I heard somewhere that it would take only a handful of nuclear explosions to bring the world into a nuclear winter. However, haven’t there been hundreds if not thousands of n. weapons tests over the years? The world still looks relatively normal, so perhaps in order for this to happen, a large amount of nukes would have to detonate during a short period of time?
It’s not just the explosion, it’s the massive fires resulting from burning cities. Most nuclear tests were designed to minimize the number of cities destroyed…
And perhaps they’d need to detonate in the air, not deep underground?
If you can find your source’s exact claim for us, this will be a lot easier to talk about.
There have been hundreds of above-ground nuclear tests, so I don’t think that explains it.
Here’s a discussion of the effects of a limited scale nuclear war; the example assumes 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs over Pakistan and results in a cooling back to 1816 levels (the “year without a summer”), taking about 5 years to recover to 1970s levels. Oh, it also shows that the predictions earlier in the 1980s (mentioned in link) were overly optimistic.
Also, as beowulff pointed out, it is the burning cities, not the nuclear explosions that cause the cooling effects:
OK, so now we know how to fix global warming. We just have to get Pakistan to take one for the team.
Don’t even Joke about it. Between the frequent regime changes, and the fact they apparently drive live nuclear warheads around in unmarked vans so the US can’t work out where they all are, Pakistan / India is by far the most likely flash point for a limited nuclear war.
Nuclear winter has been thoroughly debunked as junk science. Even the physicists who initially put forth the idea have backed away from it. it just isn’t supportable.
At least, until Iran manages to join the nuclear club…
Iran wants Nuclear weapons so they can’t be invaded by the US, a reasonable concern in my opinion. Overall they are fair more stable and predictable than Pakistan, I am much more concerned about Pakistan / India volatility than I am about a Nuclear Iran.
Do you have a cite for this claim? In the past, single volcanic eruptions have had a measurable impact on climate.
He may be talking about the “The Day After,” Alvarez Dino-Killer total iceball Earth Reaganorok scenario beloved by the press in the '80s. Which was. of course, bollocks.
This is not to say that the smoke from a hundred simultaneous burning cities wouldn’t affect global climate, just that it might fall short of freezing everyone to death in the aftermath.
Do you think a hundered burning cities put more or less particulate high into the atmosphere? I say less. A lot less. In fact, I suspect the effect of burning cities will be of similar scale and effect to any forest fire.
Reading the wiki article, the most recent studies all conclude that the cooling would be significant. However, there is some doubt about whether nuclear weapons would trigger large enough firestorms to raise large quantities of carbon into the stratosphere. I suggest we perform a test by nuking Slough.
Here’s one take on the debunking.
Nuclear War and Nuclear Winter
The rest of the article shows why “it depends” to always be the best answer for these hypotheticals. If we don’t know the exact circumstances of the originating trigger then we only can give a wide range of possible scenarios for the outcome.
Remember that the discussions about nuclear winter centered on all-out war, where 50-Megaton bombs would be dropped on almost all major metropolises. The effects of 50 Megatons is debatable, but Hiroshima was about 12 Kilotons (so 50,000 vs 12… 4,000 times more powerful). General thinking is that the flash would start forest fires 50 miles form the target city, everything would burn; each side had somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 nukes of asorted sizes. Odds are the phenomenon would be world-wide, would the USSR allow an intact South Africa or India or Australia or Argentina or even China to survive to threaten their smoking corpse? Would the USA allow anything threatening to survive? Arab countries that would threaten Israel? Collateral damage…
The release of such a level of energy would have some interesting effects on the environment. What exactly? there would be only one way to find out for sure…
I dunno. Here’s two buildings burning, as seen from space. Multiply, uh, one hell of a lot for a single bomb.
One complicating factor. I can imagine when cities burn, its a much nastier burn than when a forest does so. All that plastic, chemicals, rubber, fuel, deisel, mcdonalds deep fat fryers, and so on.
If such a burn is largscale and much “sootier” than a forest fire burn, that could in theory allow the soot to get higher than typical for small scale burns, put more up therel, and what gets way up there is worse as well.
Just a WAG but possible I think.
I agree. I see no reason to think that cities burning will make any more smoke than a forest fire that burns hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of acres.
Maybe they think that if a city burns together all at once it will force the smoke up higher than wildfires that burn in waves or lines?
I would find the explaination quite plausable.