These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'nuclear winter.
Send us feedback. See more words from the same year. Accessed 14 Nov. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. This soot, or black carbon, is the key factor in producing a nuclear winter. If the black carbon stayed in the troposphere, it could eventually be removed by precipitation, but Coupe said that once black carbon is in the stratosphere, it can last for years, triggering a long-term, global climate response.
There are other nonnuclear events that can trigger aerosol releases into the stratosphere, including volcanic eruptions and wildfires , but Coupe noted that neither produce the same effects as soot released as a result of nuclear war. Wildfire soot can also reach the stratosphere, but Coupe noted that wildfires produce black carbon on a much smaller scale than what would result from dedicated nuclear attacks on cities.
For example, the researchers state that a forest fire in British Columbia injected a few tenths of a teragram of black carbon into the stratosphere 1 teragram is 1 billion kilograms.
In contrast, they estimated a nuclear war would blast teragrams of soot into the atmosphere. The team used climate modeling to predict what might happen to Earth after the influx of an enormous amount of black carbon into the stratosphere. Coupe said their Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model version 4 WACCM4 has a much higher resolution than that found in previous studies, allowing the researchers to add more detail to predictions. Specifically, WACCM4 allowed the team to reach higher elevations, into the stratosphere—an important step in capturing lofting soot effects, said Coupe.
They found that after simulated nuclear blasts, almost the entire Northern Hemisphere was engulfed in stratospheric soot within the first week.
Scientists who have stepped into the public eye include Marie Curie , Linus Pauling and Freeman Dyson ; celebrity physicist Albert Einstein used his platform to decry American racism. These figures are often seen alternatively as either noble, fearless explorers bound to discover the truth, no matter how challenging—or stooges of the establishment, easily bought off with government and industrial money, compromising their research.
The reason for the contradictions is straightforward: scientists are people, and as such hold a variety of political opinions. But the Cold War in particular threw those differences into stark contrast. Though his research credentials were impeccable, Carl Sagan was in many ways a Cold War warrior's stereotype of a hippie scientist.
He wore his hair long by conservative academic standards, dressed modishly and casually, and was an outspoken critic of nuclear proliferation. He also smoked marijuana , which likely would have made his more straight-laced critics flip out if that fact had been widely known.
He even helped write the nuclear arms-control section of President Carter's farewell address, using phrases familiar from Cosmos and his other writings. The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space. From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is—a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have.
We see no barriers of race or religion or country. We see the essential unity of our species and our planet. And with faith and common sense, that bright vision will ultimately prevail. On the other side of the spectrum were scientists like physicist Edward Teller, whose anti-Communist zeal was particularly notable. He pushed for the U. Teller often took existing threat analyses and extrapolated them into worst-case scenarios in the interests of spurring the government toward more aggressive action.
He strongly opposed nuclear test bans and believed the Soviets were close to beginning a full-scale nuclear war. Nuclear winter pitted Sagan against Teller, culminating in both men giving testimony before the U. Teller took personal offense at the conclusions of TTAPS: if the nuclear winter hypothesis was right, SDI and other strategies Teller promoted were doomed from the start.
It didn't hurt that their tactics were similar: in public statements, Sagan focused on the most extreme predictions for nuclear winter, just as Teller cherry-picked data to exaggerate the Soviet threat. Sagan's actions drew a personal backlash that reverberates into the present—most notably, in the realm of climate change. Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt. As terrible as all that is, the greatest damage to the environment would be from the vast amount of superheated ash and soot that would rise from these destroyed cities, swept up by a nuclear firestorm into the upper atmosphere.
With global dimming, harvests would fail across the planet. International supply chains would falter as food became scarce. They would all be put at far greater risk as food supplies rapidly dwindled in the aftermath of such a conflict.
Another major, cascading effect of even a partial nuclear winter would be the depletion of the ozone layer, allowing crops to be further damaged by unfiltered hard ultraviolet solar radiation.
Ozone would be destroyed by the heating of the upper atmosphere as the darker soot-laden layer of air absorbed more solar energy. The effect would last for more than five years, with 20 percent of the ozone lost across the planet and, in some places, as much as 70 percent, leading to significant destruction of plant, marine and animal life on Earth, and resulting in skin cancers, DNA mutation and eye damage in humans and animals alike.
This, coupled with the violent competition for shrinking resources, likely civil unrest due to mass starvation, rapidly shifting weather patterns and financial collapse, would disrupt all human life with no part of the planet left unscathed. While the physical effects of a nuclear winter would begin to dissipate after a decade as the sky started to clear, the catastrophic consequences of even a localised nuclear conflict would have far-reaching consequences.
This nightmarish scenario is based on just a relatively small nuclear conflict between two minor nuclear powers who together possess nuclear weapons. They are not the only ones; China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel and North Korea also possess these deadly weapons, all able to inflict catastrophic damage on the planet.
By Alex Gatopoulos. Published On 2 Jul This is the scenario we could expect following a nuclear clash between nations. Only two nuclear weapons have ever been used in warfare — when the US bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombs exploded with the combined destructive power of around 37, tonnes of high explosive [Al Jazeera].
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