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Khoth comments on [LINK] Nuclear winter: a reminder - Less Wrong
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From the article:
I know. But how this compares to big wildfires, yearly coal and oil burnings and a volcano or two?
We are told, that the Giga tones of burnt coal and oil per year, warms the planet. About the same amount of plastics, wood and so on would trigger the so called Nuclear Winter?
I am a NW skeptic.
Also from the article:
The proximity of the bombs in time and place matters significantly. Even if you are skeptical of this, you'd have to be not updating enough based on expert opinions to view this as less than 10% likely.
Your comparison between the problems from greenhouse gasses and the particulate matter from a nuclear war is absurd.
2 Mt. 1.5% of the Tzar bomb, which exploded at Novaya Zemlya one day. Nothing much.
Enough to make as much fire as in Black Thursday bush fire? Which didn't caused a decade long "nuclear winter"?
Energy release by the bomb probably isn't the right metric here. A multimegaton bomb spends a lot of that energy heating plasma into hotter plasma. This has minimal climate impact.
The scenario the nuclear winter researchers had in mind was that those 100 bombs each start catastrophic fires that burn down major cities. Those fires can produce lots of soot and ash that have climactic effects, and then lift the particulates into the stratosphere.
I don't have enough of a background to comment on whether and why those fires would be worse than a large brushfire or forest fire, but I'm pretty sure it isn't about megajoules of energy.
If it isn't about MJ, then it is about the amount of dust and soot?
Pinatubo ejected about 10 cubic kilometers of dust into high altitudes. The potential energy of this dust was far greater than the energy of all atom bombs. Ignite them all and you will get just enough energy to get 1 cubic kilometer of rocks a few kilometers high.
It was no nuclear winter, again, from Pinatubo.
The atomic bombs are merely the ignition devices - their energy does not go into projecting particles upwards (or very little). The burning cities are the sources of smoke, the close proximity prevents easy dilution of the smoke, and solar heating gets the particles up the last few kilometers before the clouds have time to disperse (incidentally, smoke from forest fires isn't as black, thus the solar heating effect isn't prominent for them).
A volcano ash is often black. The mass of already mentioned Pinatubo's dust, exceeds the mass of all human artifacts on the planet. If everything we have, go in smoke, it has less mass than the said dust, airborne in 1991.
Now you're just making stuff up. According to this http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Mt.+Pinatubo's+cloud+shades+global+climate.-a012467057 , there were 20 million tons of SO2 ejected into the atmosphere. The number of cars in the world is about 800 million cars on the road http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile, mass about 1.5 tons, so we're ahead on those alone. Even if we're generous, and include the "10 billion metric tonnes (10 cubic kilometres) of magma" in Pinatubo (most of which is not relevant for the current discussion), I haven't started counting the trucks and trains and the 300 000 tons super tankers, all the smaller ships, the roads and the railways, etc... We'll reach 10 billion tons long before we have to start counting the largest mass in human artifacts: the buildings.
Here http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs113-97/ they say, the Pinatubo ejected 5 cubic kilometers of ash into the air.
1 tone of (combustible) artifacts per every person in on Earth - went up in smoke - would be the same mass. A very unrealistic assertion - but still nothing like "decade of nuclear winter".
The total energy released by the said Black Thursday Bush Fire was in the same range as the energy stored inside all world's nuclear bombs. 10^17 J.
Novaya Zemlya is tundra (ie, "lichen, sedge, sometimes grass, and if you're lucky, scattered dwarf shrubs sitting on permafrost") and glaciers. The Tsar Bomba went off in October. That's October in the Arctic Circle, by the way.
We shouldn't be surprised at this vast asymmetry between "models of nuclear warfare targeting cities in populated areas" and "one very large nuclear bomb, set off as a test, in the Arctic during the beginning of local winter."
The Parable of the Pawnbroker.