Hi Ulrik, good to hear from you again!
We do not know what will happen if a nuclear weapon is again detonated offensively, other than that the world would be forever changed. This is a fear shared by pretty much everyone who deals with nuclear weaponry (including recent speeches at EAG London - such as John Gower, who we met before), and even without immediate retaliation the expected probability of a large scale future exchange would rise hugely in such a world. That's what I meant about the "all bets are off" line.
Certainly, many countries would seek to a...
I feel there are a few things here:
Quick responses Vasco!
The 3.2 Tg figure is their figure for the worst case scenario, based on 1 g/cm2 fuel loading. In their later paper they discuss this may be too high for a 1 g/cm2 scenario, as you say they mention that their soot conversion was set to be high for caution, and they could have it an order of magnitude or so lower, which Rutgers do.
However, this presents a bit of an issue for us in my calculations and factors. I'm comparing headline results there, and the 3.2 is the headline worst case result. It could be that they actually meant that th...
Hi Vasco
I'm not sure I follow this argument: almost all of the above were serious fires but not firestorms, meaning that they would not be expected to effectively inject soot. We did not see 100+ firestorms in WW2, and the firestorms we did see would not have been expected to generate a strong enough signal to clearly distinguish it from background climate noise. That section was simply discussing firestorms, and that they seem to present a channel to stratospheric soot?
Later on in the article I do discuss this, with both Rutgers and Lawrence Livermore highlighting that firestorms would inject a LOT more soot into the stratosphere as a percentage of total emitted.
Hi Daniel,
Sorry, I only just saw your comment!
I think Lysenko and Lysenkoism is completely fascinating, but kind of proves the quote above.
Lysenko was a biologist of sorts whose falsified, confused and just invented results on plants supported Stalinist and Marxist thinking on how people are not innate but created by environments, and then got brought into GOSPLAN to bring these insights to the economy. This is not because there was a lack of brilliant economists initially, just that those Stalin had were either cringing on his party lines, hidden in...
Hi Ed!
One thing that falls potentially into all three categories of difficulty is food stocks/reserves, which is an issue with high relevance to exposure to shocks and food insecurity, but really hard to track.
It's a tricky issue, but could really help many researchers inside and outside of EA to improve!
A few issues we have found which would be very useful to see developed are:
The USDA PSD and FAOSTAT both have estimates for crop year end, but as crop years do not line up effective stocks are higher than this figure. These results are based on a few...
There are EA groups working on food security as a system, such as ALLFED, however while some of the work looks at today's systems, much is concerned about future crop losses in the 5-10% range, up to nuclear winter and wars. It may be something to consider in the context of his tweet and your article, however it is more abstract than food aid today, more about designing ethical and resiliant ways to manufacture foods and the social systems needed to feed everyone in shocks - where the food equivalent of a bank run commonly occurs.
Hi Ulrik,
I would agree with you there in large part, but I don't think that should necessarily reduce our estimate of the impact away from what I estimated above.
For example, the Los Alamos team did far more detailed fire modelling vs Rutgers, but the end result is a model that seems to be unable to replicate real fire conditions in situations like Hiroshima, Dresden and Hamberg -> more detailed modeling isn't in itself a guarantee of accuracy.
However, the models we have are basing their estimates at least in part on empirical observations, which ... (read more)