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Climate consequences of nuclear war shown by computer models

globalnukeNOComputer Models Show What Exactly Would Happen To Earth After A Nuclear War Let’s take a detailed look at some of these super-fun conclusions, shall we? Francie Diep Australian Popular Science
 Jul 19 2014 You’ve seen what a nuclear winter looks like, as imagined by filmmakers and novelists. Now you can take a look at what scientists have to say. In a new study, a team of four U.S. atmospheric and environmental scientists modeled what would happen after a “limited, regional nuclear war.” To inexpert ears, the consequences sound pretty subtle—two or three degrees of global cooling, a nine percent reduction in yearly rainfall. Still, such changes could be enough to trigger crop failures and famines. After all, these would be cooler temperatures than the Earth has seen in 1,000 years.

First, what happened?

The team imagines 100 nuclear warheads, each about the size of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, detonate over the Indian subcontinent. The team members are imagining an India-Pakistan nuclear war. It seems unfair to single out these nations, but I guess they’re the poster children because they have relatively small nuclear stockpiles compared to countries such as the U.S., Russia and China. The idea is, If these lightweights can do this to Earth, imagine what the bigwigs can do.

After the Indian-Pakistani nuclear exchange…

  • Five megatons of black carbon enter the atmosphere immediately. Black carbon comes from burned stuff and it absorbs heat from the sun before it can reach the Earth. Some black carbon does eventually falls back to Earth in rain…………..
This new paper combined a number of those state-of-the-art models. If you check out the paper, published in the journal Earth’s Future, you can see how these conclusions compare to previous climate-model-based calculations. Different modeling efforts have come up with slightly different years for when the Earth would be coldest after a nuclear war, for example, but they generally agree that the effects would be, well, severe and long-term……..http://www.popsci.com.au/tech/military/computer-models-show-what-exactly-would-happen-to-earth-after-a-nuclear-war,390091

July 21, 2014 - Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, weapons and war

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