Remember back in the good old days when the USSR was our unequivocal adversary and everyone lived with the lurking threat of a nuclear war in the backs of their minds? We had all been told that a full-scale nuclear conflict between the USA and USSR would be intense, fairly brief, and effectively hit the rest button for nearly all life on the planet. Bad things, right? Humanity might survive, but there might not be much point.
Well now Fear has returned, only he’s swapped clothes and appears as unchecked climate change. Glaciers melt, sea levels rise, ocean life dwindles to the point of being essentially nonexistent unless you like algae, wet areas start flooding fairly regularly, dry areas get even drier. People flee famine, governments collapse, wars erupt–shucks, maybe a nuclear one? Nah, that would never happen now–nobody wants to rain hellfire on their own assets.
So, them two scenarios. Full-on 1980s nuclear exchange, or the worst (reasonably likely) climate change scenario. Which would be easier to recover from?
In a nuclear disaster, humanity would suffer from a loss of civil services, most notably food. These can eventually be recreated because we would still have functioning food chains and places to live.
In the worst climate change scenarios, we would be talking about irreversible losses to the biosphere. Entire food chains could collapse because the species they depend on could disappear. Vast regions of land would be unsuitable for growing food or even living on. Again, we’re talking about serious and permanent damage to life processes that took millions of years to evolve. Processes that we depend upon to live, though the relationship isn’t always obvious.
If you were a hyper-rational sociopath who really cares about the long-term survival of humanity and life on earth… you’d be rooting for a cataclysmic world war that would bring about the near-extinction of humanity. Ideally biological warfare, but nuclear would serve just fine. Really, anything that halts greenhouse emissions would be fine, but since we seem hell-bent on destroying ourselves anyway…
Also consider, in a full-on nuclear war, infrastructure and manufacturing centers are going to be targeted, so any survivors are going to be living pretty much on their own. If people aren’t living close to the land already, they’ll need to in order to survive. Also, the fallout from the war is going to be a problem for millenia at best.
However, in a global climate change scenario, there will still be parts of the world that are industrialized that remain habitable, so we won’t fall back into the 19th century (or earlier). Also, no radiation.
Nah. The nasty stuff ages out within weeks, mostly gone in 30 years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are enormous cities now, with thriving commercial areas right at ground zero. Radiation = no big deal, long-term.
This ignores likelihood of massive failures of crops and fisheries. Without food for the workers to eat, all the factories in the world are no help.
I’d rather face climate change then nuclear armageddon. There is a lot more time to adapt to climate change: move to the new wet zones and learn ways to farm and survive. Over night you would lose all of your cities and infrastructure so now you’ve got to get to some place habitable without out any of our modern tools to help you figure out if you’re right and losing 80% of the population is going to make rebuilding much harder.
Of course being a climate change denier or being unwilling to adjust your life style to the coming change you are probably equally screwed and then I’d rather live in downtown LA when it gets nuked then be there when the fresh water disappears forever.
Nuclear war: Billions of deaths, nuclear winter, worldwide radioactive fallout - all happening suddenly with little or no warning.
Cataclysmic clmate change: Massive societal and economic disruption caused by competition for food and water supplies and the desire for people to live in the new temperate zones, accompanied by a scientific and industrial agriculture race to adjust to the new environmental conditions as the weakest and poorest die off - these events happening over the course of decades.
If I’m a world-destroying sociopath, I’m picking nuclear war as my preferred extinction option.
Is the concept of “nuclear winter” still a thing? That is to say, you get all the benefits of cataclysmic climate change, plus having all your major cities blown up and irradiated.
A large part of the reason that it was acknowledged that nuclear war would be a disaster for all sides was that we figured out that it would bring on massive climate change.
The change expected was in the other direction – particulate matter blocking sunlight, causing both cooling and massive crop failures. But it would still have been (still be? hope not, but the danger hasn’t disappeared) climate change. So the question as framed doesn’t work very well; because nuclear war would include climate change, not be opposed to it.
And I think the overall question is the equivalent of ‘would you have a better chance of recovery from having your head smashed in with a sledgehammer or a splitting maul?’ I’d rather dodge both of them. My remains could in either case become fertilizer for something else to grow; but my own personal chances would be extremely poor.
If it’s me as an individual, yes, I have a better shot at surviving climate change in the short run. I have enough money to relocate to Toronto or someplace, and decades to do it. But if it’s truly a worst-case scenario, that may not be enough. The earth might be approaching total uninhabitability. Or I might be fighting off millions of people for the last arable patch of land on earth.
If we’re talking about humanity as a whole, we could easily bounce back from a nuclear apocalypse. We’d lose much of civilization as we know it, but not all of it. The survivors would suddenly become owners of vast and varied plots of arable land and hunting grounds. Climate change would actually start to reverse.
This is why I’m kind of rooting for nuclear war. Climate change is real, I think it’s going to be worse than we’re admitting right now, and I don’t see any politically realistic way of stopping it. More people will survive a nuclear war with a better quality of life (eventually).
Climate change is easily reversible, if we had the political will to pour enough money and manpower into it. We can switch our grid to fully nuclear/renewable in a decade or two, then wean off of nuclear over the next few decades. We can build machines that sequester carbon (the technology exists and so do these machines, but they operate at a loss. When real cities are sinking underwater, suddenly we will realize that posing a bit of money isn’t so bad). We can use satellite mirrors and shades to geoengineer our planet. We talk about terraforming Mars, but we are already terraforming Earth; we just need to get deliberate about it.
Unfortunately, because the people in charge all over the world are as a whole only concerned with their own self interests, none of this will get done until it’s too late to prevent the suffering of millions to billions of people. But our SOCIETY will survive.
That is quite irrational. The survival of humans is not made likelier by a nuclear war, which is just as likely, if not more so, to wipe us all out than climate change.
Humans can adapt to most anything, but adaptation takes time. Despite what you hear, climate change will not change everything in a couple of years; it will have a long term effect. The danger is that even long term will be too fast to avoid problems; altering, say, the weather patterns that cause the Gulf Stream to keep northern Europe temperate over the course of 50 years will have an extremely dramatic effect on world events. You cannot relocate one hundred million people that quickly.
Nuclear war doesn’t happen in 50-100 years. Nuclear war doesn’t even take 50 minutes, and it has the effect of instantly killing people, causing massive societal disruption, ending entire nation-states, AND changing the climate and food production patterns anyway.
Yes, it certainly is, because in an all out nuclear exchange, mega tons of earth and rock are going to be blown into the atmosphere where it will circle the earth and filter out enough sunlight to trigger catastrophic winter conditions.
If nukes can block sunlight and cool the planet while the radiation is gone within weeks or one generation, what would be the problems associated with using nukes to counter global warming, provided you detonated them in places where few are affected by the radiation like the Sahara desert, Siberia or Northern Canada?
The problem is that the effects of climate change are likely severe and irreversible, and may present conditions that humans have never faced in evolutionary history. It isn’t a matter of simply relocating 100 million people; it’s that usable land may simply disappear and not be replaced.
The climate change from nukes would come from smoke blocking the sunlight, and a sudden drop in CO2 pollution as civilization stops burning fossil fuels.
To put it bluntly, nuclear climate change requires humans to die and their structures to burn. That’s one big reason we tested them in deserts.
The humans and other species who do live in such places would not be impressed by your idea that they don’t matter. Some of the species might be finished off entirely, with who knows what other effects reverberating through the entangled ecological web.
Nuclear winters, like volcanic winters, would cause massive famines; would cause significant lung damage worldwide from increased particulate matter; would cause additional economic disasters throughout civilization; and would also risk finishing off vulnerable species.
We don’t know what the hell we’re doing anywhere near well enough to try pulling something like that.
OP mentions the worst reasonably likely climate change. Is there some consensus on what that is? I’ve heard about something like 200 million people suffering significant hardship but out of, let’s say 10 billion people in 2050, 2% of humanity being in the shit is deplorable but pretty good compared to every past era.
You could have smoke blocking sunlight without a drop in CO2 from burning less fossil fuels. Nuke some place we don’t care about and let that cool.
You don’t get that kind of smoke from nuking a desert. There’s almost nothing to burn in a desert.
You could get a lot of smoke from starting forest fires, but that doesn’t require nukes. Unless of course the forest-owning country disagrees with your judgment that their forest is “some place we don’t care about”.
For the planet to recover from, or for humans to recover from? If it’s humans, I’d go with climate change. The main issue with climate change is not the temperatures, it’s the speed it’s happening. The earth, after all, has been much hotter in the past than it is today, and life thrived. Eventually, life will balance with the new normal. How well humanity weathers that is debatable, but my WAG is that rich countries can basically get through by spending what they need to in order to mitigate the effects. Food can be grown in very different ways…if you have the resources to shift your food production. Water can be obtained and distributed to places now in basically eternal drought…or they can simply be abandoned and populations moved. If you have the money and resources. The key is energy…and, frankly, we could produce all the energy we wanted if we had the political will to do so. And the money. Which most 1st world countries will. Oh, it won’t be any sort of fun times, and a lot of folks will die. But it can be done, and I have no doubt that rich countries will do them. The worst case climate change scenarios I’ve seen (by credible scientists and engineers, not by those in the various entertainment venues) are all survivable as a civilization, at least for the wealthiest countries. The poor countries? They are probably going to have a very, very bad time of it.
Contrast that to all out nuclear war, presumably starting with the US and NATO against the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, but spreading to every other nuclear power. Basically, you are talking about every industrialized nation on the planet being wiped out immediately. Billions would die and civilization would be completely destroyed with zero chance of mitigating it because all the infrastructure would be gone. There wouldn’t be enough to rebuild if all the nukes flew. Some humans would live of course, even in industrialized nations, but not enough to put things back together on any sort of time line. And the fun wouldn’t stop there, as poor countries would STILL get screwed, since the effects of an all out nuclear war would devastate them as well, both from the lethal fallout as well as acid rain and climate change effects. I doubt that, following such a war there would be any viable high level civilization left on the planet for centuries if not longer. The die off of animal life would equally be grim, since the sun would be blocked nearly world wide for 3-5 years, with all sorts of secondary and tertiary effects hitting for maybe half a century or so. After that, the Earth would slowly recover. So, if we aren’t talking about human life, I’d say that a full out nuclear war would have less long term effect for the planet than global climate change will have, meaning that, if we looked say 100 to 1000 years down the road then the Earth and most species (that survive the nuclear war and effects) would be doing fine, especially with fewer or no humans messing with them.