Nuclear Winter

What is your opinion about nuclear winter right now?
What do you think it would happen if all the bombs were detonated?
You can be imprecise, just tell what's in your head, and if you are afraid of a war or not.
If you have scientific evidence, it's even better.

Good luck and thanks!

@celino said
What is your opinion about nuclear winter right now?
What do you think it would happen if all the bombs were detonated?
You can be imprecise, just tell what's in your head, and if you are afraid of a war or not.
If you have scientific evidence, it's even better.

Good luck and thanks!

If you explode ALL nuclear devices in short time you don't have to think about anything again lest of all climate.

The point is of course the transport of dust into the atmosphere as happened during human history and have been shown several times to reflect the solar radiation and thus decreases the temperature.

I can point you to a beginners text on this if need be. A new scientific discussion would require some orginal and differing thought.

@Ponderable

I wouldn't like to be the one to differ, but take for example Carl Sagan's prediction on Kuwait oil that was burnt by Saddam Hussein. Carl said that it would devastate the crops, that the black smoke would self-lift to the stratosphere. It didn't.

I've heard a lot about nuclear explosions making the dust to go above the rain level on the atmosphere, and that it could stay there for years, maybe decades, but would the dust go so high? Would it devastate the crops locally or globally, or only in the northern hemisphere?

@celino said
@Ponderable

I wouldn't like to be the one to differ, but take for example Carl Sagan's prediction on Kuwait oil that was burnt by Saddam Hussein. Carl said that it would devastate the crops, that the black smoke would self-lift to the stratosphere. It didn't.

I've heard a lot about nuclear explosions making the dust to go above the rain level on the atmosphere, and that ...[text shortened]... st go so high? Would it devastate the crops locally or globally, or only in the northern hemisphere?

I don't know about Sagan's prediction. But so much to that: Because one scientist errs in a prediction doesn't mean that science is flawed.

Vulcanism can catapult dust into the upper atmosphere. You might want to read up on 1816, known as "year without summer" or "eighteen hundred and froze to death". This was an effect of the eruption of the vulcan Tambora. This also answers the question about the hemisphere, the dust will distribute over the whole globe.

@Ponderable

Thank you for your answer.

I've read a little more about vulcanism, and the smoke will lift to the stratosphere, above the rain level, I believe on it, maybe because of the strong explosion that makes the smoke to go so high.

I also understand now that the mushroom created by the nuclear explosion can be higher than the rain level.
What I don't understand is why burning forests and oil refineries would make the smoke go up so high, only if they get directly targeted by nuclear bombs.

I don't understand why nuclear winter is a so destructive possibility, and no one wants to talk about it.
Why do you feel so scared?

@Celino
Not scared, just not something over which we have control, and cancer's more likely. Or a car accident.

@Kewpie

We can control

@celino said
I don't understand why nuclear winter is a so destructive possibility, and no one wants to talk about it.
Why do you feel so scared?

Depending on your age, youmaybe can remember the times of the Cold war, when People lived under the constant fear of a thermonuclear war, which would erase humankind, the effect of the nuclear winter is quite secondary to being roasted in a thermonuclear Explosion or killed by the radioactive Fallout. Movies like "The day after", "Wargames", "Dr. Strangelove", "When the Wind Blows",...come to mind.

@Celino
There are something like 20,000 nukes extant and if they all went off on target the world population would go down about 90% the first day. There would not be that many folks surviving to worry about nuclear winter.
When chernobyl went off, just that one reactor explosion spread nuclear poison thousands of miles.and that without widespread damage, pretty much confined to the reactor, now melted down and such but it is still nothing like say a one megaton blast.
The survivors would be in a fight for the survival of the entire human race.
I imagine there would be pockets of less ruin that would allow folks to survive maybe in the Andes mountains or some hidden valleys but it would not be a sure bet the folks surviving the 20,000 blasts would just all die later and the latest mass extinction event would set the stage for the next evolution of life on Earth.
The extinctions would extend to the oceans as well as land. Air breathing mammals would probably be the first to die on the oceans since they are forced to surface and breath contaminated air, leading to a slow painful death. Dolphins, whales and the like would be the first to go. Sealions and the like, penquins, all gone.

It would be a total reset of life on Earth just like the half dozen other mass extinctions.

It would take a million years for life on Earth to get back to anything like normal.

Most mammals gone, most intelligent sea life gone, maybe humans gone, if not gone, then reduced to stone age levels, science, gone, math, gone, religion, gone.
They would be relearning how to chip off rocks for tools and weapons.

@sonhouse said
religion, gone.

religion gone? I am afraid even that would be optimistic because with science and knowledge, which is the enemy of religion, all gone, religion and ignorance, with the likely oppression it may bring, in any future generations from survivors would probably come back in revengeance.

@humy
That would depend on how many survived. If there were say a thousand folks in central Africa as the only survivors and they were say Bantu with their own ideas and no Islam, no christians, no Hindi's, no Rasta's and the like, these organized religions would die out.
As civilization rebuilds, there would of course develop new religions but maybe not as bad as what we have now, which is that organized religions of the world are the scourge of mankind.
Good riddance.

@sonhouse said
@humy
That would depend on how many survived. If there were say a thousand folks in central Africa as the only survivors and they were say Bantu with their own ideas and no Islam, no christians, no Hindi's, no Rasta's and the like, these organized religions would die out.
As civilization rebuilds, there would of course develop new religions but maybe not as bad as what we have now, which is that organized religions of the world are the scourge of mankind.
Good riddance.

The new religions would probably focus on the global destruction created by ourselves fostered by science.

@joe-shmo said
The new religions would probably focus on the global destruction created by ourselves fostered by science.

but it wouldn't be fostered by science but rather fostered by the likes of Trump that may be both stupid and insane enough to press the red botton.
If everyone was rational and good then science would only be used for good, like curing deadly diseases etc. Science has generally made our lives longer and less brutal despite sometimes being misused.
Science is just knowledge gained from formal scientific method.
It is only people, not science, that can misuse the technology from science.
If the new religions blamed science and not the misuse of science then they would be fostering ignorance and a new dark age. They would be blaming and banning knowledge logic scientific method and rational thought, not the misuse of it.

@humy said
but it wouldn't be fostered by science but rather fostered by the likes of Trump.
Science is just knowledge gained from formal scientific method.
It is only people, not science, that can misuse the technology from science.
If the new religions blamed science and not the misuse of science then they would be fostering ignorance and a new dark age. They would be blaming and banning knowledge logic scientific method and rational thought, not the misuse of it.

Read "A canticle for Leibowitz" for one way to see that future