Nuclear winter

[4][5] When developing computer models of nuclear-winter scenarios, researchers use the conventional bombing of Hamburg, and the Hiroshima firestorm in World War II as example cases where soot might have been injected into the stratosphere,[6] alongside modern observations of natural, large-area wildfire-firestorms.

Mills et al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that a nuclear weapons exchange between Pakistan and India using their current arsenals could create a near-global ozone hole, triggering human health problems and causing environmental damage for at least a decade.

[69] The implications for civil defense of numerous surface bursts of high yield hydrogen bomb explosions on Pacific Proving Ground islands such as those of Ivy Mike in 1952 and Castle Bravo (15 Mt) in 1954 were described in a 1957 report on The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, edited by Samuel Glasstone.

[74][79] In 1975, Hampson's hypothesis "led directly"[11] to the United States National Research Council (NRC) reporting on the models of ozone depletion following nuclear war in the book Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear-Weapons Detonations.

[63][80] However, independent of the computer models presented in the 1975 NRC works, a paper in 1973 in the journal Nature depicts the stratospheric ozone levels worldwide overlaid upon the number of nuclear detonations during the era of atmospheric testing.

Martin describes views about potential ozone loss and therefore increases in ultraviolet light leading to the widespread destruction of crops, as advocated by Jonathan Schell in The Fate of the Earth, as highly unlikely.

[87] The first published suggestion that cooling of the climate could be an effect of a nuclear war, appears to have been originally put forth by Poul Anderson and F. N. Waldrop in their story "Tomorrow's Children", in the March 1947 issue of the Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

[90] Similarly in 1985 it was noted by T. G. Parsons that the story "Torch" by C. Anvil, which also appeared in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, but in the April 1957 edition, contains the essence of the "Twilight at Noon"/"nuclear winter" hypothesis.

In the story, a nuclear warhead ignites an oil field, and the soot produced "screens out part of the sun's radiation", resulting in Arctic temperatures for much of the population of North America and the Soviet Union.

Crutzen and Birks' calculations suggested that smoke particulates injected into the atmosphere by fires in cities, forests and petroleum reserves could prevent up to 99 percent of sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface.

After the publication of "Twilight at Noon" in 1982,[100] the TTAPS team have said that they began the process of doing a 1-dimensional computational modeling study of the atmospheric consequences of nuclear war/soot in the stratosphere, though they would not publish a paper in Science magazine until late-December 1983.

calculations show large heating (up to 80 °C) at the top of the smoke layer at about 10 km (6.2 mi); this implies a substantial modification of the circulation there and the possibility of advection of the cloud into low latitudes and the southern hemisphere.

[122] Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World that his predictions obviously did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6 °C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared.

Mills (at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR), et al., published "Multi-decadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict" in the journal Earth's Future.

[131] The authors used computational models developed by NCAR to simulate the climatic effects of a soot cloud that they suggest would be a result of a regional nuclear war in which 100 "small" (15 Kt) weapons are detonated over cities.

The model had outputs, due to the interaction of the soot cloud: ...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.

[144][145] Another paper published that year, from the Tohoku University Earth science scholar Kunio Kaiho, compared the impact of nuclear winter scenarios on marine and terrestrial animal life with that of historical extinction events.

[151] A major criticism of the assumptions that continue to make these model results possible appeared in the 1987 book Nuclear War Survival Skills (NWSS), a civil defense manual by Cresson Kearny for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

[12] The TTAPS authors responded that, amongst other things, they did not believe target planners would intentionally blast cities into rubble, but instead argued fires would begin in relatively undamaged suburbs when nearby sites were hit, and partially conceded his point about non-urban wildfires.

In the Alan Robock et al. 2007 paper, they write that, "because of the use of the term 'nuclear autumn' by Thompson and Schneider [1986], even though the authors made clear that the climatic consequences would be large, in policy circles the theory of nuclear winter is considered by some to have been exaggerated and disproved [e.g., Martin, 1988].

[12] Russell Seitz, Associate of the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, argues that the winter models' assumptions give results which the researchers want to achieve and is a case of "worst-case analysis run amok".

[169] Following his investigation into the Siberian fire of 1915, Seitz criticized the "nuclear winter" model results for being based on successive worst-case events: The improbability of a string of 40 such coin tosses coming up heads approaches that of a pat royal flush.

[149]Seitz cited Carl Sagan, adding an emphasis: "In almost any realistic case involving nuclear exchanges between the superpowers, global environmental changes sufficient to cause an extinction event equal to or more severe than that of the close of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs and many other species died out are likely."

[177] In 1986 Seitz also contends that many others are reluctant to speak out for fear of being stigmatized as "closet Dr. Strangeloves"; physicist Freeman Dyson of Princeton for example stated "It's an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight.

"[152] MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel similarly wrote in a review in Nature that the winter concept is "notorious for its lack of scientific integrity" due to the unrealistic estimates selected for the quantity of fuel likely to burn, the imprecise global circulation models used.

[190] In 1985, Time magazine noted "the suspicions of some Western scientists that the nuclear winter hypothesis was promoted by Moscow to give anti-nuclear groups in the U.S. and Europe some fresh ammunition against America's arms buildup.

Former Soviet intelligence officer Sergei Tretyakov claimed that, under the directions of Yuri Andropov, the KGB invented the concept of "nuclear winter" in order to stop the deployment of NATO Pershing II missiles.

They are said to have distributed to peace groups, the environmental movement and the journal Ambio disinformation based on a faked "doomsday report" by the Soviet Academy of Sciences by Georgii Golitsyn, Nikita Moiseyev and Vladimir Alexandrov concerning the climatic effects of nuclear war.

[208] Although it is accepted that the Soviet Union exploited the nuclear winter hypothesis for propaganda purposes,[207] Tretyakov's inherent claim that the KGB funnelled disinformation to Ambio, the journal in which Paul Crutzen and John Birks published the 1982 paper "Twilight at Noon", has not been corroborated as of 2009[update].

These include natural-gas-digesting bacteria, the most well known being Methylococcus capsulatus, that is presently used as a feed in fish farming;[211] bark bread, a long-standing famine food using the edible inner bark of trees, and part of Scandinavian history during the Little Ice Age; increased fungiculture or mushrooms such as the honey fungi that grow directly on moist wood without sunlight;[212] and variations of wood or cellulosic biofuel production, which typically already creates edible sugars/xylitol from inedible cellulose, as an intermediate product before the final step of alcohol generation.