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Thomas comments on [LINK] Nuclear winter: a reminder - Less Wrong
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As I've said. All the atom bombs we have, have combined less energy than a big wildfire. So the energy is not a problem.
Then, the amount of "black smoke", which would those bombs emits, compared to a volcano is small. There is nowhere one ton of a black smoke emitting plastics per person alive, not to mention that everything will not be burned.
I don't see where they are getting their numbers. One of those scenarist was Carl Sagan. He made quite a panic when Saddam Hussein ignited those Kuwait oil pumps. He was wrong.
Look it now either from the energy point of view, either from the soot lifting point of view - it is not such a big event in the geological terms at all.
Billion of people may die, maybe more, maybe less. An unspeakable evil, it would be, yes.
But a nuclear winter from an event comparable with no such a big wildfire? One million square kilometers of the Australian bush burnt. One trillion square meters. One kilogram of grass and wood per square meter burnt. One million J of energy released. This is a very conservative calculation, but it gives you 10 times more energy than the combined nuclear stock pile would. And the biggest wild fire covered 5 times more land. So, maybe 50 times more energy released - caused no nuclear winter.
Every year we have enough wildfires to release more energy than there is in those bombs.
You have to put everything in a perspective.
I don't see the total arsenal yield figure, but i have total yield from testing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
which is slightly above 500 megatons
For the wildfire:
10^12 m^2 * 10^6 j/m^2 = 10^18 j
1 megaton of TNT = 4 * 10^15 joules. Thousand megatons = 4 * 10^18 joules. 500 megatons = 2 * 10^18 joules , 2x your fire already. Multiply by your 10..100 (the arsenal vs testing quoted from yourself), you get 20 .. 200x the wildfire, that's just the yield, not the fires in cities.
And while we are on energy calculating, why not calculate how much solar energy Earth receives in a day and say how many zillion times its more than energy of bombs combined, lol.
Note: you just might by dumb luck be factually correct, but your argument is motivated cognition. Nukes are scary, and hence very motivational. Goes both ways.
You are saying, that the total energy amount of all the nuclear weapons is 4*10^18 J. Not 40 times less as I have said.
Even in that case, the wildfire which has covered 5 million square kilometers and consumed 1 kg of dry grass and wood was a bigger event. Especially since I gave 10 times smaller energy per kilogram of wood or dry grass as it is. It's 10^7 J/kg not 10^6 as I have calculated. Not to mention, 1 kg per square meter is a very low number.
But it matters only a little. This calculation is not very exact, but quite enough to see the main point.
I still don't see the main point. Wildfires don't put stuff into stratosphere very well, its not very concentrated, and it ignores burnable stuff in the cities.
For the calculations, just do them carefully one time ok? I don't know full yield, the 1000mt is just example. Your own estimate for yield of arsenal, vs yield of testing, was arsenal = 10..100x the testing. You need to pick your numbers, and stick to them all the way through without fitting them after you arrive at something you don't like. That is just math. If you can't do that why you think your opinion on nuke war results is at all coupled to the actual results in any way?
Very clear numbers:
5 million square kilometers of bush burnt. That's 5*10^12 m2. Every year you can expect at least 1 kg of wood growth per square meter. That's 10^7 J accumulated per year on every square meter. But let say, it is all that it's there.
This gives you 5*10^19 J released by the biggest Australian bush fire. Many times more than your estimation for the atom bombs aggregate energy release.
Pure and simple, do you object this numbers?
you picked one set of numbers, calculated something, then didn't like it, changed from 1 to 10 megajoules per square metre, that's not how you do it if you are thinking straight.
Regarding 'my estimate', once again: 500 megatons is total testing, 10 ... 100x the figure you picked, total 5000 .. 50 000 megaton , the 1 megaton of tnt is 4E15 j , times 5E3 = 2E19 , times 5E4 , 2E20 .
Top it off by the smoke not going into stratosphere from a bush fire because there's too little intensity, it doesn't even burn all at once, so there's nothing whatsoever even comparable about those numbers in the first place?
What part do you not understand about "you have been conclusively demonstrated that you are not thinking straight about existential risks" ? People have two reactions to existential risks: be sure that it exists, be sure that it does not, proceed to not thinking straight one way or another. Sagan demonstrably screwed up with oil well fires, yes. You are demonstrably screwing up right now. Nobody's safe from it. I'm only reasonably sure i'm not screwing up because i haven't been called on bad math, and haven't got very strong belief about nuke winter.
Americans have 10000 atomic weapons currently. Russians also. Others are negligible in this sense.
Say that the average bomb has 1 MT. This means 8*10^19 J of energy. What is a big overestimation, but for the sake of the discussion, would you accept this number first?
I don't accept the idea that the climate effect of the fire is in any way comparable to nukes in the first place, because fire doesn't get smoke high up in the atmosphere. I think its a very screwed up assumption. I've only been criticizing the numbers because the point is that people don't think straight about existential risks. Humans don't think about risks, they evaluate risks rapidly with some feeling & particular really simple strategy that they picked up, then rationalize verbosely.
But you admit, that the energy stored in the nuclear arsenal is hardly as big as the energy released by a really big forest fire?
I don't have a good estimate of energy stored in the nuclear aresnal, and I care about this assertion just about as much as I care about comparison between energy of nuclear arsenal and energy of sunlight that hits the earth in a day.
But yes, I would say it is somewhere within similar order of magnitude, for the yield vs forest fire, ignoring the combustion of items in the cities.
BTW, nukes are incendiary weapons, there's not enough appreciation of this basic fact by public. Don't imagine your house being blown away, imagine all interior catching on fire first, then being blown off. Ditto for all asphalt.