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
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ShrNfr says:
February 26, 2011 at 2:56 pm
> @george Turner Do you really want these wackos to go on a fission expedition?
That was aweful!
INGSOC says:
February 26, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Here is some scenes from the next greenpeace commercial.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxD44HO8dNQ&w=480&h=390%5D
Even better, they could buy several untamed Tsar bombs from the Russians, 100 Megatons each and solve the the problem once and for all. Are they cowards or what?
/desperate sarc off – for those who wouldn’t get it
ShrNfr
Great. Nearly fell off my chair!
DaveE.
I seem to remember at the end of Gulf War I the predictions of some scientists that the Iraqis firing Kuwaiti oil wells and how long it’d take to put them all off would lead to this kind of scenario as well. Doesn’t seem to have.
“The effectiveness of the propaganda can be seen in these comments where people uncritically accept the false notion that “duck and cover” is a “useless” safety precaution.”
To be fair, by the time it became popular it pretty much was a useless safety precaution. In the early atomic era where you might expect a 20 kiloton bomb dropped on a major industrial area, port, military base or whatever it made a lot of sense; many or most of the people in a town could have survived such an attack if they took cover away from the heat flash and blast. But once megaton-plus H-bombs became common any attack with such a weapon would kill most people within a few miles and anyone who survived by ducking under a desk would be likely to die of radiation poisoning within a few days (almost certain to do so if it was a groundburst bomb).
Suggesting a small nuclear war to halt global warming sure sounds like anti-agw satire.
But so does photoshopped polar bears on drifting into the ocean on a tiny flake of ice, or commercials graphically blowing global warming sceptics into tiny bloody pieces, or for that matter the head of IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri.
It is all so incredibly stupid, I sometimes wonder if it really is happening.
Unfortunately it is, and how will this all end?
With a bang or a whimper?
I don’t see how a few cans of sunshine can reverse all the damage done by beer bubbles, they need to think bigger as a precautionary principal and use up most of the arsenal.
Models are so unreliable.[ /Sarc factor 10.]
And if the global temperature has increase 0.7C since the 100 years or so, how did crops grow 100 years ago?
Wild sugar cane in the tropics in Indonesia gives a better yield than farmed sugar cane crops in much cooler Australia.
Don’t forget about the Indonesia Peat Fire experiment.
“According to a 2002 study published in the scientific journal Nature, somewhere between 0.81 and 2.57 million tons of carbon were released by tropical lowland forest and peat land fires in Indonesia in 1997. The incident was one of the leading culprits behind what turned out to be the largest annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations since records began in the late 1950s.”
2.57 million tons of carbon is about 50% of what they claim the small nuclear war would release.
With global warming morphing into climate change and then into climate disruption, why not change its name once again to “Strategic Arms Reduction and Climate Solutions.” The only question is where to explode all these wonderful climate curing bombs? Washington D.C. is the obvious best choice and by doing so, most other problems this nation is plagued with will be solved too.
NG has always been biased, nothing has changed….
..I think some of you guys were just a lot younger and didn’t realize it was biased
Now you’re older, realize what a load of propaganda it is, so it seems like it changed
Those “Climatologists” are a genuine worry.
Heres a quote from Newsweek 28/4/1975 fending off proposals to melt the ice caps.
“Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality. ”
http://denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm
D. Patterson says: February 26, 2011 at 3:19 pm
The “duck and cover” safety precaution………
In the event of a nuclear attack, and I may be close to the event, I am going to use the ole “duck under the covers” ruse one last time.
If this is correct, thus far we’ve seen ‘nuclear winters’ in Florida (just ask the iguanas) and in Mexico this year alone. There’s a nuclear winter coming to California tonight, where peach, almond, plum, etc. blossoms are ready to go.
Or what about in mid April 2007 when it got down to 25 in Nashville, Tennessee for their most recent nuclear winter.
How about the nuclear winter of October 2009, which begged the infamous question “Where’s all the missing heat?” from a shivering climate scientist in Denver.
“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.”
It is ridiculous nonsense that 100 small nukes are going to affect the climate for years or probably even at all. That total yield was only 1.5 megatons. The Soviets dropped one in the Arctic of October 1961 that had a yield of 50 megatons and that was just one of the many they dropped though it was by far the largest. The US had several that were far more powerful than all the 100 that are supposed to change the climate for years. Sagan didn’t know what he was talking about but at least he was talking about a significant exchange which that isn’t even from historical actual atmospheric tests. Sagan was only accepted because it was part of the anti-nuclear hysteria. If you have someone dropping 100 “low yield” nuclear weapons, you have serious problems but global climate change isn’t going to be one of them. You don’t get the sulfur in the upper atmosphere even close to the same level as you would in a large explosive volcanic eruption.
The Warmist want global warming to happen they dont what to stop it.
They need it for there global policys to be put in place.
Once upon a time, primitive peoples believed that, with enough human sacrifice, they could change the weather.
Today’s advanced post-industrial peoples believe that, with enough human sacrifice, they can change the climate.
That’s human progress for you.
Does this mean that PNS failed us in the past, by invoking the precautionary principle to insist that all nuclear testing was below ground – “We coulda really cooled da wurld and reversed da hokey stick!!” (sarc.)
The mind boggles!!
These guys are nuts. I remember Carl Sagan running his computers to predict a nuclear winter after Saddam Hussein torched the oil fields of Kuwait. As it happened, the damage wasn’t as catastrophic as Sagan predicted.
“Professor Carl Sagan of the Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, Sagan (TTAPS) study hypothesized in January 1991 that enough smoke from the fires “might get so high as to disrupt agriculture in much of South Asia….” Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World that this prediction did not turn out to be correct: “it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4°–6°C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared.”[15]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
I recall searching google groups for the earliest reference to climage change, and found a usenet article from the 80s about nuclear winter. He was questioning the use of computer models way back then. It would be interesting to go back and look over the “science” of nuclear winter and find out if the problem was poor models, or deliberate junk science.
I had asked (@ur momisugly Rational Debate says: February 26, 2011 at 1:42 pm)
To which Curiousgeorge replied: (Curiousgeorge says: February 26, 2011 at 2:31 pm)
Interesting to hear that fusion typically has thick stem v fission being thin – I don’t recall hearing that before. That said, in my initial question which I still hope someone can/will answer, I wasn’t referring to thick v thin stem size, but rather smooth and containing clearly defined geometric cones/shapes vs. rough and far less geometric shapes within the stem.
Take a look, for example, at http://izismile.com/2008/12/22/nuclear_explosions_88_photos.html, photos 3-5, 17, 26, 28-31, 38, 75-6. To varying degrees – or even within various parts of the stem – each of those has the very smooth geometric shapes in the stem that I’m referring to, as compared to the other photos in that set.
Some of the most aesthetically beautiful (even if it’s entirely un-pc to refer to nuke photos as aesthetically beautiful or intriguing!) are those where the entire stem seems to be made up of concentric or nesting very sharply defined geometric shapes or cones. Some of the most intriguing, however, may be those where parts of the stems have the very clean cut geometric cones, inter-spaced with long segments of very rough stem.
So….I was hoping someone might know the detailed cause of the geometric vs. rough, as they are so amazingly distinct from each other. A number of possibilities had already occurred to me when I asked the question, although I just mentioned shutter speed, in part because it seemed to be perhaps the most likely answer…. I’d also considered that there could be any number of factors such as atmospheric conditions or ground surface type under the blast, blast height, etc.
That still left me with the question – which factors cause the one type compared to the other, and how? e.g., if atmospheric, just what specific atmospheric conditions cause the geometric shapes to appear in the stem vs not appear? Just spitballing here… Super high humidity but yet not atoll or over ocean bursts? (as it seems to me, without going to double check it, that I’ve seen lots of atoll or over ocean burst photos that do NOT have the smooth/geo stem) If atmo condition, then what conditions yield geo vs rough? If it’s ground surface type, just what is it about the surface that leads to geometric vs rough stems – and then how do you get the mixed stems, especially ones where you see geo/rough/geo/rough?
You see what I mean? Each of the off the cuff answers for possible causes would seem to have logical flaws. And answers of the nature ‘atmo & surface conditions’ doesn’t really answer the question anyhow — too vague. Heck, even if the answer does happen to be shutter speed alone (a factoid in and of itself that I’d like to know & that would be a start in answering this conundrum), I’d still be curious just how fast or how much difference does there have to be in shutter speed for the geo shapes to ‘appear’ vs the photos where there’s nothing but rough stems. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for an answer that’s a dissertation with equations etc., but there’s got to be a technical yet fairly concise answer to what conditions, even if it requires some combination of factors, that will result in photos with geo shapes vs just rough. Gotta say the water burst version like #14 is another intriguing version with the rather discrete yet not smooth/geo multiple downward pointing ‘cones’ sticking out all around the entire stem.
Also very curious if anyone knows the technical cause of the downward spikes in the ‘milliseconds after explosion” photos (e.g., #70 out of that same set linked above, or from the NYT’s set someone else linked to above http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/14/science/20100914_atom.html?ref=science photos #5 & 7).
Sigh – many years ago my grad profs gave us some books on dealing with nuke warfare/survival, fallout facts, blast radius, etc., and/or with a lot of details on various weapons tests and so on, lots of photos in one of ’em iirc. So, no, between my degree & those books & post Hiroshima/Nagasaki facts, I probably wouldn’t be surprised at all by how close one can be to ground zero and survive — or how rapidly areas can recover and be habitable again post blast either, although I’m certain most of the general public would be! see: Nagasaki ground zero: http://www.kyushu-tourist.com/groundzero.html and Hiroshima ground zero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial & according to wiki “Eizo Nomura (野村 英三, Nomura Eizō?) was the closest known survivor, who was in the basement of a reinforced concrete building (it remained as the Rest House after the war) only 170 m (560 ft) from ground zero (the hypocenter) at the time of the attack.[49][50] Akiko Takakura (高蔵 信子, Takakura Akiko?) was among the closest survivors to the hypocenter of the blast. She had been in the solidly built Bank of Hiroshima only 300 meters (980 ft) from ground-zero at the time of the attack.”).
Anyhow, I know I’ve still got those books from grad school somewhere…. maybe I’ll have to dig the suckers out and see if I can find anything in them on the stem geo vs rough shapes if no one here can shed any light on the subject. I sure hope someone can provide me with a bit of enlightenment, however, it’d be a lot easier (especially on my blasted back after all the f’ing spine surgeries I’ve had the last few years, talk about nuking something, my back & body feels about like it’s been nuked).
Not all the climate change people are panicking. Some of them are convinced that we’re already screwed and that even if we stopped adding extra carbon to the carbon cycle now, we’d still overheat.
Something tells me you should probably hope the panicking people are correct.
At least you are sensible enough to still adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle. But for the life of me I cannot figure out why so many scoff at the notion that taking carbon out of the ground and adding it to the carbon cycle will have no effect on the worldwide climate whatsoever.
Justifies the C in CAGW. Things are so bad that it requires nuclear bombs to reverse global warming. I have a less C suggestion. Mandate every country increase its electricity production from nuclear to match the French. CO2 emission would be cut dramatically or the AGW proponents’ hypocrisy would be exposed.
Also it’s fascinating that you think vegans are elitist and don’t understand how it is to live in the world without voluntary access to meat, but you and some of your readers scoff at the notion that people could cause climate change or that nuclear weapons are bad because you yourselves are not facing the effects of either. Ask someone who survived Hiroshima or Nagasaki how much fun that was. It was as bad as being at Dresden, except when the fires burned out at Dresden, that was it. Maybe you still had some residual stuff from smoke inhalation or whatever but that was pretty much the end of it.
Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Elitism is elitism even if it serves your own cause.
While you talk about diet being species-appropriate you might think about how much certain other aspects of our lives are species-appropriate as well.
Can we just go back to a simpler time and just toss a Virgin(Maddona claims shes like a virgin, will that count?) or AlGore or something in a volcano and call it a day?