We also have many examples of cities that have burned in the past. Such was the case with a massive fire in British Columbia in August 2017. Large wildfires have been observed to pump smoke into the upper atmosphere – the stratosphere – above where rain can wash it out, and then be further lofted by solar heating. One option is to look at the impact of forest fires. So how can we test nuclear winter theory? Fortunately, we do not have a global nuclear war to examine.
Normally scientists test their theories in a laboratory or with real world observations. While the immediate effects of nuclear strikes might kill hundreds of thousands, the numbers that would die from starvation in the years that followed could run into billions. It would also destroy ozone, enhancing ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. Smoke from the fires would last for years in the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight, and making it cold, dark and dry at the Earth’s surface. In the 1980s, using simple climate models, we discovered that global nuclear arsenals, if used on cities and industrial areas, could produce a nuclear winter and lead to global famine. I’ve been working on the threat of nuclear winter for 35 years now. In a recent paper, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, we investigate whether the smoke from these fires was enough to change global temperatures. Much like the cloud and ash thrown into the air by volcanic eruptions, this soot had the potential to block out incoming sunlight, cooling the Earth’s surface. The resulting fires saw plumes of thick, dark smoke rise high into the atmosphere. This included the nuclear bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Prof Alan Robock is a distinguished professor of climate science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US.īetween 3 February and 9 August 1945 during the second world war, an area of 461 square kilometres in 69 Japanese cities was burned by US bombing raids.
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