Is GW “the end of the world unless we stop it cold now”? Let’s say the worst projections GW models are correct. Is it cause for labeling GW the most significant threat human kind as ever faced? Would it really be the end of the known world? How does the challenge and consequence of global warming stack up against past and current threats?

The other obvious threat that should come to mind is Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War (accidental or otherwise). You would think that GW would, in most people’s mind, pale in comparison to the consequences of nuclear war, but – you would be wrong:

Check out Global Warming Impact Like ‘Nuclear War’ by Jeremy Lovell:

http://www.reuters.com/ article/ environmentNews/ idUSL1234809620070912

I asked myself: is there currently any other global threat that could be as bad or worse than global warming. I think the answer is yes. Read below and you can come to your own conclusions:

+——————

ABC a couple of years produced a documentary called “Last Days on Earth,” about the various ways human kind, as a whole, could bite the big one. Most were fairly far fetched, e.g., (Will super-intelligent machines someday make their own decisions and destroy us?). A few though were much more plausible events: a massive asteroid hit, nuclear war, and – global warming.

Global Warming End of the World

Watch the episode on Global Warming first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVyerC3PwKo

See part two here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNzUloBZ29Y

The episode starts out by saying there’s no debate that the climate, overall, has been getting warmer. A simple observation that’s been replicated over and over again.

It then moves on to talk about how “special interest” has sown doubt about the GW and why.

They then talk about the well-known correlation between CO2 and warming (and it’s more than just a correlation – there’s good evidence that C02 causes warming).

They talk about the very hot summers we have had lately, and how tough it has been on the polar bars and penguins.

At this point, we hear predictions of up to half the animals and plants going extinct if nothing is done.

Then we hear that if Greenland’s ice sheet melts, that’s 20 feet of sea level rise (over the next 200 years, maybe sooner). If Antarctica melts, that’s another 20 feet.

Near the end, it’s starts to get apocalyptic, i.e., “GW will wipe out civilization as a we know it.” This comes mostly from predictions of 20 to 40 foot sea raise. This will lead to the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, killing billions.

Then it moves onto what we can do to stop the coming apocalypse, and most of this has to do with C02 reduction.

What’s interesting at this point is very little (in fact, no) evidence for this apocalyptic end of the world. All natural ice on the planet would have to melt, human kind would have to be helpless to adapt over the course of one or two centuries to raising sea levels.

I’ll just leave it at this: beyond the fact of C02 warming the planet, the uncertainly starts going way up, and the most dire predictions have been called into serious question, and therefore debate over how bad is GW, how much worse will it get, how long will it take, and what we should do is in full sway.

Global warming is clearly a problem, and a potentially serious one, but if we can’t stop it cold (and it seems unlikely that we can’t), is it the worst problem we currently face?

Nuclear War End of the World

Now watch Last Days, Nuclear War:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdWf4-qV14k

First they make the point that while the cold war is over, the threat is not.

Seocnd, C02, even the mass qualities we’re producing today, has always been here, there’s just more of it in the air. Splitting the atom, on the other hand, was an unprecedented leap forward in human kind’s understanding, power, and ability to destroy. Before Trinity, the power people witness in the New Mexico desert only existed in the heart of a star. Now we now can literally replicate a piece of the sun and duplicate it on earth.

By the 1960’s the world arsenal of nuclear weapons numbered close to 40,000. And were not atomic weapons, like those used on Japan, but thermonuclear weapons, each 100s of times more powerful, and there were over 40,000 such weapons on the planet. This prompted Kennedy to say in 1961:

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

He was not exaggerating or kidding.

While most of the fears today are about Iran and North Korea, Kennette Benedit, Executive Director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says “these are the not the countries, the systems, the weapons that are the real theat.” The real “end of the world” threat comes from the fact that neither the U.S. or Russia have stood down. Their massive strategic nuclear world-wide forces are still operational, on alert, and in their cold war state of readiness.

“Although the Cold War is said to have ended in 1991, the US and Russia each still operate under the assumption that the other could authorize a nuclear attack against them. The failure to end their Cold War nuclear confrontation causes both nations to maintain a total of about 2,600 strategic nuclear warheads on high-alert status, which can be launched in only a few minutes, and whose primary missions remain the destruction of the opposing side’s nuclear forces, industrial infrastructure, and political/military leadership.” (See SGR Newsletter: http://www.sgr.org.uk/newsletters/NL36_lead.pdf).

The most likely way a war could start would be accidental. If there was an accidental launch by Russia, it would be almost immediately detected, and the “drill” for Obama would be to make a decision w/in 15 minutes. That’s how long he would have before a detonation on U.S. soil. The standard exercises call for a proportional retaliatory strike. At that point, it could easily escalate.

The Scientists for Global Responsibility Newsletter continues:

“During the Cold War, the US-Soviet nuclear standoff was a political issue familiar to most Americans. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a lowering of tensions between the US and Russia (which obviously inherited Soviet weaponry) led to a rather remarkable American complacency about the danger posed by the continued existence of US and Russian nuclear arsenals.

In 1994, this false sense of security was fostered by a largely symbolic agreement between the US and Russia to remove the launch coordinates from, or ‘de-target’, their nuclear missiles. Because it takes only about 10 seconds to re-install target coordinates during the launch process, the agreement created no meaningful change in the ability to launch strategic nuclear forces in a rapid fashion.

On January 24, 1995, President Clinton told Congress that “not a single Russian missile is pointed at the children of America”. Only hours later, a Norwegian weather rocket (Black Brant XII) was mistakenly identified by the Russian early warning system to be a hostile incoming ballistic missile.

The warning apparently was passed up the entire Russian chain of command and reportedly resulted in the opening of the ‘nuclear briefcases’ carried by the Russian President, Defence Minister and the Chief of the General Staff. These briefcases are designed to facilitate the rapid transmission of the ‘permission order’ to launch Russian nuclear forces. According to numerous published accounts, the false warning caused the President to open his briefcase for the first time. The buttons in the suitcase probably gave him a range of nuclear strike options against all strategic targets, including the US and Western Europe.

The electronic display on the nuclear briefcase indicated a possible US or NATO nuclear missile launched from Norway or the Norwegian Sea. The President tracked the missile on the screen for three to seven minutes before it became clear that the missile was not headed towards Russia. Russian nuclear forces were then ordered to return to watch duty. Under Launch-on-Warning protocol, he was within a few minutes of a launch decision.

Had this incident occurred during a period of increased tensions between the US and Russia, one wonders if the outcome would have been the same. Regardless, the 1995 Russian false warning of a US/NATO nuclear attack clearly illustrates the potential danger of an accidental nuclear war made possible by the existence of hundreds of high-alert ICBMs.” (See SGR Newsletter).

The existing U.S. & Russia nuclear arsenal on alert is enough to obliterate both the U.S. and Russia and end civilization in the world as we know it. And it wouldn’t take 100, 200 years — it would take about 12 hours.

End Civilization? How?

Technically, the total yield of these weapon is equal to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. That one bomb killed 100,000 people, instantly. 80,000 times 100,000 people = 8 billion people. There’s only 6 billion people on the planet.

Second – talk about climate change! – an exchange of only 20 missles would change the climate in ways that would go way beyound the worst projections of global warming. Just 20 missiles, about a 100 megaton exchange, would be enough to set up a Nuclear Winter because of the detonations and the resulting firestorms in the cities they hit.

Most people have no idea that the detonation of a single average strategic nuclear weapon will ignite a gigantic firestorm over a total area of 105 to 170 square kilometers. The bombing over Dresden ignited a firestorm over an area of about 35 square kilometers. (See SGR Newsletter).

A single average strategic nuclear weapon would ignite a firestorm over an area 4 to 5 times LARGER than Dresden. One strategic nuclear weapon. One.

To see what unleashing all these weapons would do, see the After effects of Nuclear War:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ezGpadWDn0

In addition to several hundred million immediately killed, surface temps would fall to sub-freezing levels a few days after.

And it wouldn’t take an accidental exchange of 20 or so missiles between the U.S. and Russia (assuming it would stop there), even a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan would be enough to drastically change the climate — not in 100 to 200 years, but in about a day.

A team of scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder); and UCLA conducted the rigorous scientific studies on the effects of a “small” regional nuclear war, and concluded:

“We examined the climatic effects of the smoke produced in a regional conflict in the subtropics between two opposing nations, each using 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons to attack the other’s most populated urban areas,” Robock said. The researchers carried out their simulations using a modern climate model coupled with estimates of smoke emissions provided by Toon and his colleagues, which amounted to as much as five million metric tons of “soot” particles.

“A cooling of several degrees would occur over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain-growing regions,” Robock said. “As in the case with earlier nuclear winter calculations, large climatic effects would occur in regions far removed from the target areas or the countries involved in the conflict.”

“With the exchange of 100 15-kiloton weapons as posed in this scenario, the estimated quantities of smoke generated could lead to global climate anomalies exceeding any changes experienced in recorded history,” Robock said. “And that’s just 0.03 percent of the total explosive power of the current world nuclear arsenal.” (American Geophysical Union in San Francisco: http://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/ 2006/ 12/ 061211090729.htm).

So, is GW warming a problem that deserves the attention of scientists and public policy analysis? Yes.

Can GW warming realistically end the world in 100 – 200 years. Unlikely, even if we can’t prevent the worst of it.

Is GW the biggest threat to human kind today? The answer is a laughable resounding NO! The end of the world is only a button push away. Me? I’ll take a 20 to 40 foot sea rise over 100-200 years then a 3000-5000 megaton exchange over the course of 12 hours.

Postscript

If anyone wants to argue that global nuclear war wouldn’t be the end of the world, you put yourself in the shoes of those hawks who used to argue that nuclear war was both winnable and survivable.

In 1984, and film called Threads was released as a dramatic answer to these “hawks.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT96sgTwmvo

Also, there’s terrific documentary, “1983, The Brink of Apocalypse” about the year the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. can the closest they ever had to global thermonuclear war:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uJqvNjjvog

It’s very good, and at times, riveting. And the 80’s music they use as a soundtrack is inspired.

Everyone has a different level of tolerance. So maybe a workaholic can go longer with being spelled.

I did something today that I am not proud of, especially after having left the boob tube turned off basically since 2006 –

I left the TV on all day to keep me company — sorry, really, I am.

The only excuse I can give is that I know the electricity around here is produced by a hydroelectric dam.

But I needed the company and also a break from the relentless frugality.

Another thing you can do is to simply not bring the subject up with people you know who are unconvincible (sp?). When they react so badly, you feel suddenly that you are living in a parallel universe, that you are out there, separate, alone. So, just avoid having that experience, and don’t bother even trying with these people, you are wasting good energy.

There is no getting around the fact that a very dark cloud is hanging over us and the lives of our children, but we cannot live in that mental cloud, we have to appreciate every minute that we still have of what we are able to enjoy right now — get out and smell the roses.

Take good care of yourselves everyone!

Joe, Harry, Rod, and other trolls:

Take a look at world weather news over a period of time. It’s a waste of time trying to point out facts to you all, but each of your points are recycled memes funded and organized with the help of wealthy and entrenched vested interests, some of them decades old. Science is a huge debate among intelligent and thoughtful people, and they’ve taken all your quibbles into account; there are plenty of answers unless you depend on the Inhofe/Morano and WattsUpWithThat brand of disinformation. Most of them and their sources are not experts but bias pushers resisting change.

Antarctica’s surface area has slightly increased in some areas but is diminishing rapidly in others. The volume of the ice is decreasing rather fast. Nova’s “Extreme Ice” as provides pictures and data which might possibly penetrate your determination to ignore reality. Now, about volume, the area of a square three feet on a side is 3 x 3 = 9. If it’s 2 feet deep, that’s 18, 3 feet deep, 27, etc.

The six warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 15 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1988.

Deniers are fond of picking 1998 as it was unusually hot, and comparing all the years since as if the record began in that year, which it did not.

2. Is warming caused by man? The world has been warming since around the mid 1800’s long before any significant industrial output of co2. The 1930’s were the warment decade of the last century. We know that the world has been much warmer in the past and it has also been mush cooler

3. Is warming bad? Longer growing seasons, less energy to heat homes, more areas of earth may be inhabitable by humans

4. If all of the answers to the above question are yes, is there anything that we can do to stop it? Well we still need electricity and we need to get to work. Solar and wind power are very expensive and unreliable. Burning fossel fuels it what modern civilization is built upon and give us all the standard of living that we have become used to. China and soon India produce more co2 than the US and they are not about to curb industrial activity.

Please consider the possibility that you have been lied to by Mr Gore and that he has become quite wealthy because gulible people like you believe his lies.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/ 2009/ 04/ 20/ making-your-opinion-on-co2-and-climate-change-known-to-the-epa/

Follow the money alright just look up gov’ grants