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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.'"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IUxK_0WLbg
It seems the point is that scientists were employed during wartime, and the science they discovered has peacetime uses.
Gently reply
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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
it can be used for good, it can be used for evil
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But do you know anything about your field? What would you think if someone said "I'm not sure the experts in smaddox's field really know anything about their field"? Saying, "experts aren't experts" can become very negative very quickly, and today there is an organized, committed effort to devalue all expertise. Once you do that, you can tell people anything at all because "I know as much as the so-called experts".
Yes, but chaotic systems are seldom made less so by adding greater instability. So may predictions about limits can not be accurate, but the prediction that "greater instability will make the chaotic system more unstable" is pretty straightforward. So while climate scientists can't predict the exact amount that temperature will change as greenhouse gas emissions increase, they can predict that continuing to increaase greenhouse gas emissions at the rate they have been increasing is not a good idea.
I, myself, believe that the expertise represented by the group of people known as "climate scientists" probably rates some consideration of their findings.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Probably nothing. Even the largest nukes were blown-up high above the ground, to avoid throwing-up a lot of dust, and they were less than 1/10th as powerful as the 1800s Krakatoa volcano
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
So the contribution of nuclear weapons research to atmospheric understanding is the justification for billions (trillions?) of dollars spent on nuclear weapons stockpiles and the entire Cold War fiasco? Let's trot out nuclear medicine as the next justification or, gasp, nuclear power. Humanity has been on the brink of extinction through nuclear war for fifty years. If those benificent aliens are going to save us they had better hurry...
I don't think anyone said it 'justified' it. Think of the old adage of making lemonade when life hands you lemons and maybe you'll actually get the point.
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.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Two comments -- just to be picky. One: Read Taleb's "The Black Swan". It is basically a systematic proof that in fact most experts aren't experts, with narrow exceptions in non-complex scientific fields such as physics. In complex systems, experts in fact are rarely experts, and almost invariably claim more knowledge than time and data prove that they have/had. It's quite understandable -- in the end you can understand why many experts aren't expert.
Two, chaotic systems are often made less so by increasing a driver. In fact, many of them have narrow parametric regions where they are chaotic, and if you move any parameter out of that region the system stabilizes.
As a single example, the most violent weather tends to occur when warm fronts and cold fronts are in close proximity, when/where high pressure systems and low pressure systems collide or interact. For any given heat input, temperature differentials on the surface of the Earth actually increase cooling efficiency because outgoing power is radiated proportional to the fourth power of the temperature but only the second power of the relevant surface length scale. The more uniform the temperature, the warmer the average temperature. It is therefore entirely possible for a warming climate to have more uniform temperatures and less violent weather. It is similarly quite possible for a globally cooling climate to be setting local temperature records (concentration of heat in a comparatively small area, from which it is relatively rapidly lost) while only cooling very slightly elsewhere, and to have more violent weather when cold fronts impinge on those heated areas.
I have code and descriptions if you want to numerically study a very simple actual chaotic system (or two, or three) so that you can see for yourself that you have to drive it at just the right frequencies, amplitudes, and dampings to observe a Feigenbaum tree (period doubling into chaos) and equally rapid emergence from the chaotic regime as you increase amplitude or frequency or damping. That doesn't make this a universal truth about chaotic systems, BTW, it just points out the danger of making sweeping statements about something you don't really know much about. One could go on -- is there a proof that adding more CO_2 creates greater instability? What, exactly, is greater instability (how do you define it)? I fully agree that adding more CO_2 (e.g. taking it to 600-700 ppm by 2100) is likely to raise global temperatures by some amount (the exact amount is a matter of considerable debate even among experts with a lower bound that is just over nothing).
It is by no means clear -- and to the best of my knowledge there is no statistically sound evidence to support the conclusion that -- the warming of the late twentieth century resulted in "greater instability" in the form of more violent weather, nor has any other kind of "instability" other than the motion of the mean global temperature itself been convincingly demonstrated. It has been drier, wetter, stormier, hotter, colder, both locally and globally, in the past without CO_2 forcing.
The really interesting thing is that many climate scientists are quite open about their lack of certain knowledge in climate science -- in a scientific forum where they might be called on it if they utter something really speculative as if they are sure. A George Mason survey of actual climate scientists found that roughly one in seven think that there will be little to no warming and no catastrophe by 2100. Over half think that there will be significant, but probably not catastrophic warming. In the end, I agree with you -- this honest lack of consensus among climate scientists probably rates some consideration.
For one thing, it makes the entire field more credible. When was the last time you were in a room full of scientists who agreed about everything, even important things for which there is far better experimental data and far more computable theory
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Here's another quote from Dyson; "my objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.".
In other words his argument is not based on facts, it's based on the way he percieves the behaviour of climate scientists ( coincidently that perception matches the propoganda put out by "for hire" anti-science lobbyists, not heretics). Don't get me wrong, I admire Dyson, however wrt climate science, he is the one clinging to dogma in a field of study "about which [he does] not know much".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.