Nuclear winter would endanger all 7.7 billion people on earth: study
According to co-author Alan Robock, death by famine would threaten nearly all 7.7 billion people.
(Web Desk) – Even after the end of the Cold War, the threat of an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia still persists – that has pushed researchers of the Rutgers University to perform approximate calculations of its consequence on the planet earth.
According to co-author Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, death by famine would threaten nearly all of the Earth’s 7.7 billion people.
The study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres provides more evidence to support The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons passed by the United Nations two years ago, Robock said. 25 nations have ratified the treaty so far, excluding the United States, and it would take effect when the number hits 50.
If the U.S. and Russia explode their nuclear weapons, much portion of the land in the northern hemisphere would fall below the freezing point even during summertime with the growing season slashed by nearly 90 percent in some areas.
Lead author Joshua Coupe, a Rutgers doctoral student, and other scientists used a modern climate model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research with higher resolution and improved simulations compared with a NASA model used by a Robock-led team 12 years ago.
‘The mother of all wars’ could send 150 million tons of black smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas into the lower and upper atmosphere, where it could linger for months to years and block sunlight.
The new model represents earth at many more locations and includes simulations of the growth of the smoke particles and ozone destruction from the heating of the atmosphere.
Above: Chart shows number of nuclear stockpiles possessed by the United States and Russia. Total deployed US and Russian strategic weapons increased steadily from 1983 until the Cold War ended.
Still, the climate response to a nuclear war from the new model was represented nearly identical to that from the NASA model.
"This means that we have much more confidence in the climate response to a large-scale nuclear war," Coupe said. "There really would be a nuclear winter with catastrophic consequences."
In this hypothetical mother of all wars, nuclear particles would be transported between the hemispheres within two weeks.
Global temperatures would then plunge by around 9 degrees Celsius over the next 12 months. Depending on the modelling, this decline could continue another 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Because a major nuclear war could erupt by accident or as a result of hacking, computer failure or an unstable world leader, the only safe action that the world can take is to eliminate nuclear weapons, said Robock, who works in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
Those who survive by bunking down and rugging up for five or six years will then need to worry about starvation.
Not only would a rolling winter limit plant growth, aerosols in the atmosphere could cause an average 30 percent drop in precipitation around the planet within the first few months. Within several years it could drop even further, by between 47 and 58 percent.
And that’s not something that’s totally unimaginable. In the early 1980s, towards the end of the cold war, the idea that the US and the Soviet Union might lose their cool and send a barrage of intercontinental nuclear weapons flying around the globe was not just a terrifying possibility, but an increasing likelihood.
While most people feared the devastating blasts and the radioactive fallout, an American atmospheric scientist by the name of Richard P. Turco was more concerned about the clouds of debris blown into the upper atmosphere.
Turco is the one who came up with the term nuclear winter – the cooling of the planet’s surface under a pall of fine dust, ash, and soot left by the intense bombing of multiple cities.
He and his team’s research was the first to show how smoke injected into the upper troposphere by urban fires could affect climate over a wide area. Any particles that make it as far as the stratosphere would have an express around-the-globe ticket, potentially leading to even more catastrophic climate change.
Over the decades, climatologists have returned regularly to Turco’s nuclear winter scenario with additional data and sharper mathematical tools to fine-tune predictions on how we’d fair under a post-apocalyptic blanket.
Back in 2007, Robock applied a NASA-formulated atmosphere-ocean circulation model for the first time to determine what might happen if 150 million tonnes of grit was sent sky-high.
Twelve years later, Robock and his team have retested their calculations, pitting their old maths against improved climate models. The good news is those sums more or less predict pretty much the same horror – if that can be called good news.
