This is the type of piece you get when a doomsday cult is in charge: their first thought is “how does this affect the climate?” With a side of Trump Derangement Syndrome
A nuclear war would kill tens of millions of people—and would also prove disastrous for climate change, writes @robinsonmeyer.https://t.co/dd8HAgGclc
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) March 12, 2022
From the screed
When we talk about what causes climate change, we usually talk about oil and gas, coal and cars, and—just generally—energy policy. There’s a good reason for this. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which enters the atmosphere, warms the climate, and … you know the drill. The more fossil fuels you burn, the worse climate change gets. That’s why, a couple of years ago, I spent a lot of time covering the Trump administration’s attempt to weaken the country’s fuel-economy standards. It was an awful policy, one that would have led to more oil consumption for decades to come. If pressed, I would have said that it had a single-digit-percentage chance of creating an uninhabitable climate system.
Don’t you just love how “reporters” make personal judgements, rather than just writing the news?
Since Russia invaded Ukraine two weeks ago, that threat has become a lot more real: Many Americans, including artists, climate-concerned progressives, and even a few lawmakers, have come out in support of a “no-fly zone.” But despite its euphemistic name, a no-fly zone means that NATO and the United States issue a credible threat that they will shoot down any enemy plane in Ukrainian territory. This would require U.S. bombing runs into Russian territory to eliminate air defenses, bringing the U.S. and Russia into open war, and it would have a reasonable chance of prompting a nuclear exchange. And it would be worse for the climate than any energy policy that Donald Trump ever proposed.
Oh, artists and climate concerned progressives! And, more Trump Derangement Syndrome
I mean this quite literally. If you are worried about rapid, catastrophic changes to the planet’s climate, then you must be worried about nuclear war. That is because, on top of killing tens of millions of people, even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.
I mean, tens of millions killed right off, and, don’t forget all the later problems to people with radiation, but, that’s chump change compared to what could happen to the climate!
The hot, dry, hurricane-force winds would act like a supercharged version of California’s Santa Ana winds, which have triggered some of the state’s worst wildfires. Even in a small war, that would happen at dozens of places around the planet, igniting urban and wildland forest fires as large as small states. 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.
You mean nuclear winter? A term we’ve heard since not long after the nuclear bomb was used, and became a term in the 1980’s? Anyhow, because this is a cult, all that soot and ash, much of which used to be humans, is now “carbon”. Cult. And then there would be a “global food crisis”, a cute leftist catchall term, which really just means starvation.
The cult freakout continues on, ending with
The worst fears of that era, thankfully, never came to pass. Or at least, they haven’t happened yet. It is up to us to make sure that they don’t.
By worst fears, the Atlantic means anthropogenic climate change. Nuclear war is secondary.