All of bengold's Comments + Replies

I think the issue is not the energy source/density, the issue is amount of particles in the atmosphere, Sagan/TTAPS is on record saying that the amount of particles is the same magnitude in the Kuwait fires as in their model, in addition at least in theirs simulations the burning of oil/gas deposits within cities like in gas stations cars etc... is what produced the most amount of the particles and particles in the correct mass that would rise and produce the most damage by "self lofting" into the upper layers - hence his predictions.

Also the t... (read more)

-13
TedSeay
2y

Resubmitting since it seems the comment was lost.

The whole "Nuclear Winter" field of modeling was born in sin and hence must be suspect.

As far as I kno​​w the original models and simulations and the whole concept was promoted by Carl Sagan et el. ( TTAPS team i.e.  Richard P. Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack and Carl Sagan) from what seems to be almost purely political reasons and a transparent PR campaign i.e. "was with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control" - which might not be a bad political... (read more)

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TedSeay
2y
7
Kit
5y
On the specific questions you're asking about whether empirical data from the Kuwaiti oil field destruction is taken into account: it seems that the answer to each is simply 'yes'. The post says that the data used is adapted from Toon et al. (2007), which projects how much smoke would reach the stratosphere specifically. The paper explicitly considers that event and what the model would predict about them: The details of the paper could be wrong – I'm a complete amateur and would be interested to hear the views of people who've looked into it, especially given substantial reliance on this particular paper in the post – but it seems to have already considered the things you raise. However, this still got me thinking. Why look at smoke from burning oil fields, with their much lower yields, when one could look at smoke from Hiroshima or Nagasaki? It's a grim topic, but more relevant for projecting the effects of other nuclear detonations. After a surprisingly long search, I found this paper, which attempts to measure the height of the 'mushroom cloud' over Hiroshima, which isn't what we're looking for. Fortunately for me, they seem to think that Photo '(a) Around Kurahashi Island' is another photo of the 'mushroom cloud', but in fact it appears* to be the cloud produced by the resulting fires. This explains their surprising result: 16km (range 14.54-16.88km) is well into the stratosphere across Russia and most of the US, so it seems that history is compatible with theories which say that weapons on the scale of 'Little Boy' (13–18kt) are likely to cause substantial smoke in the stratosphere. [*update 17-Sep-2021: various people familiar with nuclear weapons agree that photo (a) is of the smoke from the firestorm, not the 'mushroom cloud'.]
1
Kit
5y
On your general point about paying attention to political biases, I agree that's worthwhile. A quibble related to that which might matter to you: the Wikipedia article you're quoting seems to attribute the incorrect predictions to TTAPS but I could only trace them to Sagan specifically. I could be missing something due to dead/inaccessible links.