Nuclear winter was and is debatable Russell Seitz Nature
Andrew Lockley
Nuclear winter was and is debatable
Russell Seitz
Nature
475,
37
(07 July 2011)
doi:10.1038/475037b
Published online
06 July 2011
Alan Robock's contention that there has been no real scientific debate about the 'nuclear winter' concept is itself debatable (Nature 473,275–276; 2011).
This potential climate disaster, popularized in Science in 1983, rested on the output of a one-dimensional model that was later shown to overestimate the smoke a nuclear holocaust might engender. More refined estimates, combined with advanced three-dimensional models (see http://go.nature.com/kss8te), have dramatically reduced the extent and severity of the projected cooling.
Despite this, Carl Sagan, who co-authored the 1983 Science paper, went so far as to posit “the extinction of Homo sapiens” (C. Sagan Foreign Affairs 63, 75–77;1984). Some regarded this apocalyptic prediction as an exercise in mythology. George Rathjens of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology protested: “Nuclear winter is the worst example of the misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory,” (see http://go.nature.com/yujz84) and climatologist Kerry Emanuel observed that the subject had “become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity” (Nature 319, 259; 1986).
Robock's single-digit fall in temperature is at odds with the subzero (about −25 °C) continental cooling originally projected for a wide spectrum of nuclear wars. Whereas Sagan predicted darkness at noon from a US–Soviet nuclear conflict, Robock projects global sunlight that is several orders of magnitude brighter for a Pakistan–India conflict — literally the difference between night and day. Since 1983, the projected worst-case cooling has fallen from a Siberian deep freeze spanning 11,000 degree-days Celsius (a measure of the severity of winters) to numbers so unseasonably small as to call the very term 'nuclear winter' into question.
Correspondence to:
Russell Seitz
