Nuclear winter

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]

For other uses, see Nuclear winter (disambiguation).

10–25% of soot injected is immediately removed by precipitation, while the rest is transported over the globe in one to two weeks

Would cities readily , and if so how much soot would be generated?

firestorm

Atmospheric longevity: would the quantities of soot assumed in the models remain in the atmosphere for as long as projected or would far more soot precipitate as much sooner?

black rain

Timing of events: how reasonable is it for the modeling of firestorms or war to commence in late spring or summer (this is done in almost all US-Soviet nuclear winter papers, thereby giving rise to the largest possible degree of modeled cooling)?

: how much light-blocking effect the assumed quality of the soot reaching the atmosphere would have?^[148]

Darkness and opacity

Lofting: how much soot would be lofted into the stratosphere?

[132]

which caused approximately 1 kelvin of global cooling for 2 years due to sulfate emissions.

1883 eruption of Krakatoa

1790 to 1830, a period of prolonged solar minimum activity, resulting in Earth receiving lower insolation values.

Dalton Minimum

Doomsday device

global reduction in ground insolation, due to the atmospheric injection of aerosols from various sources.

Global dimming

Impact winter

1783 eruption of an Icelandic volcano which produced continentally localized cooling for 1–2 years.

Laki

List of states with nuclear weapons

a period of low temperatures from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, partially overlapping with the Maunder Minimum of solar activity, 1645 to 1715.

Little Ice Age

Nuclear famine

Nuclear holocaust

Nuclear terrorism

a controversial hypothesis that a volcanic winter produced by the eruption of a volcano in Toba, Indonesia, created a human population bottleneck approximately 80,000 years ago.

Toba catastrophe theory

Volcanic winter

1816, created by a volcanic eruption in Tambora.

Year Without a Summer

a controversial hypothesis that an impact event & fires triggered the last ice age.

Younger Dryas impact hypothesis

On the 8th Day – Nuclear winter documentary (1984) filmed by the and available on Internet video hosting websites; chronicles the rise of the hypothesis, with lengthy interviews of the prominent scientists who published the nascent papers on the subject.^[238]

BBC

: A book co-authored by Carl Sagan in 1984 which followed his co-authoring of the TTAPS study in 1983.

The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War

: A 1984 docu-drama that Carl Sagan assisted in an advisory capacity. This film was the first of its kind to depict a nuclear winter.

Threads

A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race: A book authored by Richard P. Turco and Carl Sagan, published in 1990; it explains the nuclear winter hypothesis and, with that, advocates nuclear disarmament.

[239]

is a mini documentary by Retro Report that looks at nuclear winter fears in today's world.