People send me stuff.
Never mind the other aerosol sources, it was the Fat Man and Little Boy.
From the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics April 2011, these claims:
- Atmospheric nuclear explosions induced the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century.
- Atmospheric nuclear explosions can be regarded as full-scale in situ tests for nuclear winter.
- Global warming will be better predicted by considering atmospheric nuclear explosions’ effects.
The paper is: Fujii, Yoshiaki, 2011: The role of atmospheric nuclear explosions on the stagnation of global warming in the mid 20th century
Here’s the abstract, the HadCRUT -vs- nukes graph follows:
“This study suggests that the cause of the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century was the atmospheric nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1980. The estimated GST drop due to fine dust from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions based on the published simulation results by other researchers (a single column model and Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model) has served to explain the stagnation in global warming. Atmospheric nuclear explosions can be regarded as full-scale in situ tests for nuclear winter. The non-negligible amount of GST drop from the actual atmospheric explosions suggests that nuclear winter is not just a theory but has actually occurred, albeit on a small scale. The accuracy of the simulations of GST by IPCC would also be improved significantly by introducing the influence of fine dust from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions into their climate models; thus, global warming behavior could be more accurately predicted.”
Somewhere, Carl Sagan is laughing.
Here’s a composite overlay graph of HadCRUT3 global temperatures from 1945-2010 via WoodforTrees.org onto the bar graph of known nuclear explosions for the same period from Wikipedia:
If the premise is true, one wonders how Trinity, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima started the sharp downtrend in global temperature in 1945, followed by Crossroads in 1946. These were all quite small in comparison to what followed.
Here’s the list of nuclear tests.
UPDATE: As Mike Lorrey points out in comments, after the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, nuclear tests were conducted underground. How then did the cooling of the 1970’s occur if the premise presented in this peer reviewed paper is true? I’ve updated the graph above to reflect this.
It’s as though NOTHING escapes the velcro fingers of the Climate Druids. Everything explains some aspect of this intangible glut of extreme temperatures and brimming seas.
You know I’m not a nuclear scientist or a climatologist, but I think even to a layman it’s fairly obvious that this is a little bit of shinola and a lot of the other thing.
so, what are we waiting for…sarc
So, the obvious conclusion is that IF “global warming” were to start up again, all we have to do is fire off some of the nukes that are just hanging around waiting.
Disarmament and planet-saving, hand in hand. Kumbaya!!!
This counts as peer-reviewed science?
Really?
Wow….
If you attempt to compare them to volcanoes the result is obvious. Small nukes are like small eruptions. They don’t show up on the radar. It takes an enormous volcano to have an effect. Krakatoa had an effect, but it was 200 Megton and injected millions of tons of SO2 into the stratosphere.
How much SO2 does a nuke put into the stratosphere? Zilcho would be the correct answer. So comparing the total amount of activity is garbage because a lot of zero’s are still zero.
Only the Tsar bomb at 50 Megaton is significant. That one in 1961 explains why 1961 was elevated for total yield. That one was large enough to put dust into the stratosphere, but it also detonated in the Arctic. The wind patterns there do not disperse globally.
Where was the peer-review for the basics of the climate. Argh!!!!!
Just looking at Global Hadcrut3 the temperature anomoly rose by 0.5 deg C between 1910 and 1945 (peak to peak). ie 0.14 deg C per decade If the above story is correct then without the Bomb temperatures would have risen from 1945 until about 2000 before flattening ie 0.5 deg C in 55 years ie 0.09 deg C per decade.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif
Quite a slowing to standstill in 2000 and for the last 10 years. How does the anthropogenic CO2 hypothesis explain that whole scenario? I don’t think it can. Or maybe secret nuclear tests are still going on to stabilise the temperature (I think not).
Oh what a tangled web they weave.
Here’s a link to the author’s version of the paper:
http://rock.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/fujii/publ/2011/Fujii2011AuthorVersion.pdf
The graph uses the wrong data. The data of interest not the total number of tests, but the YIELD of ATMOSPHERIC tests. From 1961-1962, in just 18 months, there was a frenzy of testing in the USSR, with almost 300 megatons of H-bombs detonated in the atmosphere. This far exceeded all previous testing put together. After the atmospheric test ban in 1963, atmospheric tests dropped to a very small fraction of that, no more than 30 megatons spread over a couple of decades.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuctestsum.html
The incredible ‘explosion’ of testing in 1961/62 was followed immediately by a global cooling over the next 3-4 years. I don’t know if there was a connection (a large volcano in 1963 complicates things), but the idea is not ridiculous.
John Kehr
For a look at the glories of peer review and the protection it affords us from nonsense (do I really have to write ‘sarc’?), take a look at Doug Keenan’s piece in the Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/articleSB10001424052748704615504576171863463697564.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. It’s behind a paywall but you can reach it for free if you use Google to search “keenan wsj”.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc – it happened after, therefore it was caused by. The standard logical fallacy of apocalyptics, irrational crazies and other loons everywhere.
There was a large amount of dust produced by the Soviet nuke tests in the high Arctic, especially on Novaya Zemlya, which appeared to cause a 1-3 year drop in Arctic temperatures in the mid-1960s. But the cooling was already 20 years long by then.
After Fukushima Daiichi, expect a lot more “scientific” papers demonizing nuclear power. A veritable tsunami of crap, if you will.
Old hat.
Right through the ’50s (in Australia at least) every odd weather event was due to “the bomb”.
I seem to recall that a fifteen year old lady by name Kristen Byrnes wrote this up with a lot else besides in a 2007 essay titled, Ponder the Maunder. Can’t seem to locate her essay at the mo. but I do recall her mentioning the bomb test correlations. Plus ça change……..
There are several years that do not correlate! Perhaps they used the unadjusted data in error.
Was this paper peer reviewed or pal reviewed? Utter desperation!
So, essentially, who’s been nuking up the world in recent years? :p
Funny how the anti-nuclear hippies isn’t worried over the thousand and thousand year half-life radiation from all those h-bomb tests, but soil themselves when passing a nuclear power plant.
So let me get this straight;
The models to date are accurate to the point they can hind cast our past weather and should be used to predict the future [sorry, ‘project scenarios’]. However this major parameter wasn’t included in those models. So they can’t be accurate can they??
@Mike Bromley:
Please, sir, do not slander Druids so! Druids were well known for their keen understanding of nature and fidelity to the data and known mechanism of how things worked. They were also known for running some of the best schools in astronomy and navigation of the era. Even the Romans sent folks there to study…
No proper Druid would ever do what those “other folks” have done… ALL work was to be memorized and error was not tolerated. You either knew everything exactly and correctly and could recite perfectly, or you went back to study more. NEVER was the past “re-written” and you were not allowed to just make things up because of peer pressure. No, you watched the stars and nature and learned from them how things worked. Science at it’s best.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/marden-henge-and-durrington-walls-henge/
Don’t make me get out my eye of newt… 😉
So it’s not a natural 60-year cycle, then?
So what caused the drop before 1910, and the ‘pause’ we are in now?
Then the rises to 1880, to 1940 and up to 2000 could not possibly be natural, then?
That explains everything. /sarc if needed.
Anthony is the the graph relating to Atmospheric detonations only, as a large number of detonations where underground detonations which could not have any effect on weather/climate!
Would be nice to see two graphs one for Atmospheric detonations and one for underground detonations which would dilute the argument/theory even further!
I suppose when they say global warming, they mean AGW?
If yes, according to IPCC, AGW started in ~50s?
So, it is not possible that atmospheric nuclear explosions induced the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century.
The whole thing is an enormous cognitive dissonance. They are in the hole and they keep digging.
What is inducing cooling in the last and this decade? Mostly reduced solar activity, just like in the 60s/70s.
I thought you’d done the April 1st gag?
Pointman
What can we say about this study? Nice try? Thank you for playing, Vanessa has some fabulous prizes for you on the way out….
Underground testing stopped earthquakes, just saying.
Sarc/ off
Baxter75 says: (April 5, 2011 at 1:01 am)
I seem to recall that a fifteen year old lady…
Does it go something like this, Baxter?
Kristen Byrnes Ponder the Maunder
As more and more people spread the craziness of pseudo-science and post-modern nonsense such as this paper due to an unfortunate belief in the infallibility of the word once it is set down in writing in ‘proper’ publications and books, EM Smith’s excellent reply has reminded of the oral tradition of the New Zealand Maori, who, like the ancient British Druids, through a system of Wananga, or formal schools for selected students, memorised their history, lineage, voyages of exploration, astral navigation methods, decorative arts, planting calenders and other knowledge and information central to the survival of their culture under the tuition of experts. Europeans who first arrived in Aotearoa assumed the Maori to be an ignorant stone age people due to their lack of interest in writing and also assumed that the great Polynesian explorers had merely fetched up wherever they sailed due to happenstance.
Cultural arrogance has a lot to answer for.
Surely one decent sized dust storm kicks up a lot more aerosols than a nuclear test? Is the current cooler weather in Australia a result of that monster dust storm 18 months ago?
Or is it just cycles in the climate?
Apparently, they forgot to hide both the incline and the decline.
Amateurs…
Um, slight problem with this premise: since the early 1960’s all nuclear tests have been underground…. Basically all the cooling from the Kennedy Administration up to 1979 was happening in spite of no atmospheric tests.
Oh look! The hand of the clock is going downward! It must be unhappy because I offended the Gods. Let me reform my behavior!
Aha! The hand of the clock is going upward now! The Gods must be pleased by my penitence!
Oh no! Now the hand is going downward again. What have I done to insult the gods this time?
Hate how everything is either the fault of nuclear, or stems from something nuclear. If we’re ever going to invent any kind of serious large scale space travelling craft we need to accepted it and then build it 500 times bigger.
Climate science reminds me of the old saying –
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
This can now be paraphrased –
“If the only tool you have is a computer model, everything looks like global warming.”
The fine dust aside…
By the mechanism of Svensmark’s theory, cosmic rays cause the formation of clouds, by the cosmic rays helping to form aerosols.
The atmospheric nuclear tests released large amounts of ionizing radiation, as well as widely dispersing radioactive materials that released ionizing radiation as they decayed.
Did the atmospheric nuclear tests, by the ionizing radiation that resulted, lead to increased cloud cover, that led to reduced warming and even cooling? To quantify it, the effect was likely minimal if it occurred, but then Dr. Spencer linked the apparent late-20th century global warming to a mere 1 to 2% decrease in cloud cover thus even a small effect could make for a significant difference.
The nuke list omits the Soviet oil-leak plugs via hydrogen bomb detonations.
Of course, the more variables you introduce, the more room you have to “fine-tune” the “parameters”.
And how can you explain the lack of warming during last decade? Easy, look for something that changed during this decade, (DVD disk sales, LCD screens, whatever…) make it another “forcing” and… voilá, now the models work better.
Wonders of the post-modern science.
Meh…
This just gives the modellers another free variable to add to SO2 and carbon particulates just in case global temperatures fail to march in lock step with CO2. The Ancients used to call this a “Deus ex machina”.
Absolute nonsense.
No nuclear explosions were reported in the Hudson Bay area either in 1950’s or later, yet the geomagnetic pole located there experienced rise in the intensity, going against the previous steep long term reduction. This for one or another reason coincided with the N. Hemisphere’s cooling. Both events lasted ~ 30-40years, too much of coincidence, for science to ignore.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GeoMagField.gif
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
Anthony,
This would mean that North Korea’s nuclear test went over the top and has now pushed us into an Ice Age.
What a crock of ……..
Anthony, can I sue you for eye pollution??? 🙂
An implication of the study, if taken seriously, would be that there have been very many (say, three or four score, Globally) errant and undetected atomic explosions over the last decade or so of non-warming, particularly before the last two severe winters.
Well, the good news is that we have huge arsenals of latent global cooling.
In researching if Mount St Helens (with an 20,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalent of energy) had an effect on the climate I came across the following.
“Climate did not change after this eruption. It takes a very large eruption, and it needs to be explosive enough to eject enough into the stratosphere. It also helps a lot if the volcano is in the tropics where it is easier for the atmosphere’s circulation to move the aerosols to both hemispheres.”
Anyone who remembers the aftermath of Mt Saint Helens, such as my two older brothers living in Spokane Washington at the time, will recall the huge volumes of ash that fell from the sky throughout large areas of the North West. Even years later I could see the ash remnants throughout the regions where the ash fell. I still have a jar full of Mt Saint Helens ash collected in Spokane.
I wonder how the nuclear tests compare. Did the particles reach the stratosphere, in large quantities?
I notice that warming restarted around 1977, but atmospheric testing continued for another 20 years.
Basically, we have warming stopping 10 to 15 years before significant atmospheric testing started, and restarted long before the testing stopped.
These guys are getting desperate. The problem is that the news media and most of the public will never examine the actual data, and instead just say to themselves, “Now that sounds reasonable”.
In terms of the dust taken up into the atmosphere, we need to understand which tests took place overland on the surface and which were either underground or on/under the sea.
Let me guess. Korea’s tests are what caused the lack of warming over the last 13 years?
I KNEW it! “We have been having disastrous weather of late – droughts in India, torrential rains in Germany, bad harvests in Europe – because all the atomic bomb explosions disrupt the weather” – DER SPIEGEL, 1947, 1948, 1952, 1954 pp..
I keep asking and nobody gives me the answer. How is it that people such as these, with their abysmally low intellect, are able to earn a living other than by crushing stones?
While it’s not unfathomable that the nuclear tests had a measurable effect (dropping the ’61-’62 average temperatures up/down a tenth of a degree or so), the premise that all cooling periods are due to nuclear testing needs a lot stronger of a dose-response to be anywhere near proved.
I am not in a position to put up $31 to read the paper. I cannot help but wonder how Yoshiaki Fujii addressed the effects of fires as a result of war. The burning of European cities like London and Dresden, Asian cities like Tokyo, and the Kuwait’s Oil-Fire smoke cloud were on a scale never seen before.
I certainly hope the paper makes no connection between the ‘reduction in CAGW’ and the ‘Cold War’.
EM Smith: “Please, sir, do not slander Druids so! Druids were well known for their keen understanding of nature and fidelity to the data and known mechanism of how things worked.”
Yes, they also roasted people alive in wicker cages. A nasty little habit for which the Romans exterminated the lot of them.
There are a lot of people knocking this research, but if you transform the values into a Newtonian cube and factor in Voltaire’s Constant, then subtract the number you first thought of, divided by pi, there is a perfect correlation between the two data sets.
Oh that mid-century inconvenient cooling… once it was nuclear tests then aerosols from burning the coal, then volcano, alas the Sato index shows NOTHING which would support any of that theories
Truth is, it was caused by oceans. What drives ocean SSTs up and down in 30-year pattern is unknown, but worth x trillions – so much wants EU spent to revert that natural cycle.
Good Lord…
…If we don’t stop global warming, they’re going to nuke us! /snark
No, no, no , they have it all wrong – it was the stock market that did it; Plot up the S&P 500 vs global temps – the correlation is much better:
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EGSPC+Interactive#chart3:symbol=^gspc;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
Note the big flattening in the late 60’s & 70’s, acceleration in the 80’s & 90’s, flattening in the 00’s – a great correlation to the global temp record!
/sarc off
Correlation does not equal causation.
Thank goodness there’s something that doesn’t cause global warming!
The theory is reasonable enough, but a publication is then supposed to provide evidence. That graph is resoundinly unconvincing.
It is also false. The warmest year of the 20th century was 1934. That is not what the graph shows.
Fails the sniff test, for all the reasons that have already been mentioned.
This can’t be a good sign for the true believers.
I would have thought “stagnation of global warming in the mid 20th century” would be de facto heresy.
The Hockey Stick Does Not Stagnate! It has not stagnated since 1850, when industrial CO2 emissions first created the “blade” of The Holy Hockey Stick.
This appears to be a petal in the daisy chain of logic supporting
the active terraforming plots, proposals, and plans to
“dim the sun” to help mitigate the warming predicited as a
result of AGW.
“See !”, they’ll say, “We’ve already stalled global warming once
with the dust and turbulance from nuke testing at the end of
WWII into the mid 1960s.”
We can do it again if you’ll just give us the funding, the research
facilities and the legal political support to get those temperatures
down in the future.
The insanity of using some pollutant to foul the atmosphere
to counter the supposed influence of greenhouse gasses on
global temperatures is lost on these folks.
“This study suggests that the cause of the stagnation in global warming in the mid 20th century was the atmospheric nuclear explosions detonated between 1945 and 1980.”
There may be something here, I’ll have to give it some thought.
What I find interesting with this story is the timing of it. It comes right after a story (I think in February ’11) comes out that says we could set off nukes to cool to world. I don’t see this being a coincidence.
Here is a much more raesonable article from the most recent issue of same journal, from office about 200 yards from where I am typing:
Fluctuations in some climate parameters
A.D. Erlykina, , 1, , , B.A. Lakenb and A.W. Wolfendalea
a Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK
b Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain
Received 21 June 2010; revised 26 January 2011; accepted 28 January 2011. Available online 9 February 2011.
Abstract
There is argument as to the extent to which there has been an increase over the past few decades in the frequency of the extremes of climatic parameters, such as temperature, storminess, precipitation, etc, an obvious point being that Global Warming might be responsible. Here we report results on those parameters of which we have had experience during the last few years: Global surface temperature, Cloud Cover and the MODIS Liquid Cloud Fraction. In no case we have found indications that fluctuations of these parameters have increased with time.
Research highlights
► We studied the possible rise of the frequency of extremes in some climatic parameters. ► We analysed Global surface temperature, Cloud Cover and MODIS Liquid cloud fraction. ► In no case fluctuations of these parameters increased with time.
I cannot legally send the full PDF, but I thought you might like the bit about “In no case fluctuations of these parameters increased with time.” 🙂
erratum “reasonable”
I am very impressed by the number of posters here who can be certain of the abscence of any effect on the climate by nuclear testing in the 50s-60s. Apparently in the abscence of any need to provide evidence for their certainty.
/sarc off
Given the global spread of radioactive isotopes the ionizing radiation must be a significant factor in variations in the level of such potential cloud condensation sources, I wonder if Svenmark has factored in this jump in CCN?
I would want to see some figures on the comparison between the amounts of aerosols generated by nuclear testing, sulphur and particulates from industrial sources and the similar magnitude of solar dimming factors from Pinatubo before either dismissing this research or accepting it provisionally as credible.
The courage of others in rejecting it without such knowledge is most meretricious.
It seems bizarre to add the unquantifiable and unknown particulate effects of nuclear testing to the grossly inadequate and fudged parameters of climate models, but who’s counting?
Certainly not the climate science community, which is already happy to treat trees as millennial thermometers.
The “nuclear winter” theorists who have studied and modeled man-made particulates introduced to the atmosphere from nuclear explosions have had a devil of a time getting it right. Their forecasts and models have consistently proved to be exaggerated and incorrect (e.g., Gulf War 1991 oil well fires).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
Isn’t it rather demented to add more incorrect scenarios to already-faulty and implausible climate models?
FerdinandAkin says: “I am not in a position to put up $31 to read the paper.”
Scroll up to my earlier comment. There’s a link to an “author’s copy.”
Oh, did I laugh at this one:
Andrew says:
April 5, 2011 at 4:00 am
Climate science reminds me of the old saying –
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
This can now be paraphrased –
“If the only tool you have is a computer model, everything looks like global warming.”
======
Quote of the week?
Roger Carr says:
April 5, 2011 at 2:55 am
Baxter75 says: (April 5, 2011 at 1:01 am)
I seem to recall that a fifteen year old lady…
Does it go something like this, Baxter?
That’s not the one. It was I believe Kristen’s first essay on the subject where she says:
I will demonstrate that the Earth’s warming climate is a result of natural variance and that man made changes in the warming climate in the last 40 years are negligible at best. I will insert pieces of the puzzle from new scientific studies that were not available or were ignored in previous global warming studies.
I add a possible piece of the puzzle, nuclear weapons testing in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, that may have made a small contribution to cooling at that time.
After reviewing numerous scientific studies and observing data, it is clear that the theory that “man made increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are causing global warming” is not likely.
Not bad for a 15 year old methinks. I found it at http://www.globalwarminghoax.com
Sorry don’t know how to do links.
[Reply: You did it just fine. Just post the URL, and it becomes a hotlink. ~dbs, mod.]
I was reading an interesting new paper yesterday…
“Over funding causes lots of BS to be published – Climate Science: A Case Study”
Juraj V. says: April 5, 2011 at 5:45 am
Truth is, it was caused by oceans.
Correct
What drives ocean SSTs up and down in 30-year pattern is unknown, but worth x trillions – so much wants EU spent to revert that natural cycle.
Not exactly.
a) there is no 30 year pattern, it just happens that last century had something that resembles to 30 years, but that is as far as it goes.
b) There is a perfectly simple explanation, if one cares to understand how and where ocean circulation and currents are subject to well known physical processes.
Here is a brief preview:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PDO-ENSO-AMO.htm
I love the smell of desperation in the morning!
Either they are playing us for fools or expect that everyone is hanging on their every word. Something stinks and it’s not us.
OK, if the nuclear tests caused cooling then that shows that the temp adjustments from the 40’s through the 70’s warming the ocean record were WRONG!!
Also, it is just like CFC’s, the really fine dust put into the stratosphere last a really long time so are still there and if they weren’t we would be getting really hot right now!!!!!
IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT!!!
/sarc
Atmospheric blasts ramped up from 1954 to 1963, then almost stopped after the signing of the limited test-ban treaty. Aerosol effects would not be expected to last more than a couple of years after atmospheric testing stopped, so it is hard to see how these aerosols would contribute to mid 1970’s cooling. This seems a pretty weak paper (approaching silly).
E.M.Smith says:
Please, sir, do not slander Druids so! Druids were well known for their keen understanding of nature and fidelity to the data and known mechanism of how things worked.
Druids had a lot more respect for nature (and the power of nature) than modern greens.
“How then did the cooling of the 1970′s occur if the premise presented in this peer reviewed paper is true? ”
Based on your study of this paper, what is the answer? This is a legitimate question, and I would love to hear critiques by Anthony or any of the readers — particularly of section 4:
“Estimation of GST drop by the fine dust and soot from the actual atmospheric nuclear explosions”
* Are the authors wrong in their estimates of how much fine dust and soot was created? If so, what is a better estimate?
* Are the authors wrong in their estimates of the cooling effects of fine dust and soot? If so, what is a better estimate?
* Are the authors wrong in their estimates of the how long this cooling effect would last? If so, what is a better estimate?
Someone should look up the amount of space dust that falls from the heavens every year. I think it’s around million times that of an H-bomb.
They are truly desperate to find anything to prove their point. I still think global warming is caused by Unicorn farts! I wonder how I can “prove” this?
So what’s caused the global temp stagnation we have been experiencing for the last 10 to 12 years ?????
This summer, instead of dusting and vacuuming the house I’ll connect the vacuum’s hose to the exhaust port and blow all the dust toward the windows every day to keep the nasty sunshine from coming in and heating up the place.
It’s actually a very interesting paper to read! However, I doubt that aerial testing or sub-surface testing would have generated enough particulates to impact climate in any meaningful way. Sagan’s “nuclear winter” was from widespread fires as well as dust kicked up, these tests would have produced very little particulates.
I remember those Cold War nuke test days well, my mom wouldn’t allow us to lick icicles, snowflakes etc. because of concern over fallout (this would be about 1960).
So the world won’t cool over the next few years then?????
@-Eric Gisin says:
April 5, 2011 at 10:03 am
“Someone should look up the amount of space dust that falls from the heavens every year. I think it’s around million times that of an H-bomb.”
Well if someone did look it up they would find that the commonly quoted figure is between 30,000 and 40,000 tonnes a year.
For that to be a million times the amount from a H-bomb the nuclear fireball would have to loft less than the weight of a person into the stratosphere.
In fact if the bomb yield is over a mega-tonne a ground burst will generate thousands of tonnes of fine dust which because the mushroom cloud reaches the stratosphere (unlike most volcanoes) will get there in significant amounts.
The only figure I can find in the paper is an estimate (?!) of 26,000 tonnes of fine dust from a ground burst.
If this is within an order of magnitude then it indicates one surface test may generate a similar amount of stratospheric dust as falls from space.
The difference of course is that the space dust is a continual and consistent process that would not generate any sudden trends. There are no detectable significant space dust concentration variations that the Earth’s orbit transits.
While the nuclear tests were a short, concentrated ADDITIONAL source of stratospheric dust…..
“Claim: nuclear tests stopped global warming in the mid 20th century”
That’s not all that Fat Man and Little Boy stopped……….
This was mentioned in a guest paper on the late John Daly’s website Still Waiting For Greenhouseaabout 10 years ago. Here is the link:
http://www.john-daly.com/bigbangs.htm
@-Ranger Rick says:
April 5, 2011 at 10:23 am
” I still think global warming is caused by Unicorn farts! I wonder how I can “prove” this?”
Its pretty easy. First measure the physical characteristics of unicorn farts (UF) and determine by what physical mechanism they are altering the global energy balance. It is most likely to be either by altering the albedo of the Earth to incoming solar energy or the inverse albedo – emissivity – to outgoing terrestrial energy.
In either case the spectra of energy received at, and energy emitted from, the Earth will change as the amount of UF changes.
If you have a reliable record of the change in UF levels and a matching record of changes in the energy spectra incoming and outgoing you will have ‘proof’ that there is a real, detectable physical process altering the energy balance of the globe in response to changes in UF levels.
If after allowances are made for solar and intrinsic fluctuations and other (nuclear?!) complicating factors the observed warming is commensurate with the energy imbalance caused by the changing UF levels then most of the scientific community will accept your work and it will become the mainstream focus of climate research.
Opposed only by a small minority that seem unable to accept the culpability of UF in all this, and accuse you of trying to impose global unicornuism.
Someone above beat me to the observation that dust storms would have a much greater effect than nuclear tests, particularly when so many after 1963 were underground tests.
Of course, correlation for these people means causation and we all know that global warming has been on going since man invented fire and we just have to identify all of the factors which have countered our effect over time, creating the temperature cycles that we see. You have to understand that some ameliorating cooling factor pops up every 70 years like clockwork and causes cooling, then it goes away and we continue warming. It’s so simple.
Colin says: April 5, 2011 at 5:40 am
EM Smith: “Please, sir, do not slander Druids so! Druids were well known for their keen understanding of nature and fidelity to the data and known mechanism of how things worked.”
Yes, they also roasted people alive in wicker cages. A nasty little habit for which the Romans exterminated the lot of them.
—————————————————————————–
Aw Colin – they had to have something to lighten up with after all that intensive study – give them a break.
Douglas
And another thing Colin
Those Romans were far too moralistic for their own good – look what they did to the early Christians for their beliefs! Hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Cheers
Douglas
Ranger Rick says:
I still think global warming is caused by Unicorn farts! I wonder how I can “prove” this?
RR, you have it backwards. Unicorn farts were keeping the earth cool. All reasonable people (scientists included) agree that Unicorns have been practically non-existent since the beginning of the Holocene. From that, we can conclude that it was their mass extinction that allowed the earth to warm out of the ice age. Since the warming has not been consistent, we can conclude that some may have survived, thereby helping to control warming to some degree. This is borne out by the MWP, which would appear to have been caused by the widespread hunting of Unicorns during that era. After the few remaining Unicorns escaped to what is now the United States, they began breeding again, which ushered in the LIA. Then, as urban growth and industrialization encroached on their new habitat, their numbers dropped again, which likely caused the end of the LIA. Today, it’s just getting worse, since we all know Unicorns are never seen anymore – there must be very few, if any, remaining to control runaway warming.
We must act immediately to find and preserve any remaining Unicorns, and we should begin a Unicorn breeding program right away before it’s too late.
Where do I apply for a grant?
@-Charles Higley says:
April 5, 2011 at 12:11 pm
-“Someone above beat me to the observation that dust storms would have a much greater effect than nuclear tests, particularly when so many after 1963 were underground tests.”-
Dust storms do not put significant amounts of fine dust (sub-micrometer dust) into the stratosphere.
The issue of which surface tests could be responsible for injecting fine dust into the stratosphere is discussed in the paper. China continued with surface tests after 63.
-“Of course, correlation for these people means causation and we all know that global warming has been on going since man invented fire and we just have to identify all of the factors which have countered our effect over time, creating the temperature cycles that we see.”-
For most people the correlation between the eruptions of Agung, El Chichon and Pinatubo and subsequent cooling of the climate is evidence of causation because a known physical mechanism connects the two.
Would you dispute this is evidence that small changes in the contents of the atmosphere can alter the climate ?
Two Papers – “The Role Of Atmospheric Nuclear Explosions On The Stagnation Of Global Warming In The Mid 20th Century” by Fijii 2011″ And “Comets And Climate” By Zecca, Antonio and Luca Chiari 2009
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/two-papers-the-role-of-atmospheric-nuclear-explosions-on-the-stagnation-of-global-warming-in-the-mid-20th-century-by-fijii-2011-and-comets-and-climate-by-zecca-antonio-and-luca-chiari-20/
I still don’t think they have the “nuclear winter” theory completely ironed out.
Recall that in 1990-1991, Dr. Carl “billions and billions” Sagan predicted that if Saddam Hussein set the oil pumps in Kuwait on fire, that there would be a “cooling effect” downwind in Pakistan and/or India, which never happened.
Baxter75 @ April 5, 2011 at 1:01 am
You recall correctly.
Ponder the Maunder
Oh, how their tangled web implodes,
When they predict with dull diodes,
Their weakest tea is said to flow,
Like lava to the sea, although
If nukes could truly nudge some numbers,
Increasing grants to number fumblers,
Perhaps some pigs are flying high
Through clouds that can’t be truly measured,
As if science wasn’t mystified
By what’s dismissed as ‘only weather’…
We’ve had periods of rapid cooling many times over the last 10,000 years – did nuclear weapons play any part in these events? Come to that, did man-made CO2?
Let us look at numbers: Cosmic rays are depositing approx. 1 GigaWatt into the atmosphere.This is less than ten pars per trillion or 10**(-8) of the solar power deposited on earth, which is approx. 170 PetaWatt (albedo effects not considered). Nevertheless, cosmic rays are basically the only radiation which produces ions in the upper troposphere, forming areosols. We know that solar intensity variations during solar active times are insufficient to quantitatively explain the parallel trends of global warming and solar activity which occurred up to the 1940ies. Svensmark points out that the generated aerosols can be the nuclei for droplets in cloud formation. During solar inactive times there would be enhanced cloud formation, during active times there would be reduced cloud formation. In my paper, I have followed a different route, looking at variations of terrestric solar irradiance with solar activity.
During solar active times, cosmic ray intensities have been reduced by up to 20 %, which means a reduction in power of approx. 200 MegaWatt.
During post-war times, there have been a total of several 100 Megatons of TNT equivalent deposited into the atmosphere. When we assume 10 Megatons per year, and look up the energy stored in 1 kg of TNT, which is roughly 5 MegaJoule, there is an energy of 50 PetaJoule (5*10**16 Joule) deposited into the atmosphere per year, which is a power of 1.7 GigaWatt. A large fraction of that is ionizing radiation, which, then, had been generating ions and thus aerosols – just like cosmic rays and additionally to them.
Cycle 19 with its maximum around 1960 has been the most active solar cycle in the last century. Nevertheless, global temperatures have dropped.
When you look more closely, you would expect the northern hemisphere to have cooled more than the southern hemisphere, since most tests, especially those of the Soviet Union, have been carried out in the northern hemisphere. And this is indeed the case.
Anthony, are you still laughing?
1962 should have been the coldest ever after the Oct. 1961 Tsar Bomba was lit off.
50 megatons and the cloud circled the N. hemisphere 3 times.
This is yet another attempt by Alarmists to justify the use of Nuclear Weapons to control the Climate. Such ideas are feverishly mad and bereft of guiding principles.
@-Tenuc says:
April 5, 2011 at 2:50 pm
“We’ve had periods of rapid cooling many times over the last 10,000 years – did nuclear weapons play any part in these events? Come to that, did man-made CO2?”
No.
Can you provide any dates of these ‘many’ rapid cooling events that are NOT correlated with volcanic events?
But then when you stop tests it should rebound back as is the situation in volcanic eruptions.
From CRS, Dr.P.H. on April 5, 2011 at 11:05 am:
And you listened to her, right? You should have, she was right about avoiding the yellow snow!
So we are now in Tom Lehrer territory, “Let’s drop the big one now”
sunderland steve says:
April 5, 2011 at 10:32 am
It is called ocean surface salt changes that started in the late 1960’s. Blamed on global warming BUT there was no massive evaporation to this claim.
So, it has to be pressure changes that have been declining since 1948.
Quick, someone think of the bananas.
Here is Fujii’s home page:
http://rock.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/fujii/index.html
According to his paper, “It was also clarified that efforts to mitigate temperature rise by reduction of anthropogenic CO2 emission will result in unbearable economic loss or, on the contrary, economic growth, more CO2 emission and more fossil energy consumption depending on assumptions. The unnecessary efforts, anyway, should be immediately stopped and the efforts for population stabilization and other important issues should be urgently begun.”
http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/handle/2115/40226
Some alternative views on climate change are here in Japanese:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AE%87%E5%AE%99%E6%B0%97%E5%80%99%E5%AD%A6
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B0%97%E5%80%99%E6%84%9F%E5%BA%A6
Wow! isn’t this a bit of a band wagon? And as Izen says, apparently in the abscence of any evidence. And while I am skeptical about the effects of particulate matter from the atmospheric nuclear tests, I’m not so sure about many other effects which those tests generated. In particular I’m thinking about the production of NOx’s and the subsequent destruction of ozone resulting in variations in the transmissivity of the atmosphere.
In the 10th Sept 1981 issue of New Scientist, John Gribbin reviews research by Russian scientists K Y Kondratyev and G A Nikolsky who, in the 1960’s were studying the variations in the heat of the sun and the absorbtion properties of the atmosphere.
As Gribbin says, they point out that the ozone consentration varies in inverse proportion to the amont of nitrogen oxides present in the atmosphere. They also note that the fire ball from an atmospheric nuclear explosion reaches a height of 30-40km and each megatonne releases 10³² molecules of NOx. NO2 which is a major part of this output lasts about four years in the atmosphere, they say.
Their estimates from the nuclear tests up to the test ban treaty in 1963 is that at that point there was a total figure of 980Mt “equivalent NOx power” in the atmosphere at the beginning of 1963.
They estimate that between latitudes 25 and 85 degrees north each square centimetre
of the surface had a burden of NOx above it to reduce the flux of solar radiation at the top of the troposphere by about 2.5%. Which fits the balloon observations of the time, and the weather of the time.
While any such effects from nuclear tests would have disipated since the test ban treaty, constant similar effects to the atmosphere’s chemistry and its transmissivity from solar proton events and the solar cyle have been shown to be much greater in continuous research done from the 1970’s.
I think the continued ignoring of these facts will cause much embarrassment in the future.
Image Exif data is useful to for image forensics. But EXIF data won’t tell you too much – the user might have loaded the photo into something like Photoshop just to crop it the way he wanted. Site Photoshopped Image Killer is beyond that, it mines structural information from image content and classifies image as original or altered based on that.