[HN Gopher] Global food insecurity due to climate disruption fro...
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       Global food insecurity due to climate disruption from nuclear war
       soot injection
        
       Author : Luc
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2022-08-15 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | makerofspoons wrote:
       | Owen B. Toon is famously one of the T's in the groundbreaking
       | TTAPS paper. It's credited with bringing the idea of nuclear
       | winter into the public consciousness, alongside co-author Carl
       | Sagan's article in Parade which made the topic more accessible.
        
       | photochemsyn wrote:
       | Fires have to generate a massive updraft to punch into the
       | stratosphere, and this is well-known in major volcanic eruptions
       | like Pinatubo, but it looks like recent evidence shows this is
       | entirely plausible:
       | 
       | > "Recent catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017 and
       | Australia in 2019 and 2020 produced 0.3-1 Tg of smoke (0.006-0.02
       | Tg soot), which was subsequently heated by sunlight and lofted
       | high in the stratosphere. The smoke was transported around the
       | world and lasted for many months. This adds confidence to our
       | simulations that predict the same process would occur after
       | nuclear war."
       | 
       | Also, if the world's major nuclear reactors, spent fuel rods
       | pods, and dry cask waste storage were targeted with nuclear
       | weapons, there'd be massive radioactive fallout on top of
       | everything else.
        
       | dieselgate wrote:
       | oh jeez guess that's one reason out of many why they call it
       | mutually assured destruction
        
       | Loughla wrote:
       | I don't understand, honestly, why this is a new study. I thought
       | the fallout (hah!) from a nuclear war was known to be
       | catastrophic to the planet. That's why everyone is so hesitant to
       | use them (on top of MAD).
       | 
       | What about this study is new? Is it the scientific detailing and
       | modeling?
        
         | sudosysgen wrote:
         | There has recently been people disputing the scale or
         | probability of nuclear winter, so this is relevant and useful.
        
         | mjreacher wrote:
         | There's mixed scientific consensus on the full impact of
         | nuclear winter. This paper shows evidence that it would be
         | really bad (in the sense of several billion dead).
        
           | MichaelCollins wrote:
           | As I understand it, the contention with the nuclear winter
           | hypothesis is not whether a ton of soot in the atmosphere
           | would wreck the climate, but rather whether a nuclear war
           | would actually loft that amount of soot into the
           | stratosphere.
        
       | comrad wrote:
       | Next they find out that capitalism exploits the masses and the
       | planet and only benefit the few.
        
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       (page generated 2022-08-15 23:01 UTC)