields and caloric budgets.
Stranger