16 Facts About Nuclear winter

Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect that is hypothesized to occur after widespread firestorms following a large-scale nuclear war.

The only phenomenon that is modeled by computer in the nuclear winter papers is the climate forcing agent of firestorm-soot, a product which can be ignited and formed by a myriad of means.

Nuclear winter scenario assumes that 100 or more city firestorms are ignited by nuclear explosions, and that the firestorms lift large amounts of sooty smoke into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere by the movement offered by the pyrocumulonimbus clouds that form during a firestorm.

Nuclear winter detonations produce large amounts of nitrogen oxides by breaking down the air around them.

The use of these influential Martian dust storm models in nuclear winter research began in 1971, when the Soviet spacecraft Mars 2 arrived at the red planet and observed a global dust cloud.

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Nuclear winter argued that he believed the net effects would be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the "Year Without a Summer".

Idea of oil well and oil reserve smoke pluming into the stratosphere serving as a main contributor to the soot of a nuclear winter was a central idea of the early climatology papers on the hypothesis; they were considered more of a possible contributor than smoke from cities, as the smoke from oil has a higher ratio of black soot, thus absorbing more sunlight.

In 2007, a nuclear winter study noted that modern computer models have been applied to the Kuwait oil fires, finding that individual smoke plumes are not able to loft smoke into the stratosphere, but that smoke from fires covering a large area like some forest fires can lift smoke into the stratosphere, and recent evidence suggests that this occurs far more often than previously thought.

Study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in July 2007, titled "Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences", used current climate models to look at the consequences of a global nuclear war involving most or all of the world's current nuclear arsenals .

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

The proponents believed it was simply necessary to show only the possibility of climatic catastrophe, often a worst-case scenario, while opponents insisted that to be taken seriously, nuclear winter should be shown as likely under "reasonable" scenarios.

Nuclear winter's found that the published estimates of these variables varied so widely that depending on which estimates were chosen the climate effect could be negligible, minor or massive.

Nuclear winter reveals that, in his view, "nuclear winter was largely politically motivated from the beginning".

The un-redacted portion of the document ends with the suggestion that substantial increases in Soviet Civil defense food stockpiles might be an early indicator that Nuclear Winter was beginning to influence Soviet upper echelon thinking.

The problem has been attacked at both ends; some solutions focus on preventing the growth of fires and therefore limiting the amount of smoke that reaches the stratosphere in the first place, and others focus on food production with reduced sunlight, with the assumption that the very worst-case analysis results of the nuclear winter models prove accurate and no other mitigation strategies are fielded.

Global firestorm Nuclear winter has been questioned in more recent years by Claire Belcher, Tamara Goldin and Melosh, who initially supported the hypothesis, with this re-evaluation being dubbed the "Cretaceous-Palaeogene firestorm debate" by Belcher.