Download AFF - UMKC Summer Debate Institute

AFF
Probability – warming specific
Warming is the most likely existential threat – scientific consensus should be
preferred over hypothetical impacts
Daily Times, 2014
(Daily Times Pakistan, “Climate Change: An Existential Threat,” 19 Nov 2014,
http://dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/19-Nov-14/climate-change-an-existential-threat)
Let us face it: climate change is easily the most dangerous existential crisis for humanity and we are still not
seized of it, as we should be. The vast body of scientific literature and the periodic reports of the UN’s panel on
climate change, including the latest one, has warned that without effective action to slow down, at
the very least, the rise in carbon emissions, the world is inexorably heading towards an unimaginable
disaster for the only planet that is known to support life. It is feared that any rise in global warming beyond two percent
Celsius will hit the danger button. But the projections that it might reach four degrees Celsius or more by the end
of the century will be catastrophic. As one leading climate change scientist, John Schellnhuber, reportedly said, “The
difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation.” What would that mean? As Paul Kingsnorth,
¶
reviewing two books on climate change in the London Review of Books, writes, “Four degrees (of warming) guarantees the total melting of the
Greenland ice sheet and probably the western Antarctic ice sheet, which would raise sea levels by more than 30 feet.” Furthermore: “Two-
thirds of the world’s major cities would end up under water.” And it will, even before it reaches the four degrees level,
create waves of environmental refugees moving all over the world to find safe places to live. The movement of people everywhere and the
struggle for scarce and depleting resources will create national security scenarios all over the world.
It is an unimaginable and
incomprehensible situation, which is probably one reason why people cannot get their heads around
it.” In his book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall writes, “Scientists,
who are, as a group, extremely wary of exaggeration, nonetheless keep using the same word:
catastrophe.” Without a sense of urgency about a prospective calamity, we simply are not prepared for
¶
a global action plan that might mitigate the situation. But, at the same time, as Marshall puts it, “The science around four degrees (of warming)
keeps moving usually in the direction of greater pessimism.” And he would not be wrong considering that not much progress has been made
since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where the need for some action to deal with climate change was first canvassed. The way things
are, next year’s Paris Summit might not prove any more productive than previous efforts like the Kyoto Conference in 1997 and the more
recent (2009) Copenhagen Conclave.
Evaluate warming differently that the possibility of other threats - even if they are
existential – because some countries are already experiencing advanced effects of
warming while their impacts are hypothetical
Chatterjee, 2015
(Keya- executive director of US Climate Action Network, “This Existential Threat is not a Hollywood
Fantasy,” 18 September 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keya-chatterjee/this-existential-threatis-not-a-hollywood-fantasy_b_8154658.html)
Imagine for a moment that the United States faced an existential threat. An attack was anticipated that would
be of such a scale that the U.S. would have to lower its flag from in front of the UN and would simply cease to exist. Variations
of this scenario happen in summertime action movies all the time.¶ Sadly, this scale is not only seen in movies. Climate
change is already an existential threat for many nations. The scale of threat we are used to only seeing
in action movies in the U.S. is a reality for Small Island Developing Nations and others dependent on
rain-fed agriculture, and exposed to increasingly severe disasters tied to sea-level rise and warming
seas. For these nations, it has been clear for a long time that the solutions for sustainable development and climate change are deeply
intertwined. Sustainable Development Goal 13 is critically important for these nations and for all nations. If we are to tackle poverty, climate
action needs to become a core part of the sustainable-development agenda, and not put in a silo. That vision of
¶
¶
integration is exactly what SDG 13 brings us. The specific language of SDG 13 includes a call to keep global-average surface temperatures from
increasing more than 1.5/2 degrees C, and a call for more ambition in the near-term, before 2020.
The increased action now is a
critical call, since greenhouse-gas emissions add up in the air the way that compound interest can add
up in a bank. Action now is critical.¶ Climate change influences many of the core parameters for
development — fresh water availability, food availability, and public health. Climate action also enables access to
energy for millions who can take advantage of plummeting costs of solar to electrify remote locations that are far from the electrical grid. If
they are always considered together, we have a chance of tackling the two greatest threats of our time: poverty and climate change.
Distributed solar deployment, for example, has already begun to meet the objective of tackling poverty and climate change at once, and
showing the potential for a renewable energy future. In remote regions like the mangrove forests of India and Bangladesh, villagers, tourist
hotels, and farmers all are able to use solar energy to power their buildings and increase tourism. At the same time, solar power helps villages
get quick access to electricity immediately after a storm event, without having to wait long periods of time for electrical-grid repairs. Solar
prices have plummeted so much in recent years that these solutions are spreading around the world faster than ever. Leadership on climate
change is also spreading. The faith community, including the Pope and the Muslim community, have spoken eloquently about the threat of
climate change to the least among us. The Climate Action Network has expanded to include faith, development, justice and labor voices who
come together to push for a just transition to renewable energy at all scales. In response, dozens of countries have already come forward with
climate actions, and more will come in New York next week. In December, governments are expected to reach a new universal climate
agreement at COP21 in Paris. The nations of the world are coming together to pronounce that we will not stand idly by while some nations face
¶
¶
an existential threat and the least among us in all nations are threatened.
Our action is not yet at the scale that it needs to
be, but it is scalable and can be ratcheted up to meet the ambitious global goals in the coming decade.
The action being taken by cities, regions, companies, and non profits, must be met by an equal scale of action by countries. After all, no country
is immune to the ravages of climate change. Our joint action, and our solidarity will protect all of our peoples and all of our flags.
No wars
Economic interdependence, socio-economic conditions, and nuclear deterrence are all
irreversible checks on conflict escalation
Fettweis, 2006
(Christopher J., National Security Decision Making Department, US Naval War College International
Studies Review (2006) 8, 677–697)
However, one need not be convinced about the potential for ideas to transform international politics to believe that major
war is
extremely unlikely to recur. Mueller, Mandelbaum, Ray, and others may give primary credit for the end of major war to ideational
evolution akin to that which made slavery and dueling obsolete, but others have interpreted the causal chain quite differently. Neoliberal
institutionalists have long argued that complex
economic interdependence can have a pacifying effect upon state
behavior (Keohane and Nye 1977, 1987). Richard Rosecrance (1986, 1999) has contended that evolution in socio-economic
organization has altered the shortest, most rational route to state prosperity in ways that make war
unlikely. Finally, many others have argued that credit for great power peace can be given to the existence of
nuclear weapons, which make aggression irrational ( Jervis 1989; Kagan et al. 1999). With so many overlapping
and mutually reinforcing explanations, at times the end of major war may seem to be overdetermined
( Jervis 2002:8–9). For purposes of the present discussion, successful identification of the exact cause of this
fundamental change in state behavior is probably not as important as belief in its existence. In other
words, the outcome is far more important than the mechanism. The importance of Mueller’s argument for the field of IR
is ultimately not dependent upon why major war has become obsolete, only that it has. Almost as significant, all these
proposed explanations have one important point in common: they all imply that change will be
permanent. Normative/ideational evolution is typically unidirectionalFfew would argue that it is likely, for instance, for slavery or dueling
to return in this century. The complexity of economic interdependence is deepening as time goes on and
going at a quicker pace. And, obviously, nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented and (at least at this point) no
foolproof defense against their use seems to be on the horizon. The combination of forces that may have brought major
war to an end seems to be unlikely to allow its return. The twentieth century witnessed an
unprecedented pace of evolution in all areas of human endeavor, from science and medicine to philosophy and
religion. In such an atmosphere, it is not difficult to imagine that attitudes toward the venerable
institution of war may also have experienced rapid evolution and that its obsolescence could become
plausible, perhaps even probable, in spite of thousands of years of violent precedent. The burden of proof
would seem to be on those who maintain that the ‘‘rules of the game’’ of international politics, including the rules of war, are the lone area of
human interaction immune to fundamental evolution and that, due to these immutable and eternal rules, war will always be with us. Rather
than ask how major war could have grown obsolete, perhaps scholars should ask why anyone should
believe that it could not.
No nuclear extinction
No extinction from nuclear war
Walker, 2016
(Robert – inventor and programmer with degrees in math and philosophy, “Could anything make humans extinct in
the near future?” 5 April 2016,
http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/could_anything_make_humans_extinct_in_the_near_future-169780,
arc)
This is one of the questions I get asked most often since I started to cover the topic of asteroid impacts. Will humans will become extinct within
a decade, or within a century? And can this happen through natural disasters? For instance if you watch the movies you may think there's a
chance of a giant asteroid impact which will make us extinct. But what's the real situation? I'll look at natural disasters first, and then results of
our technology that could happen in the next ten or twenty years. Technology advances so rapidly that you can't look much further than that,
as you can see by predictions of the present from thirty or more years ago. It would be nice to look further ahead, but what may seem major
issues for the future now may never happen and other things that we haven't even thought of might be the big issues of the day in the 2040s.
¶
¶
And this is about whether we can go extinct, not about things like famine or war.
Even an all out nuclear war leading to a
nuclear winter would not make the tropics as hard to live in as the Arctic - so some humans would
surely survive. And the radioactivity could also be dealt with, enough so that some humans would
survive it. Of course we must not let that happen. But it wouldn't make us extinct, and that's the topic here. Would anything
else do this? What about climate change, or asteroid impacts? I've written this for anyone - so if you have a scientific background, do excuse me
when I occasionally venture into the more "wacky" ideas that bother some people though any scientist would see that there is no possibility of
them happening. Well, first,
we are an extremely adaptable species, able to survive anywhere from the
Kalahari desert to the Arctic, with only stone age technology. We had already colonized most of the
world by the end of the neolithic period.
¶
No extinction from nuclear war – mass extinction does not mean complete extinction
– people would survive and recover
Ayres and Pagel, 2015
(Matt – interviewer & Mark-evolutionary biologist, “We asked an evolution expert what will happen to humanity
after the apocalypse,” 16 Nov 2015, http://community.lovenature.com/wild/we-asked-an-evolution-expert-whatwill-happen-to-humanity-after-the-apocalypse, arc)
Love Nature: Hi Mark. What do you see as the most likely cause for a complete wipe-out of the human race? Professor Mark Pagel: There are
two aspects to this question: one is the probability of the causal event happening, the other is its lethality or potential for complete destruction.
¶
The usual main contenders for potentially devastating effects on the human race are climate change,
food or energy shortages, nuclear war, antibiotic resistance or a pandemic virus, a global computer shutdown or attacks from
rogue AI machines. Each of these could happen and might even be relatively likely, but none is likely to wipe out the human race. By
comparison a collision with a large asteroid, although very unlikely in the timeframe of our history as a species, could easily lead to our
extinction. When in the future do you predict that humans will face the threat of mass-extinction? Mass-extinction (as opposed to complete
extinction) could occur as a result of any of the causes mentioned above. It is not out of the question that the first of these could happen within
100 years. My own view is that they won’t, but given current trends, they could. The key point is that I don’t think current trends will continue.
Regarding a collision with a large asteroid, current models suggest the chances are small but this is a case of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown
knowns’. We know that large asteroids exist, but we can never rule out that there is one coming our way that we don’t yet know about. How
likely is it that humans would survive an apocalypse—for example, something similar to the event that wiped out the dinosaurs? Humans would
¶
¶¶
¶
¶
¶¶
¶
almost certainly survive an event such as the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, but globally billions of people would perish. In
the
case of an event even more catastrophic than that, even though billions of humans would perish,
some of us would survive.¶ Life would become stone age-like but some remnants of humanity would
survive. Under some scenarios, the more humans that die, the easier it becomes for the remainder to
survive because food will become more plentiful, energy will become less scarce, there will be less
strife and the rates of disease transmission will be lower.¶ On the other hand, the pool of shared knowledge will
dwindle as more humans perish and this will make it more difficult for the survivors. In the event of almost complete
extinction, would humans be able to recover?¶ Yes, we would. We would recover by the slow
accumulation of knowledge, technology and skills that raised us from the stone age the first time
around. It is a phenomenon known as cumulative cultural evolution. However, this time, there would be some
¶¶
memory of the past that we could benefit from so our progress would be faster. Humans would eventually ‘rediscover’ farming,
we would form into towns and cities and slowly recover the technologies of the past.
NEG
Magnitude
Prefer high magnitude impacts, even if the probability is very low
Bostrom, 2013
(Nick, Professor at Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director, Future of
Humanity Institute, Director, Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology University
of Oxford, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”)
But even this reflection fails to bring out the seriousness of existential risk. What makes
existential catastrophes especially
bad is not that they would show up robustly on a plot like the one in Figure 3, causing a precipitous drop in world population or average
quality of life. Instead, their significance lies primarily in the fact that they would destroy the future. The
philosopher Derek Parfit made a similar point with the following thought experiment: I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we
now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes: 1. Peace.
2. A nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population. 3. A nuclear war that kills 100
per cent. 2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two
differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between 1 and 2. I believe that the difference between 2 and 3
is very much greater. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilisation began
only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a
tiny fraction of the whole of civilised human history. The difference between 2 and 3 may thus be the
difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day,
what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second (Parfit, 1984, pp. 453–454). To calculate the loss associated with an
existential catastrophe, we must consider how much value would come to exist in its absence. It turns
out that the ultimate potential for Earth-originating intelligent life is literally astronomical. One gets a
large number even if one confines one’s consideration to the potential for biological human beings living
on Earth. If we suppose with Parfit that our planet will remain habitable for at least another billion years, and we assume that at least one
billion people could live on it sustainably, then the potential exist for at least 10^16 human lives of normal duration. These lives could also be
considerably better than the average con- temporary human life, which is so often marred by dis- ease, poverty, injustice, and various biological
limitations that could be partly overcome through continuing technological and moral progress. However, the
relevant figure is not
how many people could live on Earth but how many descendants we could have in total. One lower
bound of the number of biolog- ical human life-years in the future accessible universe (based on current
cosmological estimates) is 10^34 years.7 Another estimate, which assumes that future minds will be mainly implemented in
computational hardware instead of biological neuronal wetware, produces a lower bound of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective life-years
(or 1071 basic computational operations) (Bostrom, 2003).8 If we make the less conservative assumption that future civilisations could
eventually press close to the absolute bounds of known physics (using some as yet unimagined technology), we get radically higher estimates of
the amount of computation and mem- ory storage that is achievable and thus of the number of years of subjective experience that could be
realised.9 Even
if we use the most conservative of these esti- mates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space
colonisation and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the
value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere
one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. The
more tech- nologically comprehensive estimate of 1054 human- brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 1052 lives of ordinary length) makes
the same point even more starkly. Even
if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential
of a technologically mature civilisation a mere 1 per cent chance of being correct, we find that the
expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage
point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue
that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite
provision of any ‘ordinary’ good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute
value of the indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost certainly
larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.10
Yes Wars
War is possible—geopolitics
Ferguson, 2008
[Niall – Prof History @ Harvard. Hoover Digest, No 1 Winter 2008]
The risk of a major geopolitical crisis in 2007 is certainly lower than it was in 1914. Yet it is not so low as to lie
altogether beyond the realm of probability. The escalation of violence in the Middle East as Iraq
disintegrates and Iran presses on with its nuclear program is close to being a certainty, as are the
growing insecurity of Israel and the impossibility of any meaningful U.S. exit from the region. All may be
harmonious between the United States and China today, yet the potential for tension over trade and
exchange rates has unquestionably increased since the Democrats gained control of Congress. Nor
should we forget about security flashpoints such as the independence of Taiwan, the threat of North
Korea, and the nonnuclear status of Japan. To consign political risk to the realm of uncertainty seems
almost as rash today as it was in the years leading up the First World War. Anglo-German economic commercial
ties reached a peak in 1914, but geopolitics trumped economics. It often does.
Yes nuclear ext
Even a small nuclear war results in temperatures below freezing – nuclear winter
theory is true
Robock, 2015
(Alan – Prof of Climate Science in Dept of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers who has published more than 350
articles about climate change of which 200 were peer-reviewed, “Nuclear Famine and Nuclear Winter: Climatc
Effects of Nuclear War, Catastrophic Threats to the Global Food Supply,” March 2015,
https://ratical.org/radiation/NuclearExtinction/AlanRobock022815.html, arc)
So here’s our beautiful planet (stretched somehow by the computer here). After a nuclear war it might look like this with a
cloud of smoke covering the Earth, blocking out the Sun, and making it cold and dark at the Earth’s surface. And what could
cause this—Ted showed you what a blast over New York City would do, but he didn’t show the next step which is the fires that
would result and put smoke in the atmosphere. There are two types of targets: nuclear air bursts and ground bursts. The cities
would burn and firestorms would build. Ground bursts also produce dust and in one case the sunlight gets absorbed
and in another case it gets reflected. But that means very little sunlight would reach the ground. And that would
cause rapid, large drops in surface temperature. This would be devastation to agriculture and natural
ecosystems.¶ The smoke in the atmosphere also heats the upper atmosphere which then destroys
ozone and that would mean a lot more ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground; also which would be
devastating for life. So this produces what we call Nuclear Winter with cold, dry, dark conditions at the surface,
more ultraviolet-producing, crops dying, and global famine. Max just showed a version of this graph showing the total
¶
number of nuclear warheads. The first idea of this was a paper by Paul Crutzen and John Birks [Crutzen, P.J.; Birks, J.W. (1982). “The
atmosphere after a nuclear war: Twilight at noon”. Ambio (Allen Press) 11 (2/3): 114-125]. Then climate model simulations of the response
were done by both Russians—Aleksandrov and Stenchikov [Alexandrov, V. V. and G. I. Stenchikov (1983): “On the modeling of the climatic
consequences of the nuclear war,” in The Proceedings of Applied Mathematics, The Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences,
Moscow, 21 pp.]—and Americans, Turco et al [R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, Carl Sagan: “Nuclear Winter: Global
Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 23 December 1983: Vol. 222 no. 4630 pp. 1283-1292],and I published a paper the next
year showing the long-term effects [Robock, Alan, 1984: “Snow and ice feedbacks prolong effects of nuclear winter.” Nature, 310, 667-670].
The nuclear freeze movement was going on at the same time as Helen described. And then the nuclear arms race ended. And this science was
part of the story of why the nuclear arms race ended. The Soviet Union ended 5 years later so it wasn’t the end of the Soviet Union that ended
¶
¶
the arms race. I’d also like to point out that the number by 2017 is not zero. We still will have
¶
5,000 nuclear weapons on the
planet and that’s still enough to produce nuclear winter so the problem has not been solved. Why do I think we
¶
scientists had a role? You can ask the people that made the decision: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. ¶ Reagan said, “A
great many reputable scientists are telling us that such a war could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe
out the earth as we know it. And if you think back to ... natural calamities – back in the last century, in the 1800s, ... volcanoes –
we saw the weather so changed that there was snow in July in many temperate countries. And they called it the year in which
there was no summer. Now if one volcano can do that, what are we talking about with the whole nuclear exchange, the nuclear
winter that scientists have been talking about? It’s possible.” And Gorbachev said,¶ “Models made by Russian and American
scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth;
the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation.Ӧ So both these men
who made the decision had this information from both Russian and American scientists telling them the same story. That was a
powerful message.¶ And in the United States people said, Why do we care about climate effects, we’re all going to die anyway
from a nuclear war. Wait, we’re all going to die. And it made people really focus on the direct effects too and the craziness of
the increase of the nuclear weapons.¶ That was 30 years ago. Why am I even telling you about it? I want to ask 2 questions. The
Cold War and the arms race are over. Could the remaining nuclear arsenals still produce nuclear winter with temperatures
below freezing? And now there are not just 2 nuclear nations, there are 9. What if a couple of the new
nuclear nations, say India and Pakistan had war on the other side of the world, how would that effect us?
The answers to these questions are, Yes the current arsenal can still produce a nuclear winter and will last
¶
much longer than we thought—decades. And a small nuclear war would not produce winter—that is the
¶
temperatures wouldn’t get below freezing—but it would be terrible direct effects and there would be severe impacts on global
agriculture for more than a decade.¶ Now unfortunately we know that cities can burn. There was an earthquake in San Francisco
in 1906 and Jack London was out on San Francisco bay. He wrote,¶ Within an hour after the earthquake shock the smoke of San
Francisco’s burning was a lurid tower visible a hundred miles away. And for three days and nights this lurid tower swayed in the
sky, reddening the sun, darkening the day, and filling the land with smoke.¶ And it produced a firestorm and pumped the smoke
up into the upper atmosphere. This is what San Francisco looked like afterwards. All of the buildings were gone except for some
of the stone ones.¶ This is what one of the survivors of Hiroshima remembers which is the smoke and the fires. And this is what
Hiroshima looked like afterwards.¶ So we have this example of cities burning and producing smoke.¶ The number of countries
with nuclear weapons has increased about 1 every 5 years until the Soviet Union broke up and we have 2 more since then and
now we have 9 nuclear nations. Max showed another table like this. [So Many Exist Ready To Be Used - The World’s Nuclear
Warheads Count, August 2014.]¶ There are about 16,400 nuclear weapons in the world now as of August 2014. The
graphs show the different [types]—the yellow are the ballistic missiles which are on hair trigger alert.¶ Russia has about
8,000. The US about 7,000. All these other countries have a couple of hundred. Why did they stop?
Why do they only have a couple of hundred?¶ How many nuclear weapons do you have to put on
your enemy to deter them from attacking you? One. Okay, maybe two if the first one doesn’t work.¶
So why do we still have thousands? The US and Russia could immediately go down to 200 each and not lose any of their deterrent
ability even if it were a deterrent. Max talked about—Ted also—about how close we’ve come several times. What about this time? Imagine
you’re Pakistani Air Defense and you see an attack coming in over the horizon. You’re a nuclear nation. Who do you think would be attacking
you? Would you guess it was the United States or maybe you’d think it was India. So did we almost start a nuclear war by going to get Osama
bin Laden? We didn’t, fortunately. But along the Kashmiri border, there are always disputes between Indians and Pakistanis. Imagine a skirmish
there escalating due to poor communication, misunderstanding, panic, problem with the computer. In fact the last year I was at the IPPNW
meeting in Kazakhstan, I picked up the newspaper that morning in the hotel: “Four people were killed when nuclear-armed rivals India and
Pakistan traded heavy fire across their border early Saturday...” This happens all the time. We’ve been really lucky that, again, this hasn’t
¶
¶
escalated into something worse. So we decided to look at what the climatic effects of such a war would be.
We took 50 Hiroshimasize weapons and put them on the 50 targets in each country that produce the largest amount of smoke. For India this would
¶
produce 3.5 million tons of smoke. For Pakistan, 3 million tons—6.5 million. We said, Let’s be conservative; let’s put 5 million tons of smoke into
This is much less than even 1 percent of our current
global nuclear arsenal; 0.3 percent. Of course it would be a terrible direct effect. 20 million people would die directly.
the upper atmosphere and see what the climate response would be.
Here’s a movie of where the smoke would go. It would be heated—this is the tropopause. Most of it would be heated and go up into the stratosphere, the region
above where there is weather so there wouldn’t be any rain to wash it out and it would last for more than a decade, and it would cover the whole world. If you
graph the climate response on a graph of global average temperature: blue is the global warming we all know and love which I spent a lot of time working on; the
red would be the global temperature change. So it would be a couple of degrees colder. It wouldn’t be winter temperatures. But this
would be the
climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. Colder than the little ice age. Two other climate
models have recently done a similar calculation to make sure this is not dependent on one climate model. All three found basically the same result. This is the
climate model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which is much more detailed and also includes the effects of ozone. [Here are two additional
movies made by Michael Mills. Alan Robock had asked him to make another version with a white background and progressive shades of grey leading to black for the
highest concentrations so it looks like smoke. The first animation is in greyscale and runs at 10 frames per second. The second animation version runs 5 frames per
second.] The smoke goes up, it gets heated and goes up into the upper stratosphere and it stays there for years. The sun heats it and this is in April. As you get to
summer it goes to the northern hemisphere heated by the sun. And then it goes into the southern hemisphere when it turns winter and stays there for a long time.
We can calculate how long it stays there. Our first calculation showed that the temperature would go down by 1.5 degrees Celsius, about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The
Swiss model showed similar results. The NCAR model had the smoke last longer. It calculated more detail in the stratosphere and actually it would last for a couple
of decades. Alright, so a couple of degrees. What does that mean? We said, Let’s take this and let’s go to places where they grow food and apply the change of
¶
¶
¶
There would also be cooling in the
ocean. First of all the ozone would be depleted. Now we worry about the ozone hole around Antartica. This would be a global
temperature, the change of precipitation, the change of sunlight, and calculate how crops would grow.
¶
ozone hole with excess ultraviolet. We haven’t even had time yet to look at the impacts of the UV. This is a graph from our analysis using all of
those three climate models looking at how the production of the main food crops in China, the country that grows the most food, would
change. This is for 10 years. For rice it would be down by 20 percent. For winter wheat, 40 percent. And this is only in the first decade. Let me
summarize this in a table. In the US, corn would go down by 20 percent, soy beans 15 percent, rice would go down by 25 percent in China,
¶
¶
wheat by 40 percent. This means the same amount of food that was grown
in China when they had several 100 million
fewer people. And it would last for more than a decade.¶ You can imagine people hoarding food,
world food trade collapsing. And now we’re analyzing every crop in every country so we can go for the whole world and
¶
tell no more chocolate for you, no more wine for you. People can really have a gut feeling of how it’s going to affect them. Not
somewhere else in the world.¶ But the story—it’s much worse than that. Forget about what I just—it’s much worse than that.
Because as Ted mentioned, every Trident has 100 nuclear weapons and they’re much more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
So each Trident submarine can produce about 1,000 Hiroshimas and the US has 14 of them. And that’s
only half of our arsenal. And Russia has got the same size arsenal.¶ So we could produce much, much, much more smoke if we
used them. So we did a simulation of what would happen if the US and Russia had a nuclear war. And [there would be] a lot
more smoke. It would go up in the atmosphere and cause much more temperature change. Now I’m going
to graph the global temperature change. In the 5 terragram case I first showed you is up at the top here. I’ve had to re-scale the graph. Now for
150 million tons of smoke, 7 or 8 degrees Celsius colder. Colder than the Little Ice Age.¶ This is the same amount of smoke that we
put in the atmosphere when we were studying nuclear winter in the 1980s using a third of the-then much larger arsenals. We were trying to
figure out, How can you still get so much smoke? It turns out, with a third of the arsenal, every possible target in Russia and the US had 9
nuclear bombs targeted on it. Because they put one on. Okay, let’s put two on in case it doesn’t work. So we have this huge pile of weapons,
Okay let’s bounce the rubble. Now if we just put one on each target we can still produce the same amount smoke even after the new START
agreement is in effect. If you look at global warming then, [laughs], this huge impact. Before you ask the question, Yes, this would solve the
global warming problem. I did a calculation. If you put that much smoke in and you stop producing C02, global warming is gone. I’m writing an
¶
¶
article about that called: “A Modest Proposal: A Solution to Global Warming.” [laughter] What’s new in this work?
A nuclear war
between any nuclear states using much less that 1 percent of the current nuclear arsenal could
produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history.¶ Such a “small” nuclear war could
reduce food production by 20 to 40 percent for a decade. And we’ve repeated the nuclear winter calculations done in
the 1980s about which there was some doubt about well do you really get temperatures below freezing? It turns out nuclear winter
theory was correct. In the current arsenal, the Russian and American one can still produce temperatures below freezing and the effects
would last for more than a decade. Now we have modern models that can heat the smoke, take in the upper atmosphere and calculate how
long it would stay there. In the 1980s the climate model simulations were done on a Cray-1 Computer which is much less powerful than your
iPhone in terms of its computing capability and storage. Now we have modern computers that can do this much better.
¶
Nuclear war would result in functional extinction – debating whether or not the few
survivors could reproduce a functional society is irresponsible
Starr, 2015
(Steven - director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program & former senior scientist for
Physicians for Social Responsibility, “Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction,” 2015, Federation of
American Scientists, https://fas.org/pir-pubs/nuclear-war-nuclear-winter-and-human-extinction/, arc)
While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from a nuclear winter, it is relatively simple to predict those
which would be most profound. That is, a nuclear
winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from
nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.¶ Following the
detonation (in conflict) of US and/or Russian launch-ready strategic nuclear weapons, nuclear firestorms would burn simultaneously over a
total land surface area of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. These mass fires, many of which would rage over large cities
and industrial areas, would release many tens of millions of tons of black carbon soot and smoke (up to 180
million tons, according to peer-reviewed studies), which would rise rapidly above cloud level and into the stratosphere. [For an explanation of
the calculation of smoke emissions, see Atmospheric effects & societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts.] The scientists who
¶
completed the most recent
peer-reviewed studies on nuclear winter discovered that the sunlight would
heat the smoke, producing a self-lofting effect that would not only aid the rise of the smoke into the stratosphere (above cloud
level, where it could not be rained out), but act to keep the smoke in the stratosphere for 10 years or more. The
longevity of the smoke layer would act to greatly increase the severity of its effects upon the biosphere. Once in the stratosphere, the
smoke (predicted to be produced by a range of strategic nuclear wars) would rapidly engulf the Earth and form a dense
stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke from a war fought with strategic nuclear weapons would
quickly prevent up to 70% of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35% of sunlight from
reaching the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Such an enormous loss of warming sunlight would produce Ice
¶
Age weather conditions on Earth in a matter of weeks. For a period of 1-3 years following the war, temperatures would fall
below freezing every day in the central agricultural zones of North America and Eurasia. [For an explanation of nuclear winter, see
Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences.]¶ Nuclear winter
would cause average global surface temperatures to become colder than they were at the height of
the last Ice Age. Such extreme cold would eliminate growing seasons for many years, probably for a decade or longer. Can
you imagine a winter that lasts for ten years? The results of such a scenario are obvious. Temperatures would be much
too cold to grow food, and they would remain this way long enough to cause most humans and
animals to starve to death.¶ Global nuclear famine would ensue in a setting in which the infrastructure of the combatant nations
¶
has been totally destroyed, resulting in massive amounts of chemical and radioactive toxins being released into the biosphere. We don’t need a
sophisticated study to tell us that no
food and Ice Age temperatures for a decade would kill most people and
animals on the planet. Would the few remaining survivors be able to survive in a radioactive, toxic
environment? It is, of course, debatable whether or not nuclear winter could cause human extinction. There is
essentially no way to truly “know” without fighting a strategic nuclear war. Yet while it is crucial that we all
understand the mortal peril that we face, it is not necessary to engage in an unwinnable academic debate as to
whether anyhumans will survive.¶ What is of the utmost importance is that this entire subject –the
catastrophic environmental consequences of nuclear war – has been effectively dropped from the global
¶
discussion of nuclear weaponry. The focus is instead upon “nuclear terrorism”, a subject that fits official narratives and centers upon the danger
of one nuclear weapon being detonated – yet the scientifically predicted consequences of nuclear war are never publically acknowledged or
discussed. Why has the existential threat of nuclear war been effectively omitted from public debate? Perhaps the leaders of the nuclear
weapon states do not want the public to understand that their nuclear arsenals represent a self-destruct mechanism for the human race? Such
an understanding could lead to a demand that nuclear weapons be banned and abolished. Consequently, the nuclear weapon states continue
to maintain and modernize their nuclear arsenals, as their leaders remain silent about the ultimate threat that nuclear war poses to the human
species.
¶
¶