Just in case people were thinking a few nuclear bombs don’t matter:
“…even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.”
Despite sounding crazily disconnected from reality, Robinson Meyer is slightly less crazy than the cult people he’s trying to reach. Many “artists” and “climate concerned progressives” have leapt on the latest hot-fashion-in-activism (who could have seen that coming?) and they’re calling for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine. It’s like they believe that putting up a sign saying “Warplane Free” will stop the warplanes.
Meyer has figured out that a No Fly Zone might lead to World War III, and he’s trying warn the raptured throngs, that things might not work out so well. Naturally, he’s speaking in lingua-leftie. But how, exactly do you scare someone in a climate cult? Not with nuclear war, but with something catastro-double-awful-bad for the climate.
On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem
By Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic
Social media pundits are having a field day:
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On the richter scale of climate porn, what’s the worst thing Meyer can imagine:
“And it would be worse for the climate than any energy policy that Donald Trump ever proposed.”
He’s gently telling them their calls for a No Fly Zone might be more damaging for the climate than the demon-man himself. I don’t think they’ll get the message though. The whole package just won’t parse. He goes on to tell them nuclear war “carbon” doesn’t warm the world, it cools it, and cooling is awful.
After 26 UN COP meetings aimed at cooling the world by lowering carbon, this story will just bounce right off:
A 2007 study estimated that if 100 small nuclear weapons were detonated, a number equal to only 0.03 percent of the planet’s total arsenal, the number of “direct fatalities due to fire and smoke would be comparable to those worldwide in World War II.” Towering clouds would carry more than five megatons of soot and ash from these fires high into the atmosphere.
All this carbon would transform the climate, shielding it from the sun’s heat. Within months, the planet’s average temperature would fall by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit; some amount of this cooling would persist for more than a decade. But far from reversing climate change, this cooling would be destabilizing. It would reduce global precipitation by about 10 percent, inducing global drought conditions. In parts of North America and Europe, the growing season would shorten by 10 to 20 days.
Ponder how far these people are from reality, even at the sensible end of the spectrum. He goes on to say that ocean acidification would get worse, the ozone layer would be destroyed, the world will be fried by extra UV radiation, and people will get skin cancer.
h/t Ed Driscoll, Instapundit