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Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect that is hypothesized[1][2] to occur after widespread firestorms following a large-scale nuclear war.[3] The hypothesis is based on the fact that such fires can inject soot into the stratosphere, where it can block some direct sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth. It is speculated that the resulting cooling would lead to widespread crop failure and famine.[4][5] When developing computer models of nuclear-winter scenarios, researchers use the conventional bombing of Hamburg, and the Hiroshima firestorm in World War II as example cases where soot might have been injected into the stratosphere,[6] alongside modern observations of natural, large-area wildfire-firestorms.[3][7][8]
- ^ Goure 1985.
- ^ Cotton, William R.; Pielke, Roger A. Sr. (February 1, 2007). Human Impacts on Weather and Climate. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-46180-1.
- ^ a b Toon, Owen B.; Robock, Alan; Turco, Richard P. (December 2008). "Environmental consequences of nuclear war" (PDF). Physics Today. 61 (12): 37–42. Bibcode:2008PhT....61l..37T. doi:10.1063/1.3047679. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-03-12.
environmental changes triggered by smoke from firestorms.
- ^ Diep, Francie (July 19, 2014). "Computer Models Show What Exactly Would Happen To Earth After A Nuclear War". Popular Science. Archived from the original on 2017-11-14. Retrieved 2018-02-04.
- ^ Toon, Owen B.; Bardeen, Charles G.; Robock, Alan; Xia, Lili; Kristensen, Hans; McKinzie, Matthew; Peterson, R. J.; Harrison, Cheryl S.; Lovenduski, Nicole S.; Turco, Richard P. (October 1, 2019). "Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe". Science Advances. 5 (10): eaay5478. Bibcode:2019SciA....5.5478T. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aay5478. ISSN 2375-2548. PMC 6774726. PMID 31616796.
- ^ Toon et al. 2007.
- ^ Fromm, M.; Stocks, B.; Servranckx, R.; Lindsey, D. (2006). "Smoke in the Stratosphere: What Wildfires have Taught Us About Nuclear Winter". Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union. 87 (52 Fall Meet. Suppl). Abstract U14A–04. Bibcode:2006AGUFM.U14A..04F. Archived from the original on 2008-01-24.
- ^ Toon et al. 2007. "the injection height of the smoke is controlled by the energy release from the burning fuel not from the nuclear explosion"., "...smoke plumes deep within the stratosphere over Florida that had originated a few days earlier in Canadian fires, implying that the smoke particles had not been significantly depleted during injection into the stratosphere (or subsequent transport over thousands of kilometers in the stratosphere)."