Entangled Histories: Climate Science and Nuclear Weapons Research

Harperdog writes "Paul N. Edwards has a great paper about the links between nuclear weapons testing and climate science. From the abstract: 'Tracing radioactive carbon as it cycles through the atmosphere, the oceans, and the biosphere has been crucial to understanding anthropogenic climate change. The earliest global climate models relied on numerical methods very similar to those developed by nuclear weapons designers for solving the fluid dynamics equations needed to analyze shock waves produced in nuclear explosions. The climatic consequences of nuclear war also represent a major historical intersection between climate science and nuclear affairs. Without the work done by nuclear weapons designers and testers, scientists would know much less than they now do about the atmosphere. In particular, this research has contributed enormously to knowledge about both carbon dioxide, which raises Earth's temperature, and aerosols, which lower it.'"

Comments

greenhouse gasses

[Black Parrot]

The effect of greenhouse gasses has been known for a couple of hundred years.

However, I think it was Sagan's group's concern about a possible Nuclear Winter that got people started actually thinking about greenhouse gasses and climate.

Re:Nuclear winter and the big bombs of the 50's

[rgbatduke]

Or, all together were probably less than Tambora: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora -- at 800 Mt, considerably less. Tambora holds many records: Largest explosion in recorded history, loudest sound in recorded history, largest single-event influence on the climate in recorded history (it basically eliminated "summer" for two years in a row in at least some temperate latitudes) and helped make the decade of 1810 the coldest decade on historical record (but not the coldest year or part of the coldest half-century or century).

But I don't think we can be certain of the effect of the nuclear tests. Many of the largest were low over water and kicked a lot of water into the stratosphere. We just don't have the data, and hence any conclusions are likely to be guesses.