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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Nuclear winter is a flawed concept.

Yes. A few years ago I read about the origins of nuclear winter and determined it was entirely fictional. And every time I try to explain that to someone they act like I'm a loon.

Would you be interested in doing a little write up of it here? I’d love to see more information about this.

The Wikipedia article actually does a pretty decent job of summarizing it.

To me, it seems obvious that nuclear winter hypothesizers are fabulists. Predictions of a 20 degree fall in global temperatures are Prima facie ridiculous, being 3 times greater than the fall in temperatures following the Yucatan impact 66 million years ago.

(The Yucatan impact released energy equivalent to about 10,000 times the entire world's nuclear arsenal).

The one time that a nuclear winter prediction was tested was in 1991 during the Kuwait oil fires. This did not, in fact, cause a small scale nuclear winter as predicted.

And of course there is the bias angle. Can you imagine a university researcher publishing a paper "acxtually, nuclear winter won't happen"?