The Automatic Earth: Will Water Set the World on Fire?

[GliderGuider]

Further to the recent discussion on the global food crisis, here is an article about the water situation in India, Pakistan and China. Between them they have 40% of the world's population, and all of them have nuclear weapons already.

Will Water Set the World on Fire?

It is one thing for large populations to lose their real and perceived financial wealth, but an entirely more disruptive thing for those populations to lose access to clean water and adequate food. There are two nations that provide the quintessential example of a breeding ground for sociopolitical instability brought on by industrialization and resulting environmental degradation - Pakistan and India. The former state was arbitrarily created after the end of British colonial rule of India in 1948, and its borders were drawn in a fashion that exacerbated long-standing tensions between Muslim and Hindu populations and divided control over critical resources. Both of these countries are labeled as suffering from "acute water scarcity" by the United Nations, and this trend will significantly contribute to chronic food shortages, as they both rely on irrigated agriculture for exports and also to feed their growing populations. <3>.

Much of India's water scarcity is directly or indirectly (population growth) caused by the industrialization of its economy. The discharge of untreated sewage from urban areas into rivers and streams has introduced many organic and inorganic toxins into surface waters. Heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides in the agricultural sector have significantly contributed to polluting almost 70% of the country's surface water and a growing number of groundwater reserves, rendering much of them unsuitable for human consumption, irrigation or industrial processes. There are also many other industrial factors making this horrible water situation even worse, including the destruction of forest, wetland and coastal ecosystems, as well as climate change (discussed more in Part IV). <4>.

Pakistan is in a very similar situation, as it relies on water resources for agriculture and industry, which have in turn degraded the quality of its surface and groundwater over many years. <5>. Of course, it also shares many of the same sources of water with India (Indus River and its tributaries), and this fact sets up the likelihood of greatly increased conflict (perhaps full-blown war) between the two states within the next few years. India is already in the process of constructing 33 new hydro-electric dams, some of which are located in the hotly-disputed Kashmir territory, and studies indicate that their cumulative storage of river water could divert significant amounts of water from Pakistan during its growing season. <6>.

Due to a rapidly growing economy and population, environmental degradation, increasing droughts and wealth inequality, almost a quarter of China's population (primarily in the North) did not have access to safe drinking water as of 2009 and nearly 15% currently suffer from water-related illnesses. <8>, <9>. China is also the largest exporter of agricultural crops in the world, and water scarcity is becoming an imminent threat to this industry. Many farmers in the Northern plains have already stopped producing wheat because of unreliable surface water and no access to groundwater. Chinese agriculture employs 300 million people in the country, and anywhere from 5-19% of the population already suffered from "hunger" according to the World Food Program's estimates in 2006.

As I've said before, it's not the growth of civilian nuclear power that increases the risk of nuclear war. That risk is increased most strongly by the desperation caused by declines - the decline in fresh water, the decline in food, the decline in the oil supply, and especially the decline in political stability that all those other declines bring on.

[pscot]

1. I've been wondering what effect a nuclear exchange

between India and China would have on climate change. It would probably reduce the burning of hydrocarbons. And it would raise huge clouds of dust that would shade the earth briefly. The effect on population seems obvious. Care to speculate? Carefully.

[thecrow]

2. Maybe we'd all die from the dust?

Problem over.

[GliderGuider]

3. That's like asking what old people taste like. The answer is...

"Depends..."

It depends on how many nukes get used, how big they are and whether the strikes are counter-force or city-busting, air-burst or ground-burst.

An exchange of a half-dozen 150 kt weapons on either side would probably make no real difference to the world situation regarding climate change. The effect on national population numbers would be negligible - perhaps 10 million immediate deaths plus another few tens of millions in the year afterwards. In the context of a total combined population of 2.5 billion that's barely noticeable. Oil consumption would probably fall in China. Economic output would be cut, but not by much. I think the immediate economic decline would be less than 20% for each country, recovering within 5 years to its current level.

A larger exchange would be proportionately worse. If it involved 100 half-megaton weapons on each side (all of India's arsenal and half of China's) we might see 200 million immediate casualties, and many more than that over the following year. We might see a population reduction of 20% of the combined total of 2.5 billion. Economic output would probably grind to a halt for the next couple of years in both countries, would recover only shakily after that, and would never fully regain its current level. FF consumption would fall to very low levels for the first couple of years and would recover to 25% to 50% of current levels in 5 years. It would probably never again rise over 50% of today's usage due to lack of industrial demand, lack of infrastructure and the global post-peak decline in supply. Regarding the effect on climate change, I have no clue. It doesn't seem to me like this should kick up enough soot and dirt to have a major long-term effect. I think it might be on the order of a dozen Icelandic volcanoes popping off at once. We'd some cooling for 5 or 10 years or so, then it would be back to BAU.

Basically, I think it would be much like the effects predicted in the study NatGeo wrote about in February:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110223-nuclear-war-winter-global-warming-environment-science-climate-change/

[pscot]

6. I've hesitated to talk about this

because I thought I'd be accused of advocating the death of millions of brown and yellow people. I'm going to have to read the comment thread to that article.

[kristopher]

5. Here is one quantification

...The number of deaths and carbon emissions, though, must be multiplied by a probability range of an exchange or explosion occurring to estimate the overall risk of nuclear energy proliferation. Although concern at the time of an explosion will be the deaths and not carbon emissions, policy makers today must weigh all the potential future risks of mortality and carbon emissions when comparing energy sources.

Here, we detail the link between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and estimate the emissions of nuclear explosions attributable to nuclear energy. The primary limitation to building a nuclear weapon is the availability of purified fission- able fuel (highly-enriched uranium or plutonium). Worldwide, nine countries have known nuclear weapons stockpiles (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea). In addition, Iran is pursuing uranium enrichment, and 32 other countries have sufficient fissionable material to produce weapons. Among the 42 countries with fissionable material, 22 have facilities as part of their civilian nuclear energy program, either to produce highly-enriched uranium or to separate plutonium, and facilities in 13 countries are active. Thus, the ability of states to produce nuclear weapons today follows directly from their ability to produce nuclear power. In fact, producing material for a weapon requires merely operating a civilian nuclear power plant together with a sophisticated plutonium separation facility. The Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has been signed by 190 countries. However, international treaties safeguard only about 1% of the world’s highly-enriched uranium and 35% of the world’s plutonium. Currently, about 30,000 nuclear warheads exist worldwide, with 95% in the US and Russia, but enough refined and unrefined material to produce another 100,000 weapons.

The explosion of fifty 15 kt nuclear devices (a total of 1.5 MT, or 0.1% of the yields proposed for a full-scale nuclear war) during a limited nuclear exchange in megacities could burn 63–313 Tg of fuel, adding 1–5 Tg of soot to the atmosphere, much of it to the stratosphere, and killing 2.6–16.7 million people. The soot emissions would cause significant short- and medium-term regional cooling. Despite short-term cooling, the CO2 emissions would cause long-term warming, as they do with biomass burning. The CO2 emissions from such a conflict are estimated here from the fuel burn rate and the carbon content of fuels. Materials have the following carbon contents: plastics, 38–92%; tires and other rubbers, 59–91%; synthetic fibers, 63–86%; woody biomass, 41–45%; charcoal, 71%; asphalt, 80%; steel, 0.05–2%. We approximate roughly the carbon content of all combustible material in a city as 40–60%. Applying these percentages to the fuel burn gives CO2 emissions during an exchange as 92–690 Tg CO2. The annual electricity production due to nuclear energy in 2005 was 2768 TWh yr-1. If one nuclear exchange as described above occurs over the next 30 yr, the net carbon emissions due to nuclear weapons prolif- eration caused by the expansion of nuclear energy worldwide would be 1.1–4.1 g CO2 kWh-1, where the energy generation assumed is the annual 2005 generation for nuclear power multiplied by the number of yr being considered. This emission rate depends on the probability of a nuclear exchange over a given period and the strengths of nuclear devices used. Here, we bound the probability of the event occurring over 30 yr as between 0 and 1 to give the range of possible emissions for one such event as 0 to 4.1 g CO2 kWh-1. This emission rate is placed in context in Table 3.

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security
Mark Z. Jacobson
The Royal Society of Chemistry 2009
Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148–173|157
Available at:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/ReviewSolGW09.pdf

The above contributes to this final scoring by Jacobson:
http://pubs.rsc.org/services/images/RSCpubs.ePlatform.Service.FreeContent.ImageService.svc/ImageService/image/GA?id=B809990C


Some of the sources:
68 O. B. Toon, R. P. Turco, A. Robock, C. Bardeen, L. Oman and G. L. Stenchikov,
Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism,
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 2007, 7, 1973–2002.


69 National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Monitoring nuclear weapons and nuclear-explosive materials,
National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 2005, 250 pp.

70 A. Robock, L. Oman, G. L. Stenchikov, O. B. Toon, C. Bardeen and R. P. Turco,
Climate consequences of regional nuclear conflicts,
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 2007, 7, 2003–2012.

71 United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA),
Methodology for estimating CO2 emissions from municipal solid waste combustion, 2003,
http://yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/ globalwarming.nsf/UniqueKeyLookup/LHOD5MJT9U/$File/2003- final-inventory_annex_i.pdf.

72 M. O. Andreae and P. Merlet,
Emission of trace gases and aerosols from biomass burning,
Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 2001, 15, 955– 966.

[pscot]

7. The carbon consumed in the course of a nuclear

war would would almost certainly be more than offset by the reduced emissions following such an exchange. At least that was the premise behind my question. But as GG suggested, the effect of one or two bombs wouldn't be all that disruptive, depending on their targets.

[kristopher]

8. It depends.

I provided some hard numbers that you can use to plug into any given scenario; it is up to you to define and defend your scenario.

In the paper the information is drawn from however, we aren't dealing with a current business as usual scenario. The author is examining the costs of transitioning our system to any of various low carbon options for power generation. Under that scenario we've already moved to a low carbon economy and we've done so with nuclear power. That means the decreased economic activity you posit would not result in decreased emissions.

It would, however, result in a world-wide energy emergency as the world - rightfully frightened by the instant incineration of millions - once more struggles with the burden of replacing a poorly selected energy system. In the meantime we would probably enjoy a collapse of democratic institutions as fear allows the right-wing demogogues to lock in police states around the world.

[CRH]

4. Tick, tick, tick, ... K&R n/t