12 ms·
If you go back a bit farther, I think you'll find the work on nuclear winter actually came out of work done at Cornell to try to model the result of a large obj
by yodon 4y ago
If you go back a bit farther, I think you'll find the work on nuclear winter actually came out of work done at Cornell to try to model the result of a large object impacting the earth 65 million years ago to kill off the dinosaurs. Amazingly enough, one of the hardest parts of the dinosaur extinction work was figuring out how a localized impact like that could kill enough things to cause an extinction, and that part came from the atmospheric modelers. After doing that modeling work, they realized the parallels with a nuclear conflict and produced the nuclear winter projections.
- ncmncm 4y agoThen it turned out everything was cooked, not frozen.
- robonerd 4y agoI think there's little doubt that tons of soot and ash in the upper atmosphere can cause periods of global cooling. The problem with the nuclear winter hypothesis is in the link between nuclear war and tons of soot in the stratosphere. These nuclear winter models make a lot of assumptions about the likelihood of a modern cities turning into firestorms and the amount of soot they would generate, the amount of soot lifted into the stratosphere by the fireball, and the amount of soot that stays there instead of precipitating out.