Eric Nielsen writes to me via Facebook:
I find it disturbing the National Geographic would suggest something like this
Well, um, yeah. This sort of thing is why I don’t subscribe to National Geographic anymore. Could there ever be a dumber headline related to global warming?
Click for article
Here’s an excerpt, your tax dollars at work:
To see what climate effects such a regional nuclear conflict might have, scientists from NASA and other institutions modeled a war involving a hundred Hiroshima-level bombs, each packing the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT—just 0.03 percent of the world’s current nuclear arsenal.
…
After ten years, average global temperatures would still be 0.9 degree F (0.5 degree C) lower than before the nuclear war, the models predict.
Years Without Summer
For a time Earth would likely be a colder, hungrier planet.
“Our results suggest that agriculture could be severely impacted, especially in areas that are susceptible to late-spring and early-fall frosts,” said Oman, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The full article is here.
While basic research might be useful, the whole nuclear winter scenario proposed by Carl Sagan has long been accepted, so I really don’t see the point of doing another study on the effects of nuclear war, especially in the context of global warming. It’s rather obvious science.
I wonder how much taxpayer money was wasted on this?
For those of you unfamiliar with my headline spoof:
One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Bến Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a United States major said today.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The next thing we’ll see is a paper on how the above ground nuclear testing of the 50’s and 60’s clearly caused all the ‘global cooling’ that lasted until the 70’s. They’re trying to ‘disappear’ that cooling phase, just as they tried to disappear the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period. Makes the entire CAGW meme all the better.
Can’t you just hear it now?
Of course, they're already shooting themselves in the foot if they want to take this tack, because the amount of above ground tests were far far more than 100 Hiroshima sized bombs. If they really wanted to play this card, they'd've had to match up the yields used with the actual recorded temp drops. So in one fell swoop they've not only blown it for their future predictions, but also for efforts to disappear those decades of cooling.
It IS a rather intriguing thought that perhaps the testing might have played a part in the cooling those decades, however, isn't it? Oops, but then there's all the existing research papers about all the excess aerosol's we eeeevil thoughtless huuu-mons released during those decades that have ALREADY accounted for the cooling – doh! How'll they reconcile that with their new nuke premise?
On a lighter note, did I pepper in too many eeeevils, should I have gone with rotating in other pejoratives instead? 😉
When the warmists started suggesting that China’s sulphur aerosol emissions might mean temperatures would not rise so much, I thought they were just trying to cover their backs. If they now need a nuclear war to hide the decline I think that proves how desperate they have become.
wws says:
February 26, 2011 at 11:58 am
“As previous posters have alluded, there were well over 100 nuclear weapons set off during the testing of the 50′s – I think Russia hit that total all by itself.
Was the world hit by massive crop failures?”
Oh great. You just gave the climate boffins an explanation for why the tree ring data diverged from thermometer data circa 1960. Thanks a lot.
The CAGW train is running on empty. This is one of the signs.
Next research paper from this group. “Comparative study of expected global cooling from nuclear weapons use above oceans vs. above ground as shown by our most excellent global climate modeling computer algorithms” Oops, or would the 15 papers of degrees of global cooling expected based on a comparative study of above ground testing over various types of geological surfaces/strata come first?
Trouble is if Pakistan keeps heading into the Jihadist morass, we may see that reagional nuclear war.
However for a good quick climate change nothing beats a good VE-8 or 9 volcanic eruption or several smaller ones at once….
More hype or propaganda to desensitize the population to an apparent problem hoping that the people will then buy into smaller solutions that do not appear to be as bad as the initial solution.
Propaganda 101 and no matter what side of the debate you are on it is shameful that so many people in science, who should be above this sort of manipulation of information, are openly involved in it.
But then, in the past scientists got too involved in the social side of the debate, especially when it concerned their status or place in society. Then they got wrapped up in the financial aspects, you can not blame big business or governments for that, scientists took the money. Now we have too many top scientists wrapped up in politics. Add that to the status and financial issues and who can you really trust to turn out unbiased science? Science that helps us understand the world around us rather than science that divides us. We certainly can not claim to be better scientists in this way than those who went before us. So much for Newton’s, standing on the shoulders of giants.
When my student teachers ask me about the present day debates in science, I have to admit that far too many scientists seem more concerned about status, money or political positioning than they are about the science.
I haven’t verified/double checked their data, but here are charts of the above ground yields from actual worldwide above ground tests (scroll down the page to find them): http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/rert/nuclearblast.html#exposure
The ‘research’ claims that a regional nuclear exchange causing global cooling would REDUCE precipitation? How in the world do they get that when you’ve just pumped a gazillion tons of fine particulates into the atmo for cloud nuclei?
Smokey, thank you very much for providing the links. I suggest more people take a looksie at what nuclear weapons are really all about. VERY scary stuff, in my opinion. And just think, the nuclear weapons of today are MUCH more powerful. I think people in general have really lost sight of what nuclear war would be all about. Again, scary stuff.
Coincidentally, I just happen to be watching “Broken Arrow” right now .. hehehe
Wow, a lot of us have dropped NG and Canadian Geographic. I used to buy it. When my kids left home I also bought a subscription for my kids for Christmas. But I dropped it over 10 years ago as the bias was so bad. Kind of sad.
Amazing article for those of us who were taught the useless “duck and cover” routine in school. I still remember the day President Kennedy was assassinated. We all thought they were about to say that ICBM’s were coming in from Russia as they announced that we were to listen carefully and go straight home afterwards. Scared the daylights out of everyone. Then we all went home to watch the replays of the event on television. I always think of the song about Buddy Holly when I think of that day – “The day the music died”. The end of an era.
I sometimes think the green movement started about then. I recall protests over the US underground tests at Amchitka, Alaska not long after, traveling with draft dodgers and Vietnam vets.
Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” We have. We do.
“Anybody else recall the nuclear winter hysteria of the 1980′s?”
I do recall media reports where the Nuclear Winterists were claiming that if Saddam set Kuwait’s oil wells on fire it would disrupt agriculture across Asia and kill lots of people.
Of course he did and it didn’t.
The highly ‘nuclear winter’ models are one of the reasons why I never put much faith in ‘global warming’ models.
Seriously,
This question haunts me for many years.
Carl Sagan and James Hansen.
?? Somehow they had personal or professional relationships too close??
Venus, CO2, Mariner 2,
Thanks
I stopped reading NG years ago, due to their biased message, but 2 cover stories last year really drove the point home.
One read ” Global Warming causes massive drought in Australia.”
The next one, the very next week, read ” Global Warming causes excessive flooding in Australia.
I now only use the mag in my fireplace, which I am using to help heat the house, as it is -6 outside.
There was a large-scale field test of this mechanism in the spring of 1945 when something like 150 square miles of built up area was burned in Germany and Japan. Nothing particular happened.
There was an even larger test back in October 1871 when about 2000 square miles of Wisconsin forest, the town of Peshtigo and 4 square miles of Chicago burned down on the same day. Nothing happened then either.
To judge from the amount of soot in the Greenland ice there was one or more forest fires many times larger than the Peshtigo fire somewhere in Canada, Alaska or Siberia in the summer of 1854. Same thing, nothing special weatherwise.
Anthony,
You sure can tell when the scientists have been toking up with the psychedelic drugs.
Wayne Delbeke says:
February 26, 2011 at 12:46 pm
“Wow, a lot of us have dropped NG and Canadian Geographic. I used to buy it. When my kids left home I also bought a subscription for my kids for Christmas. But I dropped it over 10 years ago as the bias was so bad. Kind of sad.”
I wrote several articles for Can Geo back in the late 1980s – when they were just starting to go off on their current ‘planet saving’ mission – then got in a dust up with the editor over some blatantly false information in a particularly ridiculous ‘green advocacy’ that appeared in it, and that was that. Never looked back. It just got worse from there.
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 (Minus North Korea’s)
http://www.geekosystem.com/every-nuclear-explosion-time-lapse/
Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998.
And after all these test Earth is not cooling????????
Mark Miller says: “I wonder if they ran a model to determine what would happen if the bombs were neutron bombs (those nasty ones that primarily kill people and leave the infrastructure). ”
What the lefties didn’t tell you was that the infrastructure that was left was people’s houses with the owners cowering in the basements shielded from the neutrons by the surrounding damp dirt and the people who would be killed was invading soldiers in their tanks who’s steel armor the neutrons passed through like it wasn’t even there.
Back on topic, wouldn’t it make more since to have aircraft eject some lampblack as they flew if that’s what we really wanted to do? Using nuclear devices to put carbon in the atmosphere would be like doing plastic surgery with a chain saw.
Does anyone happen to know what causes the difference between the nuclear test photos where the ‘stem’ of the mushroom cloud has those fabulous smooth geometric cones and so on, versus the far more commonly seen rough stems? Shutter speed?? Or ??
There are soooOOoooOOOoooo many reasons why I don’t subscribe to propaganda rags like the National Geographic, however, this recent reason is certainly one of ’em.
Too bad – they used to be awesome before their minds went soft…
I could cure global warming and it would only take two bombs. One for GISS and the other for Berkeley.
They must have their figures wrong. The Castle Bravo test in 1954 was, by itself, one thousand times bigger than Hiroshima. In 1961-62 there was an absolute frenzy of H-bomb testing in Russia, culminating in the “Tsar Bomba” test three or four times the size of Bravo.
Soviet atmospheric testing in 1961-62 was about 229 megatons, equivalent to about 15,000 Hiroshima bombs.
It’s possible that there was some effect on global climate in 1962. I think John Daly had an article on this some years ago.
While basic research might be useful, the whole nuclear winter scenario proposed by Carl Sagan has long been accepted, so I really don’t see the point of . . .
No, it has not ‘long been accepted.’
The ‘TTAPS’ study was done using an atmospheric model that was of laughable resolution and quality even 20 years ago. You could run it on a Nintendo today. Sagan stuck his name on the end of the paper just for the publicity value, since he was a TV scientist. The paper was published in Parade Magazine, a slick-paper supplement stuck in Sunday newspapers, right next to the comics.
Subsequent studies showed the Nuclear Winter to be no more than a cool week in the Spring, and serious folks involved with nuclear arms were skeptical of it even back then.
Oh only a small, regional nuclear explosion — that’s alright then………..
Plonkers!
I think I will write to National Geographic…… hand written, on paper with a pen. It is surprising how hard it is to sit down and hand write a letter after using a key board for years. To do so shows commitment. I know in government, a hand written letter that doesn’t follow a form letter (typically sent out by lobby organizations, is considered to represent 1000 constituents.
I did that with an organization I was involved with. The government department received 130 hand written letters. The organization got 2 million dollars and the senior bureaucrats asked me very politely not to do it again.