Nuclear war simulation forgets the Medieval Climate Optimum
Story submitted by P. Wayne Townsend
Yesterday’s Daily Mail carried an article about a simulation of the climate consequences of nuclear war. The paper Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict is not paywalled gives the usual horror stories (nuclear winter, crop failures, etc.).
What caught my eye was this idea intellectual relic found in both the Daily Mail article and here quoted from the abstract of itself.
Our calculations show that global ozone losses of 20%–50% over populated areas, levels unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years
.
1000 years would be 1014, during the Medieval Climate optimum. Digging deeper we find that, indeed, Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick is the zombie reference for this claim.
The severe increases in UV radiation following a regional nuclear war would occur in conjunction with the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years [Mann et al., 1999].
Of course, this is a model of climate after a nuclear wars so, perhaps these may be disciples or wannabes of the distinguished Mr. Mann. With a reference to Mann this long after refutation, will we ever be able to get rid of this zombie science, or are we doomed to living in the land of the walking dead papers?
The paper is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205/abstract
Abstract
We present the first study of the global impacts of a regional nuclear war with an Earth system model including atmospheric chemistry, ocean dynamics, and interactive sea ice and land components. A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15 kt weapons could produce about 5 Tg of black carbon (BC). This would self-loft to the stratosphere, where it would spread globally, producing a sudden drop in surface temperatures and intense heating of the stratosphere. Using the Community Earth System Model with the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, we calculate an e-folding time of 8.7 years for stratospheric BC compared to 4–6.5 years for previous studies. Our calculations show that global ozone losses of 20%–50% over populated areas, levels unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years. We calculate summer enhancements in UV indices of 30%–80% over midlatitudes, suggesting widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Killing frosts would reduce growing seasons by 10–40 days per year for 5 years. Surface temperatures would be reduced for more than 25 years due to thermal inertia and albedo effects in the ocean and expanded sea ice. The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine. Knowledge of the impacts of 100 small nuclear weapons should motivate the elimination of more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that exist today.
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Given the nature of this website most of the technical responses naturally concentrate on climate and meteorological issues, but there is a wider issue which is affected by the retrospective flattening of global or regional temperature variations by Mann and his followers.
Historians and archaeologists are interested in population changes in agricultural settlements , for example the abandonment of farms in the , now cold and wet, uplands of Britain after the early Bronze Age . Or the drift from rural to urban society to the towns in late mediaeval England , how much was that due to the Black Death , the collapse of feudal structure or the change in climate making agriculture even more difficult a way of life.
These studies have relied on , for example, the Greenland ice core analyses for some relative temperature scale, for northern Europe at least . If the Mann school brings these into disrepute much work by many scholarly folk over many years will have to be revisited.
An extreme scenario could be as follows:
A respected Prof in Mediaeval History is giving a freshman class in norse settlements in Greenland and remarking on the gradual abandoning of the settlements as the benign MWA comes to a close. A polite but baffled student raises his hand in enquiry . “My girl friend ” he says is a student of climate science with a Prof who is – like – just brilliant. She says that he says there is no MWA – and he has more prizes than you can shake a stick at – so maybe your norse farms were just Inuit settlements all along ” Exit respected Prof , sobbing , his life work in tatters. Shortly afterwards there is the muffled sound of a shot from the study.
In some far-off corner of the internet an alert for J Murphy just came up. Time to rush off and polish Manns imaginary nobel prize.
J Murphy
J Murphy wins
J Murphy wins by netting a new record response count.
Congratulations, you’ve hit the sweet spot.
Pippen Kool says:
But until Mann ‘98 paper is withdrawn from Nature…
Nature was forced to issue a Corregenum [a correction] to Mann’s paper, indicating that the original was wrong. Other scientists have issued their own corrections.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
KevinM says:
J Murphy wins by netting a new record response count.
Yes, the Consensus says he’s wrong.
Live by the consensus, die by the consensus.
On Billy Liar equating J. Murphy with Michael Mann: Given the smug tone of Murphy’s comment, I could imagine this is Mann speaking about himself in the 3rd person. But the Liar surname hints that your hypothesis is just a throwaway laugh line. Either way, it warms my heart to think of Mann reading WUWT, frequently becoming outraged by what he reads, desperately wanting to respond, but knowing the PR value of his participation in the lair of his self-imagined enemies, knowing that his side too will castigate and excoriate him for such an indiscretion, and thus understanding he could never comment here under his own name, but eventually a Steynian level offense will be given, his stick mocked beyond its pale, when a verbal torpedo holes his ship of mute resolve below it’s waterline, he fires up a trusted sock puppet to defend his own honor. Wouldn’t that be great?!
No conspiracy. No connection with any bogey-mann. I look here now and again just to see what the latest obsession is, or what the latest A-B-C (Anything-But-Carbon) hope is. Anyway, I know no-one here likes it but unfortunately for you, Mann and his hockey-stick are still relevant. Doesn’t matter what I or you think: his work can only be refuted by peer-reviewed science that cannot itself be refuted. Hasn’t happened yet…
(A real J Murphy!)
@J Murphy – of course the mann and the hokey stick are still relevant! People need to be shown what hack science is.
That should be 1883, right?
ferdberple says:
July 22, 2014 at 7:01 am
“I’m reminded of Bertrand Russell’s lecture on belief. That if you accept just one thing to be true that is in fact false, then you can prove that anything is true.”
That reminds me of the late Terence McKenna who said about science “Give us just one free wonder and we can explain the rest.” The wonder being the Big Bang.
Pippen Kool says:
July 22, 2014 at 11:57 am
“But until Mann ‘98 paper is withdrawn from Nature — it is not — it will be cited at the same high rate it has always been. ”
Well it sure is a remarkable paper.
The whole “nuclear winter” notion is groundless. The practical predictions were falsified by the outcome of Gulf Wars I and II, where massive burndowns did not cause the slightest weather blip. And they are substantially falsified by catastrophic volcanic eruptions, which cause short-term havoc and maybe a year or so of slightly depressed temperatures, but nothing that causes us to think back and be thankful humanity wasn’t wiped off the map (e.g., Mt. St. Helens).
Read “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” by Glasstone. In it, you will find that nuclear detonations below a certain yield fail to have their clouds rise above the troposphere. Therefore any dust or “black carbon” (known to us from the 20th century as “soot”) will rain out. End of story. If a bomb has a yield big enough to cause the cloud to puncture through the tropopause, it is rising so fast it doesn’t have time to collect any soot from surrounding burning trees and climate research repositories.
The devil is in the assumptions. They assume that the post-detonation conflagration is fast enough, and the fireball is rising slow enough, that all the soot will be entrained in the fireball as it ascends into the atmosphere. Just watch films of real detonations and see how quickly everything happens. It is not a realistic assumption at all.
They also assume that the particulate matter persists, which can only be true if the fireball/cloud gets into the stratosphere (as mentioned above). Why? Because natural clouds go up to the tropopause. Natural clouds are (wait for it) rain clouds and the tropopause is a permanent thermal inversion that caps the altitude of most clouds. You would actually be surprised at the statistics of having clear skies. No matter where you are, it almost never happens. (I was in the business of figuring out where to situate ground-based laser weapons and had to look into these details. It turned out we needed to find three different sites around the world, to make sure we had a reasonable chance of a cloud-free line of sight.)
Here’s an interview of a William J.Murphy who is an auditor or as they describe
National Leader, Climate Change & Sustainability Services at KPMG
In the vid they discuss the latest trends in sustainability reporting and ESG disclosure in the USA and internationally:
http://youtu.be/Wy0QJKk-TGw
J Murphy says:
…Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet, and not in real life or the real world…
WUWT is the premier climate site on the internet. It has won the Best Science & Technology award for the past 3 years running. It has almost 200 million unique views in only 7 years, and a million reader comments. That is huge. No alarmist blog comes close. Mann’s own blog, realclimate, is populated by head nodding alarmists, and has relatively little traffic.
Furthermore, the OISM co-signers list has the names of more than 31,000 professionals, all with degrees in the hard sciences. NO alarmist group comes anywhere close to the OISM numbers. OISM co-signers state unequivocally and in writing that CO2 is harmless and beneficial to the biosphere. The fact is that the ‘Consensus’ is on the side of scientific skeptics. The alarmist clique depends on false propaganda to spread the misinformation that scientists and engineers in general believe that CO2 is a problem — witness the deceptive articles pretending that “97%” of scientists agree that “carbon” is a threat. Nonsense. That was fewer than 80 respondents, compared with the OISM’s 31,000+.
So when J Murphy claims that WUWT is just a “corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet”, he is whistling past the graveyard. The truth is that Mann is being marginalized, and that could not happen unless skeptics had the truth on their side. The truth is that the evidence shows CO2 is harmless, and global warming has stopped. Refute that if you think you can, J Murphy. Otherwise, you have been debunked.
I’m not saying this is the same J.Murphy, just that there is a J. Murphy who derives some or possibly most of his income from tabulating businesses carbon footprint in anticipation of a global warming tax of some sort.
I bet that J. Murphy, if it’s not the same J. Murphy, at least matches this J. Murphy’s anxiety level regarding the health annd well-being of Michael Mann’s research.
Bit of a distracting read for me. Maybe P. Wayne could get someone to proof-read his submission next time?
This was actually field-tested on a large scale in 1945. The bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki together burned about 16 km2 of built-up area. If we assume that the 100 nuclear bombs over India/Pakistan are all used against urban targets (unlikely) and are equally destructive this would amount to 800 km2 of built-up area. Now the bombing of Japan in March through August 1945 destroyed at least 350 km2 of built-up area of which 240 km2 in May alone. Add in Dresden, Pforzheim, Dortmund etc and the very extensive destruction during ground-fighting in Germany in spring 1945 (including most of Berlin) and the total destroyed area must have been well over 400 km2 of which c. 250 km2 during one month (may).
No climate effect whatsoever was noticed.
tty says “No climate effect whatsoever was noticed.” (from the bombing of Hiroshima).
Yeah, I also didn’t notice it UNTIL I observe a depression in temperature from the 1930’s reaching a low in the 1950s and 1960s.
Now I notice it.
Your mileage may vary.
Bill Illis says:
July 22, 2014 at 4:46 am
” Above ground nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were many times higher (number and power) than this simulation and nothing like the consequences proposed in this study occurred.”
…
The difference being that all the testing was spread out over the course of 30 years, and a “war” would have them all detonated in a matter of days. (or weeks)
dbstealey says:
July 22, 2014 at 1:11 pm
“. It has almost 200 million unique views ”
…
Unfortunately, the web site counters are unable to distinguish between a skeptic and a non-skeptic.
[Reply: As there is no censorship here, the numbers include both. ~ mod.]
chuck says: “Unfortunately, the web site counters are unable to distinguish between a skeptic and a non-skeptic.”
Sure it does. Believers go to SkepticalScience or RealClimate and skeptics go to WUWT. Once or twice a year I go to SkepticalScience and once or twice a day I visit WUWT.
The last place you go for any kind of truth is the site that claims to be the truth — you want real climate? Don’t go to RealClimate. Are you skeptical about science? Don’t go to SkepticalScience. This phenomenon is true of many aspects of human life — Google “truth about Mormonism” (or any other ism) for examples.
WUWT lays out new science with plenty of citations.
Consider this list and see if you can find any SCIENCE or citations. It’s just a bunch of ridicule and heresay:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Myth: “Climate’s changed before” Factoid: “Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing.”
Oh? What makes humans the dominant forcing? Just because you say so?
Myth: “There is no consensus” Factoid: “97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.”
Oh? Got names? I didn’t think so! 72 out of 12,000 papers mentioning “climate” in some way assert human caused global warming. But I will agree that if you DEFINE “climate expert” to be those who assert AGW, then it ought to be 100 percent. But 97 percent looks better.
Myth: “It hasn’t warmed since 1998” Factoid: “For global records, 2010 is the hottest year on record, tied with 2005.”
Says you. I say, 1998 was the hottest year where I live. Since no agreement exists on what is “global temperature” the statment has no meaning.
Myth: “Antarctica is gaining ice” Factoid: “Satellites measure Antarctica losing land ice at an accelerating rate.”
Says you. Nice dodge, too, not denying that Antarctica is gaining ice. You just look for some PART that is losing ice.
Myth: “CO2 lags temperature” Factoid: “CO2 didn’t initiate warming from past ice ages but it did amplify the warming.”
Another dodge that implicitly accepts the truth of the myth.
And so on. It is quite entertaining if one tries not to be depressed by the propaganda.
There is too much profit to made by too many people in too many places for today’s incarnation of climate science ever to be willingly discarded based upon the weight of slowly-accumulating observational evidence.
All of climate science as it is currently being practiced will remain a zombie science indefinitely into the future, until and unless fifty years or more of continuously falling temperatures have been experienced.
J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 12:49 pm
“Hasn’t happened yet…”
…
Not to mention the dozen or so subsequent reconstructions using different proxies, and different statistical techniques that have confirmed Mann’s original work.
Looks like this online library agrees with J Murphy. It doesn’t provide the correctionfor MBH98.
Maybe when you cite it they tell you everything else.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/1999GL900070/abstract
cn
As a public service to the many longtime members of this forum, I’ve taken J Murphy’s first post in this thread (the post that elicited a number of responses) and am reproducing it here.
Oh, I’ve removed all of the erroneous statements in the post.
J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that … In reality, whether you like it or not,everyone should accept reality ..…
So, the reality is that the MWP did happen, the LIA did happen, and warming since the end of the LIA is not unprecedented.
Mann’s “hockey stick” graphic does not represent global temperatures during its timeframe.
I can accept that.
“Nothing to see here … close the curtain and move on down the line …”
Any extended cold observed must be an error because it doesn’t agree with our modeling of the future. If something is too obviously a major cold spell, they obfuscate it time and time again (for those paying attention to primary data and detail).
Lake Michigan freezing over was the same scenario. They changed the way they presented the data as they saw it likely to occur, then a few days later they could show it not frozen over … because it would have represented the coldest winter ever recorded in the region. Chicago, at its southern end, had its coldest winter (Dec-Mar,2014) ever recorded in 140 years.
Now, the southern sea ice is so disruptive to the paradigm of propaganda … that it had to be changed as was noted on this blog several days ago (the manipulating data post and comments about the sudden loss of sea ice shown at the very depth of winter cold).