Wow. What a week.
I just got back from a seminar led by Rutgers University professor
Dr. Alan Robock on his new research into nuclear winter. He started out
by stating that “This is worse than global warming.”
Yikes! Just what I needed to hear, another disaster scenario to add to the list!!
Dr. Robock led us on a horror tour as he stepped through the course
of events that would unfold if only a small fraction of today’s global
nuclear arsenal was deployed in a regional conflict in southern Asia.
After the initial devastation from the actual explosions, cities
would go up in flames and the resulting firestorms would loft dust and
smoke high into the earth’s upper atmosphere. Here, atmospheric
currents would pick them up and spread the aerosol load throughout the
world. This shield of dust and smoke would remain in place for upwards
of a decade, blocking about a significant amount of the sun’s warming
rays (while at the same time, through its destruction of the ozone
layer, allow in more harmful solar ultraviolet radiation) and ushering
in a nuclear autumn. Large-scale crop failures would result and lack of
food would begin to take its toll in regions of the earth that were far
removed from the direct conflict.
A larger-scale nuclear conflict, say between the U.S. and Russia,
would be even many times worse. A full out nuclear winter would result,
in which many places in the northern mid-latitude land areas would not
see above freezing temperatures for several summers in a row. Needless
to say there wouldn’t be much food around leading to massive
desperation and starvation. (For more on Dr. Robock’s work on this
topic, including some very scary PowerPoint slides, visit http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/).
In Dr. Robock’s opinion, the fact that there are still many
thousands of nuclear warheads which are readily available for
deployment means that a nuclear conflict and its climatic aftermath is
a very real threat—not something to be underestimated or ignored—and we
all need to start taking actions to do something about it.
But, even as bad as a nuclear winter surely would be, it is hard to know whether it would be worse than global warming.
Consider this. Famed climatologist (and sometimes media mogul) Ted Turner just a few days ago told everyone listening that
within 30 to 40 years, the world would be so hot as a result of
human-caused global warming that none of our crops would grow and that
living conditions would be so intolerable that most humans would
perish. Those few of us that did remain would have no choice but to
fall upon one another as a source of food—the human race being reduced
to roving bands of cannibals. And this is within a foreseeable time
frame!
And if that is not enough, another noted and richly rewarded climatologist, Al Gore, just announced that
he was setting up a program to spend 300 million dollars over the next
3 years in an effort to raise everyone’s awareness about the imminent
danger of global warming and to put pressure on their elected officials
to do something about it. There are strong hints in his An Inconvenient Truth that
millions upon millions of people are going to be displaced in the
coming century as large portions of the ice sheets currently perched
atop Greenland and Antarctica will melt into the oceans rising sea
levels many meters (parroting the claims of
NASA’s outspoken Dr. Jim Hansen). Such a mass migration of people will
also surely produce a large array of other disruptions and upheavals to
the human societies around the world. Read Rest....
