Nuclear proliferation is an Environmental problem

[bananas]

As Dr. Jeff Masters, co-founder and Director of Meteorology at "Weather Underground",
pointed out in his blog last year:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1208

Nuclear winter revisited

Posted by: JeffMasters, 2:00 PM GMT on April 10, 2009

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a series of scientific papers published by Soviet scientists and Western scientists (including "rock star" scientists Dr. Carl Sagan, host of the PBS "Cosmos" TV series, and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen) laid out the dire consequences on global climate of a major nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The nuclear explosions would send massive clouds of dust high into the stratosphere, blocking so much sunlight that a nuclear winter would result. Global temperatures would plunge 20°C to 40°C for several months, and remain 2-6°C lower for 1-3 years. Up to 70% of the Earth's protective stratospheric ozone layer would be destroyed, allowing huge doses of ultraviolet light to reach the surface. This UV light would kill much of the marine life that forms the basis of the food chain, resulting in the collapse many fisheries and the starvation of the people and animals that depend it. The UV light would also blind huge numbers of animals, who would then wander sightlessly and starve. The cold and dust would create widespread crop failures and global famine, killing billions of people who did not die in the nuclear explosions. The "nuclear winter" papers were widely credited with helping lead to the nuclear arms reduction treaties of the 1990s, as it was clear that we risked catastrophic global climate change in the event of a full-scale nuclear war.

Even a limited nuclear exchange can cause a climate disaster
Well, it turns out that this portrayal of nuclear winter was overly optimistic, according to a series of papers published over the past few years by Brian Toon of the University of Colorado, Alan Robock of Rutgers University, and Rich Turco of UCLA. Their most recent paper, a December 2008 study titled, "Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War", concludes that "1980s predictions of nuclear winter effects were, if anything, underestimates". Furthermore, they assert that even a limited nuclear war poses a significant threat to Earth's climate. The scientists used a sophisticated atmospheric/oceanic climate model that had a good track record simulating the cooling effects of past major volcanic eruptions, such as the Philippines' Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. The scientists injected five terragrams (Tg) of soot particles into the model atmosphere over Pakistan in May of 2006. This amount of smoke, they argued, would be the likely result of the cities burned up by a limited nuclear war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs in the region. India and Pakistan are thought to have 109 to 172 nuclear weapons of unknown yield.

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This magnitude of this cooling would bring about the coldest temperatures observed on the globe in over 1000 years (Figure 1). The growing season would shorten by 10-30 days over much of the globe, resulting in widespread crop failures. The effects would be similar to what happened after the greatest volcanic eruption in historic times, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. This cooling from this eruption triggered the infamous Year Without a Summer in 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere, when killing frosts disrupted agriculture every month of the summer in New England, creating terrible hardship. Exceptionally cold and wet weather in Europe triggered widespread harvest failures, resulting in famine and economic collapse. However, the cooling effect of this eruption only lasted about a year. Cooling from a limited nuclear exchange would create two to three consecutive "Years Without a Summer", and over a decade of significantly reduced crop yields. The authors found that the smoke in the stratosphere cause a 20% reduction in Earth's protective ozone layer, with losses of 25-45% over the mid-latitudes where the majority of Earth's population lives, and 50-70% ozone loss at northern high latitude regions such as Scandinavia, Alaska, and northern Canada. A massive increase in ultraviolet radiation at the surface would result, capable of causing widespread and severe damage to plants and animals. Thus, even a limited nuclear exchange could trigger severe global climate change capable of causing economic chaos and widespread starvation.

Climate change and the Doomsday Clock
It is sobering to realize that the nuclear weapons used in the study represented only 0.3% of the world's total nuclear arsenal of 26,000 warheads. Fortunately, significant progress was made in the 1990s and 2000s to reduce the threat of nuclear war. If the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) is fully implemented by the U.S. and Russia as planned, by 2012 the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons will be just 6% of the 70,000 warheads that existed at the peak of the cold war in 1986. However, the threat of a more limited regional nuclear war has increased in recent decades, since more countries have been joining the nuclear club--an average of one country every five years. The 2007 move by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the hands of their Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight--the figurative end of civilization--helped call attention to this increased threat. In addition, they also mentioned climate change for the first time as part of the rationale for moving the clock closer to midnight. I believe that climate change does not pose an immediate threat to civilization--at least for the next 20 years or so--and there is still time to significantly reduce the threat of "doomsday" levels of climate change to civilization if strong action is taken in the next 20 years to cut carbon emissions. Thus, setting the hands of the clock closer to midnight because of climate change is probably premature. However, climate change triggered by a limited nuclear war is a whole different situation. The twin disasters of a limited nuclear war, coupled with the devastating global climate change it could wreak, should remind us that there is no such thing as a small scale nuclear war. Even a limited nuclear war is a huge threat to Earth's climate. Thus, there is no cause more important to work for than peace, so, this Easter weekend, I plan on making myself--and thus the world--more peaceful.

Jeff Masters

For those unfamiliar with Jeff Masters

He is the co-founder and Director of Meteorology at "Weather Underground"

About Jeff Masters:

http://www.wunderground.com/about/jmasters.asp

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In 1986, he took a position teaching weather forecasting to undergraduates at SUNY Brockport in New York, then later that year moved to Miami to join the Hurricane Hunters as a flight meteorologist for NOAA's Aircraft Operations Center. You can see him on the 1988 PBS documentary NOVA show titled "Hurricane!", flying into Hurricane Gilbert, the strongest hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic at that time. He co-authored several technical papers on wind measurement from aircraft during his four years flying with the Hurricane Hunters.

After nearly getting killed flying into Hurricane Hugo, Jeff left the Hurricane Hunters in 1990 to pursue a Ph.D. degree in air pollution meteorology from the University of Michigan. His 1997 Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Vertical Transport of Carbon Monoxide by Wintertime Mid-latitude Cyclones." The University of Michigan College of Engineering awarded him their 2006 Merit Award as the Alumnus of the year from their Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences Department, and Jeff remains active with the Department, offering guest lectures on hurricanes, and managing a Weather Underground undergraduate scholarship program.

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About Weather Underground:

http://www.wunderground.com/about/background.asp

The First Internet Weather Service!

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In 1991, while working under the direction of Perry Samson at the University of Michigan, PhD candidate Jeff Masters wrote a menu-based telnet interface which displayed real-time weather information around the world. By 1992, the two servers his system used were rattling off their desks as "um-weather" became the most popular service on the Internet.

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The web site has never stood still and many new features have been added in recent years. Of particular note, Weather Underground has developed the world's largest network of personal weather stations (almost 10,000 stations in the US and over 3,000 across the rest of the world) that provides our site's users with the most localized weather conditions available. Embracing the community aspect of the web, we have developed WunderPhotos, a section where our members upload and share photographs of weather related content; our popular Blogs section allows members to post weather-related blogs in addition to Jeff Masters' widely-read WunderBlog.

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wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_%28weather_service%29

Weather Underground is a commercial weather service that provides real-time weather information via the Internet. Weather Underground provides weather reports for most major cities across the world on its Web site, as well as local weather reports for newspapers and Web sites. Most of its United States information comes from the National Weather Service (NWS), as information from that agency is within the public domain by federal law. The Web site is available in many languages, and an ad-free version of the site with additional features is available for an annual fee.

History

Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was founded in 1995 as an offshoot of the University of Michigan's Internet weather database. The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1960s militant radical leftist student group the Weather Underground, which also originated at the University of Michigan.

Jeff Masters, a PhD candidate in meteorology at the University of Michigan, working under the direction of Professor Perry Samson, wrote a menu-based telnet interface in 1991 that displayed real-time weather information around the world. By 1992, they claim that the two servers they used were the most popular service on the Internet. In 1993 they initiated a project to bring Internet weather into K-12 classrooms.

In 1995 the Weather Underground, Inc. evolved as a commercial entity separate from the university.<1> It has grown to provide weather for print sources, in addition to its online presence. In 2005 the Weather Underground became the weather provider for the Associated Press; WU also provides weather reports for some newspapers (including the San Francisco Chronicle) and the Google search engine.

In October 2008, Jeff Masters reported that the site was #2 in Internet Weather for 2008. <2>

Blog

Blogs are one of the main features in Weather Underground, allowing users of the site to create blogs about weather, everyday life and anything else. Dr. Jeff Masters started the first blog on April 14, 2005,<3> and he now posts blog entries nearly every day.

Products

The Weather Underground also provides an outlet for members having personal weather stations (PWS) to provide weather observation detail to the Internet community.<4> They distribute Internet radio feeds of NOAA Weather Radio stations from across the country, as provided by users. The Associated Press uses Weather Underground to provide national weather summaries.<5>

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