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.
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.