Entangled Histories: Climate Science and Nuclear Weapons Research 92
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.'"
Re:greenhouse gasses (Score:4, Informative)
Not only the nuclear winter. At around the same time, astronomers started* to study the climate of the other planets of the Solar System, palenontologues started* to study the ancient climate changes that happened on Earth, and the people thinking about nuclear warfare started* to study man-made climate change.
* Yeah, I know, there were older studies. But not with as strong conclusions.
Re:Nuclear winter and the big bombs of the 50's (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:greenhouse gasses (Score:4, Informative)
got people started actually thinking about greenhouse gasses and climate
That started a little over a century ago, however for the first 50yrs the killer argument was that the H2O absorption spectrum overlapped that of CO2. This was not resolved until the 50's when better spectoraphs were built for reasearch into heat seeking missiles. The role of CO2 as the main driver of Earth's climate came about from trying to work out what caused the ice ages, even though the discovery of the Milankovich cycles eventually explained the timing of the ice ages, it could not explain the maginitude of the change without including CO2 feedbacks (such as melting permafrost).
All this was known to science in the late 50's when the NAS first warned the US government that emmisions were causing the climate to warm. Areosols are much more complex, some (sulphur compounds) have a cooling effect because they reflect sunlight, others such a soot absorb sunlight and dump it into the ocean as heat. This complexity is reflected in the error bars put around it's contribution to climate change. This complexity and uncertainty is also the origin of the canard "they predicted global cooling in the 70'", it's true that ~30% of the papers that did attempt a climate prediction in the 70's, predicted the wrong sign. However that was 40yrs ago and there is no scientifically valid support for such a view now, particularly since Reagan pushed for and won a (successful) international cap and trade system on sulphur emmissions to combat acid rain.