https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/202212/nuclear.cfm
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
This paper claims 2 billion would die in war between Pakistan and India.
As near as I can tell their numbers are off by a factor of 100 to 1000
What is odd is they even mention " after the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland1 or the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia2,3' They could have considered Krakatoa as well. All these events are like 100-1000 times more ash than Pakistan India war. I cannot for the life of me figure out wow they get 5–47 Tg of soot, which would most likely be less than 16 by their own numbers. I do not think these soot numbers are even correct since they comparing them to volcanos. None of their numbers make any sense to me if you do some simple back of the envelope calculations in comparison to past volcanic events. They also do the usual thing and assume the nukes are dropped right on top of the most populated cities where they would mostly be used against military targets.
They use CESM is a state-of-the-art climate model but I think it is pretty clear these climate models are not very accurate.
6 comments:
These numbers are whackadoodle, why did they publish this? It looks like a high school project where they make crazy assumptions put it into a code get a range of crazy numbers and take the worse case.
250 15kt bombs kill 2 billion
4400 15kt bombs kill 5 billion.
You see the problem.
The soot arguments make no sense in light of volcanos. By the way a 15 kt volcano will put out why more ash than 15kt bomb for rather obvious reasons but I think they assume it is the same. My guess about 10 times less, one is blowing up from the ground up, the other is is air burst, completely different amounts of dust or ash generated.
I am not pro ww3 or anything but this paper is propaganda.
Can the physicists combat/reduce the climate change of nuclear weapons? They already did. Long ago they designed and built Enhanced Radiation Weapons (e.g. Neutron Bombs). Those devices pushed out radiation in favor of physical explosive force, the idea being that kill the people but spare the territory (Russian tanks/forces attacking Europe) was the genesis of the design. People balked arguing that it would make the use of such a weapon more palatable and acceptable to use.
The naysayers won the day, that type of weapon was pulled from the arsenal. But we did keep warheads that were designed to penetrate the earth to target underground facilities, and a ground burst weapon has far greater climate damage than an air burst device.
And all of that discussion is akin to putting the Genie back in the bottle.
Jeez, the Popular Mechanics version of the US stockpile. Don't posters here know better?
Mr. Popular Mechanics here.
Would the poster of 5:22 care to enlighten us on the U.S stockpile and comparatively how much each design would kick stuff into the atmosphere? Of course, do so in a manner that would not put themselves or Scooby under the scrutiny of the government.
Also, let's include the stockpiles of all the other nuclear states and then ask again how the U.S. scientists could help mitigate the pollution of these other countries weapons.
1/26/2022 8:58 AM
The designs don't "kick stuff into the atmosphere," the height of burst determines that. If you want info on designs you are asking for SRD information, so no. If you are asking for foreign government designs, ask Trump about his stolen documents.
Sigh, you do not need know anything remotely classified to show the study is absolute total BS.
Krakatoa,
With an estimated Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 6,[2] the eruption was equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT (840 PJ)—about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the Little Boy bomb (13 to 16 kt)
Consider the claim in the paper
250 15kt bombs will kill 2 billion
4400 15kt bombs will kill 5 billion.
In both case the claim is the deaths are due to ash cooling the earth.
However
130000 > 4400 > 250.
Krakaktoa did not kill billions of people through climate change so something does not add up When you see people make crazy statements like in this paper all you need to do is a very simple calculation to know that this cannot even be close to to being right. By this happens time and time in certain fields, namely social sciences and some climate studies where they ofte do not understand the math. It is like teaching an intro lab class and the students go through a calculation and say "see we have the numbers", they find that speed of a dropped ball from a table is 100000 kilometers a second, the resistance is 10^8 Ohms, and so on, and you have to explain to them that the number makes no sense and they never thought about it. The authors of the nature food paper took some public domain climate science model that they clearly do not understand, put some numbers and and "so there!!!" but never thought for a second why the numbers cannot possibly be right.
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