Speaker 0 00:00:04 World. It is exploding. Violence flaring bull is loden. You're old enough to kill, but not for voting. You don't believe in war boards and to, and even the Jordan River has bodies floating butcher. Tell me over and over and over again, my friend, I don't believe we're on destruction. Speaker 2 00:00:45 Well, that was a cheerful tune for those of you not familiar with the song, that was Eve of Destruction, sung by Barry McGuire and written by PF Sloan. Hey, Brooke, what day is it? Speaker 3 00:00:57 It is every other Sunday again. And you are listening to sustainability now, a biweekly case, squid Radio Show, focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. Hello, K S Q D listeners. I'm Brooke Wright. Here in the studio with Ronnie Lipitz, Speaker 2 00:01:17 There's a Specter haunting Europe, and it's not communism. Russian leader of Vladimir Putin has put his country's nuclear forces on special combat readiness, bringing back memories and fears for some of us, reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War. While we've been worrying about climate change, nuclear war has been there in the background all along. What would be the climatic consequences of nuclear war? Today our guests are Dr. Alan Robach, distinguished professor in the Environmental Sciences Department at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And Dr. Joshua co coop, a post-doctoral researcher at Lou Louisiana State University, who received his PhD from Rutgers in 2020. They and their colleagues have been modeling the climate climatic consequences of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States, also known as nuclear winter. A notion first proposed in 1982 and popularized by Carl Sagan. Some of you may remember him. And that's our topic for today's show. Uh, Dr. Robach and Coop, welcome to Sustainability. Now. Speaker 4 00:02:21 Thanks for having me. Speaker 5 00:02:22 Yeah, thanks for having us. Speaker 2 00:02:24 How do we Speaker 4 00:02:25 Do it? Hi, Josh. Speaker 5 00:02:27 Hey, <laugh>. Speaker 2 00:02:31 Okay. I grew up during the 1950s and sixties, and I well remember the admission to duck and cover and get under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye. In 1962, we lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the threat of nuclear holocaust was never far from our minds since 1991. However, that fear has faded, and for many, born after 1980, it was never really there. But here we are again, as they say. So let's get started on today's, uh, uh, conversation. Um, I want to start by asking Alan, uh, to tell us a little bit about yourself and when and how you got into the climate change and nuclear winter business. And then hear from Joshua. Speaker 4 00:03:14 I got my PhD at MIT in 1977, and my dissertation was to try and figure out what's been causing climate change for the past a hundred years. I looked at what humans are doing, which is putting carbon dioxide and particles in the atmosphere, and I looked at natural causes, solar variations, sunspots and volcanic eruptions. And I calculated what caused the climate change in the last a hundred years, and discovered that volcanic eruptions were the largest natural cause of climate change. And ever since then, I've been working on volcanic eruptions and their impacts on climate. In the 1980s, I learned that maybe smoke from fires started by nuclear weapons could go up in the atmosphere and cause climate change. And I used the same climate model I was using to calculate the effects of volcanic eruptions to see how much the smoke, how much climate change the smoke would cause. And that's how I got interested in nuclear winter. Speaker 2 00:04:13 Um, so your initial motivation then was, um, uh, uh, volcanic, sorry, volcanic eruptions. Um, how did you pick that particular topic? Speaker 4 00:04:26 Well, if you look at what can cause change in climate, what can cause a change in the amount of energy coming into earth, the biggest thing that nature can do is put a cloud up there after a big volcanic eruption and reflect sunlight and make it colder at the surface. And so we already knew that that was important, but we, I wanted to try and quantify it and see how important it was compared to other causes of climate change. And so I was, look, I looked at all the causes I looked at, so solar variations, changes of the amount of heat coming from the sun. It turns out that's not very large and not very important. I looked at, uh, the pollution that humans put into the atmosphere by burning coal and oil and, and you get haze in the atmosphere, and that reflects sunlight and causes cooling. And I looked at the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane and other gases, and I tried to calculate how much each of those was causing climate change. At the same time, there's natural variability, there's chaos, there's natural variability. And so sometimes there are changes that are just random. And so I wanted to compare the changes actually caused by different things in the atmosphere with the random changes to see what was significant. Mm-hmm. Speaker 2 00:05:44 <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative> on the way over here. Brooke and I were talking about the, uh, the ice ages and, and I realized, I don't know what causes ice ages. Um, I remember back in the sixties, people were warning of an, of a new ice age because we were at the end of the interglacial. What, what causes that? I I, I know this is sort of off topic, but I'm curious what Speaker 4 00:06:06 I I'll I'll tell you very briefly. Yeah, yeah. Uh, <laugh>, the Earth's orbit changes uhhuh <affirmative>, the tilt of the axis changes with respect to the sun. The hert became, becomes more elliptical or more circular. Oh, and the top of the axis wobbles. Yeah. And that changes the amount of sunlight reading, reaching Earth on, uh, on different seasons. And so when it's, when it's, uh, not as much sun in the summertime, then if the sun, if the summer is not as strong, then you can have snow in the winter that lasts and stays around till the next year and starts to build up an ice sheet. And so these, these cycles which happen on the time scales of 20,000 years to a hundred thousand years, are the dominant natural cause of climate change. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and you're right, it's been 10,000 years since we've, we've been in this what called what's called interglacial. And before that there were ice ages for like a hundred thousand years. And many Interglacials last about a hundred thousand, about 10,000 years. But it looks like this one's gonna last for quite a while. But actually, humans are the biggest cause of climate change right now. Not, not the earth orbit. And so the earth is warming much faster than would happen naturally. Speaker 2 00:07:18 Uhhuh <affirmative>. Um, and you, Joshua, how did you get into this business? Speaker 5 00:07:24 So, I studied meteorology in undergrad, and I generally just had an interest in weather. Um, but I wanted to learn how to run climate models in grad school. Uh, so I didn't initially seek out nuclear winter, but I was a grad student in need of funding. And Alan had just received new funding to run these new simulations, which is, or which are a part of the research that we've been publishing the, the past few years. So at the end of the day, simulating nuclear war is just, I guess, a, a unique application of client models. Um, uh, so that's, that's basically how I got started. Speaker 2 00:07:59 Uh, I was curious, Alan, what were these new studies or, or were they continuations of old ones, or what was the motivation for for doing this Speaker 4 00:08:10 For nuclear winter? You Speaker 2 00:08:11 Mean for doing these new, these nuclear recent nuclear winter studies that you've been doing? Speaker 4 00:08:15 The recent ones. Well, in the 1980s, we did simulations with very simple, very primitive by today's standards, climate models. Right. And found that the smoke from fires started by nuclear weapons if targeted on cities and industrial areas would produce so much smoke that it would make the temperatures below freezing even the summertime. And we called that nuclear winter, right? Yeah. And at, at the same time, the American scientists who did it, and the Russian scientists who did it, told their leaders, uh, Ronald Reagan and Mihail Gorbachev, and they accepted the science. And this helped to motivate them to end the nuclear arms race mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so the number of nuclear weapons has been going down ever since then. And, you know, we went on to other things, but about 15 years ago, Brian Tune and Rich Richard Turco, who were two of the people that invented the term nuclear winter, along with Carl Sagan, met me at a conference and said, you know, somebody asked us what would happen if India and Pakistan had a nuclear war. Speaker 4 00:09:16 There are now nine countries with nuclear weapons. And so what about some of these new nations? The US and Russia have more than 90% of all the nuclear weapons, so what if they had a nuclear war? And so they asked me to start working on that. And I used the same climate model we were using for a volcanic eruptions to do that, and found that it wouldn't be nuclear winter, the temperatures wouldn't get below freezing, but it would still be a huge climate change colder than the little AC age of a couple hundred years ago. And we started working on that again. And then we took our modern climate model and redid the calculation of nuclear winter and found yes, these simple estimates we had in the 1980s were actually, were correct. You really would get nuclear winter mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so we, and we realized that the number of weapons that we still have on Earth, even though the arms race is over, are still enough to produce nuclear winter. And we said, oh, well, you know, we thought we solved this problem, but we haven't yet. There's still too many nuclear weapons. And so we started trying to publicize our results and make the world aware that it's still a danger. Speaker 2 00:10:17 Well, yeah. The, the arms race isn't actually really over. Brooke, do you want to ask, uh, some questions? Speaker 3 00:10:24 Oh, um, sure. <laugh>. So, uh, yeah. One question was, um, just to understand more about what the environmental impacts are of nuclear bombs going off, what, what would happen at the ground level or at a low altitude, or does happen, I should say? Cuz it's not like they don't ever go off <laugh>. So, Speaker 4 00:10:45 Well, there were two nuclear weapons atomic bombs used in warfare on Hiroshima Nagasaki 77 years ago. And they started fires. And the, the direct effects are horrific as we all know. There would be blasts, there would be radioactivity, and there would be heat and, and, and fire. And, but the, they also would start everything on fire. And so the fires would produce smoke, which would get pumped up into the upper atmosphere. We saw that clearly in Hiroshima. The, so the horrific effects are, are what everybody knows about, but we discovered that if there were enough weapons, there would be climate consequences around the world. Temperatures would, would fall far from where the bombs were dropped. The smoke would be lofted in the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere above where we live, where there's no rain to wash it out. And it would last for years, blow around the world, and temperatures would fall globally for more than five years. And this would have a huge impact on agriculture. If it gets cold, dark, and dry, you can't grow crops. And there would be a threat of, of famine. Speaker 3 00:11:53 What, what kind of scale of, um, of detonations are you talking about when you talk about those kinds of consequences? Speaker 4 00:12:03 The bombs dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, that's 15,000 tons of t n t equivalent from one bomb. The one on on Nagasaki was about 20 kilotons. Current bombs are like 150 kilotons or 500 kilotons. So they're much, much bigger than the ones that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there are thousands of them. Speaker 2 00:12:28 What, what done, what, you know, where does all the sud come from? I mean, you're focusing on the, the black stuff that goes into the atmosphere, and obviously, you know, it comes from fires, but, but what other materials are burning? I mean, what's the, what are the, the sources for this? Speaker 4 00:12:45 It's, uh, buildings, the contents of buildings, uh, oil, asphalt, roof tiles. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, anything in a, anything that, that, that's flammable. So there were studies done in the 1980s. They would take a city like Nashville and they looked at every building in the city. Yeah. Every home, every school, every factory, every library. And calculate how much material there was there. And it turns out that maybe 3% of the, of the wood of the material ends up as smoke particles. The rest, uh, is turns into carbon dioxide and water from combustion and, and some of it gets washed out by rain, but maybe 3% of the, of the particles still, uh, stay in the atmosphere. That's where the smoke comes from. Speaker 2 00:13:30 Hmm. That doesn't sound like a lot, but I guess, I guess it all adds up to quite a bit, huh? Speaker 4 00:13:35 Part of our team is trying to do these surveys with modern cities, bigger cities, and all the materials to calculate how much, how much we call it fuel. It's kind of a <laugh> jargon that to sanitize what you're talking about, but how much fuel there is, uh, in each target. Speaker 2 00:13:50 I I imagine plastics are, are making a much larger contribution or would make a much larger contribution today than Absolutely. Than the 1980s. Right. Speaker 4 00:13:58 You, you, maybe you're old enough to remember the movie The Graduate, where they went up to Ben and said, you know, yes, Ben, I've got one word for you. Plastics. Right, right. Uh, to go in and now there's a lot more plastic than there was back then. So the, there's a lot of that. Speaker 2 00:14:10 Yeah. Okay. Well, let's take a, a short break and, um, we'll come back and continue our discussion. You're listening to KS Q D 90.7 FM and k squid.org streaming on the internet. Hi k Squid listeners. This is Ronnie Lipchitz and you're listening to sustainability. Now we're in the studio with Brooke Wright, and our guests today are Dr. Alan Robach from the Environmental Sciences Department at Rutgers University. And Joshua Coop, uh, now post-doctoral researcher at Louisiana State University who did his PhD work with, uh, with Alan Robach. And we are talking about nuclear winter. So Joshua, I was sort of interested in the kind of research that, that you are doing and, and what that might motivate you to, uh, to study in the future. Speaker 5 00:15:02 So, yeah. So a lot of my work, the nuclear winter work, is really figuring out just how much the entire atmosphere, ocean circulation changes when you put all the smoke into the atmosphere. There's like a, basically like a restructuring of the atmospheric, atmospheric circulation. So, for example, one of our research findings is that there's this six to seven year long al Nino, um, that happens in a nuclear winter, which shuts down the tradewinds stops upwelling in the Pacific Ocean, which could have consequences for, uh, marine life there. Um, and there's some connections, uh, to volcanic eruptions. There's some thought that that could increase the probability of El Nino, which is just sort of like an additional layer on top of the, the changes to temperature and precipitation. So say some of the circulation changes are, uh, what I've been looking into. And there yeah, there are a lot of connections to real, uh, analogs that could happen in the future. Speaker 4 00:16:06 It's kind of counterintuitive that you get a warming of the Pacific Ocean and El Nino when the whole globe is cooling, but it's caused by the change of the atmospheric in oceanic the winds and, and the ocean currents. Hmm. Speaker 2 00:16:20 And, um, where, just, where does that heat come from? I'm, I'm not sure how to put the question right. If there's warming where, if, and everything is cooling, where does it come from or how does that work? Speaker 5 00:16:33 So during normal times, um, the, the Western Pacific is, uh, typically has a lot of heat. It's a lot warmer than the Eastern Pacific. Yeah. Okay. Uh, the, the Tradewinds get shut down in a nuclear winter just because the, there's, there's less rising air in the tropics, there's less precipitation. So all this warm water, uh, that's usually pooled up in the west mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it sloshes back to the east. And I I see it replaces. Yeah. So it's still relatively warm, um, over the course of a few years in our simulations, it's, it does cool down because there's less sunlight. Um, but there's a really strong dynamic coal response in the ocean. Speaker 4 00:17:12 Another way, another way to look at it is that these trade winds are pushing the water away from South America and bringing cold water up from below. And that's why it's colder in the East. It takes a while for the sun to heat it, but if these trade winds weaken, then there's much less cold water coming up from below. And that also allows it to warm up. Speaker 2 00:17:33 Hmm. Okay. And, and, you know, we are, we are out here in California where, uh, we get Al Ninos every so often and, and Nias in, in opposite years, what would be the impacts on, on weather on the West Coast, for example? Speaker 5 00:17:51 I think the first order effect of the nuclear winter is going to be more impactful than the El Nino Uhhuh <affirmative> in California. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, there is an increase in precipitation, strangely enough, in our simulations, which is connected to the El Nino. Yeah. Um, but it, uh, there's a small increase during summer. There's not much rain in the summer here, California. No, no. So those anomalies really wouldn't, um, do much. So yeah, the, the major impact is, is the massive cooling, um, and reduction in precipitation, uh, during the wintertime. Speaker 4 00:18:24 And what that means is you can't grow any food and, and there's not gonna be any food for people in California. Speaker 2 00:18:31 Yeah. Um, well anyway, Speaker 4 00:18:33 Uh, or the rest of the world or the rest Speaker 5 00:18:35 Of the world. Yes. Speaker 2 00:18:37 Yes. Uh, Brooke, do you wanna ask a question? <laugh> sitting there, very quiet and, uh, <laugh>, Speaker 3 00:18:44 It's such a bleak topic, honestly, <laugh>, it's so hard to figure out where to go, um, as we go through these different issues. But yeah, you just talked about food production. Could you speak a little bit more to that? Um, and one, I, I guess in a context that I was thinking about is how in climate work we'd sometimes talk about resiliency, right? And so there's some things about trying to prevent climate change. And then there's also things about trying to be prepared for the inevitable climate change. Should we also be preparing for an inevitable nuclear winter? And if we did, what would that look like in terms of food production? Speaker 4 00:19:22 I don't think so. I mean, this is a depressing thing to work on, but I work on it to try and prevent it, to try it, have it never happen. That's the solution, is to get rid of all the nuclear weapons on the world, cuz we can't use them. So, uh, you, if you had a bomb shelter and you had, uh, uh, enough food for 10 years and enough weapons to keep your, your hungry neighbors out, maybe you could survive. But I don't think that's what you, how you should prepare. You should prepare by telling the world to not spend a cho us not to spend a trillion dollars to modernize our nuclear weapon arsenal, but to use that money for having enough, uh, medical care for everybody, enough food for everybody, and not, not spending it on weapons. That's the way to solve the problem. Speaker 3 00:20:07 I, yeah, I, I, I agree. I think what I meant more was like, on a policy level, are there, um, ways like to think of it as, are there places that we should be planting food that we aren't right now that would survive a nuclear winter? You know, more from that perspective, <laugh>, Speaker 4 00:20:25 There are some people working on, can you, uh, plant potatoes which can grow underground or can you, uh, grow mushrooms in the dark on, on the dead wood and, or, or grow seaweed. But those are, I think, uh, uh, to prepare to feed the world with those really drastically changed sources of food. Uh, is e let's say you could do it, I think that might increase the probability of using nuclear weapons because people wouldn't be as worried about nuclear winters. So I don't think that's a good idea in that sense, but I don't also don't think we have the resources to prepare. By the way, you know, there's a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, uh, that was passed in the United Nations in 2017, and there's gonna be a meeting in Vienna this summer of all the countries that have signed it, 59 countries so far, and additional observers to try. And it's the message of the rest of the world telling the nine countries with nuclear weapons, we want you to get rid of them because we're worried we're gonna suffer even if no bombs are dropped here. So that's where the policy is going. Speaker 2 00:21:28 Yeah. I actually did a show on that, um, on the, uh, anniversary, I can't remember which anniversary it was, but on one of the anniversaries of the, uh, initial signing of the treaty, of course the United States has not signed it as far as I know, and Speaker 4 00:21:42 Certainly Oh, that's right. Speaker 2 00:21:43 Is is hardly likely to ratify it given the composition of the Senate. Um, you know, you did, you did, you were talking earlier about, uh, an exchange between India and Pakistan. And I'm wondering if you might say something more about, uh, what one article, uh, which I found, uh, called how a small Nuclear War would Transform the Planet, small Nuclear War Seems like an Speaker 4 00:22:10 Oxymoron. <laugh> Yeah. Speaker 2 00:22:11 But, but maybe you could say more about that. Speaker 4 00:22:15 Well, India and Pakistan, when we did our first study 15 years ago, each had about a hundred nuclear weapons mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and now each one has 150, 160, and the weapons are bigger than they were. And they are, uh, targets are, are a little bit bigger. And so they would produce so much smoke, it would get, uh, temperatures would go to 10 global average temperatures, 10 degrees Fahrenheit below normal for five years, five degrees Celsius. And so that would have a, and we have a, uh, way to calculate how different crops grow. We, we calculate for wheat, for rice, for, for corn, for soybeans, uh, and we also calculate for fisheries, uh, how would the production change if you change the climate, make it darker, make it colder, make it drier, and we've just completed calculations for every country in the world, how much food that would there be compared to, uh, now. Speaker 4 00:23:16 And we assume that the, uh, international trade would stop. People would hoard food like they hoarded toilet paper a couple years ago, and we calculated that a war between India and Pakistan could, and there's only about 60 days average food supply stored in the world. So we cal, we said, let's wait for the next year after all the stew, that food that people have stored is gone. And about 2 billion people would die. So there's only 7 billion in the world. So that's a, that's a horrible catastrophe, even from a war between two of these using less than 3% of the global nuclear arsenal. Speaker 2 00:23:58 Where, where would most of these deaths take place then? Uh, I mean, aside from the Speaker 4 00:24:03 Direct directors, they would take place at higher latitudes in places where it would get, where the agriculture would be more affected. So we calculated for every country, but for the us, for Russia, for China, mm-hmm. <affirmative> for North Korea, those are all nuclear nations. They would, they would suffer greatly. The countries in the tropics wouldn't have as much of an effect. Speaker 2 00:24:27 Huh. That's interesting. Um, you know, I know that you mentioned, you, you got started, uh, in this by studying, uh, volcanic eruptions. And, uh, I I know that, uh, I think it was 1816 was the year without a summer, right? Uh, not the little ice age. It was, uh, uh, it was because of the explosion of Krakatau. Was that what it was? Speaker 4 00:24:49 Um, no, no, it Speaker 2 00:24:51 Was differently. Speaker 4 00:24:52 It was Thera Krakatau erupted in 1883, was the, okay. The Tambora eruption erupted in 1815 mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And there was another volcano that erupted six years earlier. We don't know what it was, but we know that it erupted because we found the sulfur from it in every ice core. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so Ronald Reagan even mentioned the year without a summer when he was saying he believed nuclear winter. So, uh, and this caused, there was a book by Gillon Wood who said, if anywhere in the world if you were alive after the Tambora, you were hungry for three the next three years mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So there was, there was famine in, in Europe, in India, in China and Egypt. And so there were, and, and, and disruption to food supplies in the US too. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So, but then they, the most particles go away. Right. And so it only lost for a couple years. And so that's one analog that helps us test our theory. Another is the asteroid impact, which killed the dinosaurs. That's something that Joshua is working on right Speaker 2 00:25:54 Now. Don't, don't look up <laugh>. Yeah. Um, Speaker 4 00:25:59 Josh, do you wanna tell them what you're Speaker 2 00:26:00 Doing now? Tell us about that. Yeah. Speaker 5 00:26:02 Uh, so yeah, I'm, I am looking into the, the asteroid that took up the dinosaurs, um, and using some of the same modeling, um, except the, so the, the, the asteroid would've emitted something like a thousand kilograms of soot in addition to, uh, as a, uh, sulfates, like of like a volcanic eruption. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So the impact from that is, is a lot more. Um, but obviously Speaker 4 00:26:32 A thousand kilograms compared to like 150 terra hundred Speaker 5 00:26:36 50. Yeah. Our nuclear simulations are hundred Speaker 4 00:26:38 50 Speaker 2 00:26:39 For audience. How many trillion grams? What, how much is aerogram? Just so, so people know. They won't know what a Speaker 4 00:26:47 Terra aerogram is. A million tons. Okay. Okay. So 150 million tons of smoke from a US Russia war, Uhhuh <affirmative>. And he's talking about six times that from the asteroid impact, plus all the other rocks that got shot up into the atmosphere. Speaker 2 00:27:00 Right. Okay. Okay. Um, yeah. And that, that pretty much, and, and we know this from, um, what kind of, uh, you know, what kind of data, I mean in, in terms of the, uh, the amount of material and, uh, the, you know, how, how long it takes to fall back down. I mean, how, how do we know this? How do you know this? Speaker 5 00:27:23 We can, so there's to, to get from, um, materials being burned and then smoke getting into the atmosphere, we can make estimates about the amount of biomass that was around back then. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Okay. Um, we do have some, so there's been some research about wildfires and the emissions of black carbon and organic carbon from those mm-hmm. <affirmative> that sort of informs some, some, some of those estimates. Um, and Brian Tune has, uh, part of our group has been working on figuring out like the exact composition and how that, uh, how the type of smoke from wildfires gets into the atmosphere. So some of that would inform the figuring out what's produced by the asteroid. Um, we, we know there was an asteroid, cuz there's like this iridium layer, right. Um, across the world and we can, we, you can find evidence of black carbon or little, uh, particles across the world as well. So we know there were large fires. There are definitely, uh, error bars on those estimates. Uhhuh <affirmative>, especially cuz it was 65 million years ago. But we do know that, that there was an extinction event, and there seems to be a lot of evidence pointing to smoke, uh, enveloping the world. Speaker 4 00:28:38 You, you can look at layers in the, in the earth, and there's this layer of iridium, which is very rare on Earth, that spread around all the world. You find it everywhere. And beneath that layer of iridium, there's dinosaur bones. Right. And above that layer, there aren't any dinosaur bones. So we know that's, that, that, that's when the dinosaurs went extinct. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And, and along with the iridium, there's also carbon, there's, there's, the smoke is there in every layer too. And so we know that everything on the surface of the earth burned every forest. Everything burned and came back down, uh, eventually onto the land. Speaker 2 00:29:12 Um, we need to take a, a break and, and we'll come back and, and continue our conversation here. You're listening to Ksq D 90.7 FM and k squid.org streaming on the internet. You're listening to sustainability. Now. I'm Ronnie Lipitz here in the studio with Brooke Wright. And we're talking today with doctors Alan Robach and Joshua Coop, who have been doing research at Rutgers University on the climatic consequences of nuclear war. We were just talking about the impact, the famous impact of the, uh, the asteroid that, uh, wiped out the dinosaurs. And, uh, that is a source of data for the studies that, in particular, Joshua is, uh, is conducting. Um, okay. Uh, well to go back to my question about the, the summer without, no, the winter, the year without of summer, what was the volume or quantity of, of soot and ash thrown into the atmosphere in comparison to what you estimate would happen from that small quote unquote, uh, India Pakistan nuclear exchange? Speaker 4 00:30:22 The, uh, India Pakistan nuclear holocaust, I don't like to use the word exchange. Exchange is like you take a sweater back to the store cuz it's the wrong size. So, uh, would be maybe 20 or 30 million tons of smoke depending on the targets in the number of weapons. Uh, maybe up to 40 million tons of smoke. The tambora eruption put about 60 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas in the stratosphere mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And that reacted with water to form a cloud of maybe 90 million tons. So it would be two or three times more than from a war between Indian Pakistan, but it would fall out much more quickly after a year. Most of it would be gone, but the smoke from, uh, fires would be heated by the sun and lofted high up into the stratosphere and last for five years or more. So even though there would be less smoke to start with after a year, there would be more and it would last for much longer. Speaker 2 00:31:20 So it's, it's the soot that makes the difference, Speaker 4 00:31:22 Basically. Yes. Speaker 2 00:31:23 Uhhuh <affirmative>. Okay. Um, well let's talk a little bit about, um, about policy. Um, I know Alan, that, that you are, uh, active as a scientist around, you know, anti-nuclear, um, activities. I'm not quite sure how to, how to put it. What, what does that involve for you? Speaker 4 00:31:47 We published all of our articles so people can know what we find and we've tried to publish also in places where people would see it. So we had an article in Scientific American a couple years ago, Brian Tune and Rich Turo, and I did to explain it with nice graphics so people could understand it. Yeah. Uh, Brian Tuna and I had an op-ed in the New York Times a couple years ago about nuclear winter. Uh, but, and we have articles in the top science journals like Science and Pristine and National Academy of Sciences, but policy makers don't really read that <laugh>. Yeah. So, uh, Brian, so I, I went to the conferences on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear war that were organized by the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, uh, ahead of the, they're getting the treaty banned nuclear weapons through the United Nations in 2017. Speaker 4 00:32:40 And so I went to two of them and Mike Mills, another colleague, went to a third one. And so we told there were more than a hun delegates from more than a hundred countries that came to these meetings and we informed them about it. And then they passed this treaty. And then that year, uh, the, in October ICAN n got the Nobel Peace Prize mm-hmm. <affirmative> for getting the treaty passed and for warning the world about the humanitarian impacts of nuclear war, partly based on our results. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So now we're, we're still trying to publicize that and make the world aware of it. And, uh, so we don't have Carl Sagan anymore who's, uh, but we, thanks to you, uh, we're telling people on the radio right now. And, uh, I do, I do interviews on other, other times when I get a chance and Brian Toon and I are writing a book that we hope will get a lot of publicity. It'll be called Dead Dinosaurs and Nuclear Winter. So, uh, I gave a Ted Talk about six years ago about this work. It's gotten 30,000 views. Brian gave a talk a couple years ago about dinosaurs in nuclear winter, and it's gotten almost 7 million views. So we try to use social media. I, I I tweet about it. I, I don't tweet about what I had for breakfast, I tweet about policy things mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But if you can, uh, give me some advice cuz you're a professional I'd, I'd appreciate it. Speaker 2 00:34:00 <laugh> No, I I have no more idea how you would, you would affect policy, although I hate to say it, but it's a sort of an opportune moment, right. As I, as I began the show, um, Russia has its nuclear weapons on some sort of of readiness, and I'm, I'm assuming that although nobody has said anything, that the United States and and NATO are not just sitting around, you know, waiting for, for something to happen. So when we see, Speaker 4 00:34:29 No, it's, it turns out our weapons are always on hair trigger alert, especially the missiles out in the western part of the United States. They have to be launched within a few minutes, or they'll get destroyed if, if they're incoming, uh, missiles. And so that's a very dangerous situation because what if you're tell the president, uh, incoming, you've gotta launch and it's a mistake. The, the sensors are bad or somebody was hacked or something. So we also have missiles ready to launch on, uh, immediately from all the submarines around the world, all the nuclear submarines. And so they can be launched, uh, anytime and to use airplanes. Uh, then that would take longer. So saying I'm putting them on on alert doesn't really mean anything because they're are already on alert. Speaker 2 00:35:16 Well, okay, I I, I, I admit that, but of course, you know, Putin is, is, uh, is engaged in, uh, nuclear deterrence activity Right. By saying that he's trying to basically keep NATO from, from doing anything in support of Ukraine. But we still have, I think we still have, uh, nuclear missiles in Europe, don't we? Or were they taken, you know, I I, I have to confess, I haven't followed this very closely. I, like many others have been sort of sanguine about the, the, the, the threat for the last 30 years. Um, Speaker 4 00:35:55 And the intermediate, the intermediate range nuclear force agree. Uh, treaty, which was signed by Reagan, right. Uh, got rid of the missiles in Europe. Right. And so, but there are still nuclear weapons on, on airplanes and on cruise missiles. And so the US has a few hundred, the Russia has over a thousand. Those aren't covered by any treaty right now. The only, the only treaty, the new star treaty covers what are called strategic weapons, which are intercontinental weapons on missiles, on submarines, and on airplanes that can fly ac uh, across, uh, from one continent to the other. Speaker 2 00:36:30 Yeah. So, so, uh, the, the concern is not so much, well, I mean, it should be a concern, but, but the issue then is, uh, let's just say an unintended or accidental launch of some sort of short range, you know, let's say cruise missile, right? I mean, Russia has been using cruise missiles against Ukraine and cruise missiles are indifferent, uh, in terms of, you know, what they're armed with. Speaker 4 00:36:53 Yeah. I don't know if you, you, you read it two weeks ago, India launched a cruise missile into Pakistan and they said it was, uh, a mistake, a malfunction. Yes. It didn't have a bomb on it, it didn't hit anything that didn't destroy anything and didn't start a nuclear war. But it makes you wonder how much control India has other a nuclear forces. That's a really, and there've been many, many cases in the past where we almost had a, a nuclear war because people reported incoming, and it was really a reflection off a cloud or somebody put a training tape in, or a ba a plane was flying, dropped bombs by a mistake. So the mere existence of the, of the weapons makes it possible for them to be used. What I worry about is escalation. Yeah. What if, uh, Russia has a policy of, uh, escalate to deescalate, which doesn't make any sense, but it doesn't sound like it makes any sense what they say. We're gonna shock somebody by sh launching one weapon, and then no, nothing will happen afterwards. But how can you count on that? What if, uh, people panic and, and decide to launch a countermeasure and then they launch a bigger one? And so it can develop any st any use of nuclear weapons can develop into a global nuclear holocaust? That's what's really scary to me. Speaker 2 00:38:12 Well, that's what I was trying to, the, the, the idea that I was trying to raise, right, is that, um, once you actually put these things on alert right then, then the, uh, the temptation or the possibility of accidents go, goes up. Um, that's what what Speaker 4 00:38:31 I'm saying, what I'm saying is it's always been like that. It's not just this week, uh, just, just <laugh>. Yeah. Okay. So the, the, that, that is the scary situation. Speaker 2 00:38:41 Right. Brooke, you're, you're quiet over there, Speaker 3 00:38:45 <laugh>. I don't have quite the background Ronnie does on this topic, so I am quiet. But, um, yeah, I do have one question that came to me a little bit earlier. And this ties to policies. Is it, um, to what degree do you think the, the possibility of a nuclear winter is playing a role in the calculations of nuclear leaders? Like at this point? Speaker 4 00:39:09 I hope it's playing a big role. I hope they know about it. Uh, I, I have a Google alert on term nuclear winter, and every day I get an e email from them telling me how many articles. And in the last couple weeks, there have been a lot more. Mm. Yeah. And so I think people are worried about it. People know about it, and I think that's, he makes them hesitate. You know, we think we have a situation of mutual assured destruction, a mad policy. If you attack me, I'll attack you. So, uh, but Brian Tuna, I wrote a part, an article a couple years ago, uh, called Self-Assured Destruction. If one country launches enough to destroy another country, and the other country doesn't even reply, there'd be so much smoke that everybody in the first country would die from starvation, from the climate response. And so if you threaten to use your nuclear weapons as a deterrent, you're acting like a suicide bomber. It's a really crazy situation. Speaker 2 00:40:05 Well, I, I studied this stuff back in the 1980s when I was, well, I wasn't so young, but I was a naive grad student. Right. And, and nuclear strategy and, and deterrence is a, is sort of castles in the air, right? That it's, it's a sort of psychological exercise in which people imagine how they might rationally respond to escalation. Right. And, and then conclude that before things get out of control, somebody will stop. And of course, that's never really been put to the test. Um, so Speaker 4 00:40:37 A colleague of ours had a, uh, who's Indian had a, had a, some retired Indian and Pakistani generals, had a think tank out in Monterey, California, put them in a room and gave them situations like there was one attack, a battlefield nuclear weapon started, or, or a tank invaded, and they used a nuclear weapon. And what, and what would you do? And then what would you do going back and forth? And in some cases, the first use of a nuclear weapon was so shocking that everything stopped, but in other cases, it escalated into a full nuclear war. Speaker 2 00:41:08 Hmm. Well, <laugh>, nobody knows Right? Until, until the button button is pushed, nobody actually knows. Uh, what might, what might happen. Um, I'm gonna take another break and then we'll come back for the last portion of our show. You're listening to KS QD 90.7 FM and k squid.org streaming on the internet. You're listening to sustainability. Now, I'm Ronnie Lipitz here in the studio with Brooke Wright, and today we're speaking with doctors Alan Robach and Joshua Coop, uh, who are researchers based at Rutgers University. They've been studying, uh, various aspects of climate change, in particular, the, uh, impacts of the use of nuclear weapons on, on the world's climate. Um, well, I have, I have a, this question, Alan, and, and what is the best thing we can do at this juncture to, uh, reign in nuclear weapons and prevent nuclear war? I mean, I know that's a h uh, uh, a loaded question, but, um, seems like a good one. Speaker 4 00:42:12 By we you mean the average Speaker 2 00:42:14 Person. The average person, right. Um, Speaker 4 00:42:17 In the 1980s, in addition to the nuclear winner message from scientists to the leaders of the US and Russia, there were massive peace marches in the United States and the UK demanding an end to the nuclear arms race. People were really scared. It was really important to them. Today, there are other things that people worry about. They worry about the pandemic. They worry about their job. They worry about the price of gas. And, and nuclear Holocaust is not really high on their list. It's getting higher because of this threat from Putin. And so I think what we can do is try and organize and tell our members of Congress to ignore all the lobbyists from the, from the companies that make weapons and do something that's right for, for our country and lower our number of nuclear weapons. Why do the US and Russia have so many thousands of weapons when every other country that has them only has a few hundred, couple hundred and there's only nine countries with weapons? What about all the other countries in the world that think it's better not to have any? So why can't we emulate them? Why can't we immediately reduce our arsenal down to a couple hundred and then work with them to get rid of all of them by signing the Ban Treaty? But it's gonna take messages from people to their members of Congress to vote for that and to the president? Speaker 2 00:43:34 Well, it, it sort of remind, it reminds me of a story, a story. It might be sort of apocryphal about how we ended up with, uh, a certain number of, uh, long-range ballistic missiles, Minutemen. Um, and, and I, Robert Mcna McNamara commissioned a study which concluded that a hundred of them would be sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from attacking the United States. Um, and he brought this to the Pentagon, and the generals, of course thought so this was not enough. And so he said, how many? And they settled on this nice round number of 1000. There was no actual, uh, you know, analysis behind it. It was just, it sounded better than 100. But I know that a hundred is, is usually deemed to be sufficient for deterrence if, if deterrence works. Um, what else? Any other thoughts about that? Speaker 4 00:44:32 Uh, <laugh>? It's pretty, it's pretty frustrating. We want to warn the people about this and, and, uh, uh, you know, Eisen, president Eisenhower, when he left office warned us about the military industrial complex. And I feel really frustrated working against armies of lobbyists that come into Congress and give money to congressmen to build more weapons and give them more money, and spend, what, 700 billion a year on our defense budget. And now they're planning to spend another trillion dollars to modernize our nuclear weapons, build new missiles and new submarines, and we can't even use them. And so they, they make people afraid and say, we need them, we need more. Uh, uh, but President George h w Bush drastically reduced our arsenal when the Soviet Union was falling apart without a treaty, and the r Soviets later followed. So, I know President Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, but I was disappointed that he never reduced our arsenal. Speaker 4 00:45:31 And I know, uh, the, the Nuclear Policy Review, pasta review is now being completed in Washington. And I hope President Biden will change his policy to one of no first use of nuclear weapons. All weapons don't have all options, don't have to be on the table and take our land-based missiles off hair trigger alert. So, uh, we try to communicate with him. We, we, we, uh, write to our people that we know and talk about it as much as we can, because you really can't use them. It makes the world much more dangerous to have them. John Kennedy knew that 60 years ago. He said, assertive Damocles hangs over us. And, uh, when, when Beatrice Finn accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for ican, she said the story of nuclear weapons will have an ending. It will be the end of nuclear weapons, or it will be the end of us. One of these things will happen. Speaker 2 00:46:22 Yeah. Um, well tell Joshua, tell us a little bit about what you're going to be doing, uh, in the future in terms of research, uh, at as, especially at Louisiana. Are you gonna be at Louisiana State, or, or are you working remotely? What's, what's your situation? Speaker 5 00:46:39 Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm working, um, for LSU remotely and Right. So I'm doing this work on how the KPG asteroid impact affected, um, the Earth's ecosystems and whatnot. But I'm probably not going to, uh, I'm, I'll probably be branching out more into general climate impacts mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>, not necessarily nuclear winter, maybe volcanic eruptions. Um, Speaker 2 00:47:05 What, what's I, I'm just curious, what's the, uh, the attitude there and the department about, uh, these nuclear winter studies? It being Louisiana? Speaker 5 00:47:15 They're all very interested. Yeah. Um, I'll be giving a, a seminar on Friday. Speaker 2 00:47:20 Oh, okay. Speaker 5 00:47:21 But actually, so I have a better sense of their attitudes once I get them all in a room. <laugh> Speaker 4 00:47:26 <laugh>, are you gonna be there in person? Speaker 5 00:47:28 Yes, I will be. Speaker 4 00:47:29 Oh, oh, great. Speaker 2 00:47:30 Oh yeah. That's good. Uh, and and how about you Alan? What are you, what are your, your sort of, uh, you know, what are you look looking to do in the future? Speaker 4 00:47:40 We really want to see how crops will be affected and the current crop models, uh, need to be improved. For example, the smoke in the atmosphere will destroy, heat it up and destroy ozone and let more ultraviolet radiation reach the surface. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but our models currently don't deal with the impact of ultraviolet radiation on crops or on ecosystems. We want to improve that and do a better job of calculating that response. I also work on this, uh, idea of climate intervention or geoengineering where people have suggested a scheme to put particles in the stratosphere on purpose to reflect sunlight and cooler earth to counteract global warming. And so we're working on how that will affect agriculture too. Speaker 2 00:48:19 What's your, uh, can, can I ask what's your view of, of, of geoengineering? It's not a topic we've addressed as far as I can recall, but Speaker 4 00:48:28 If, if you could do it, uh, uh, the, you couldn't do it tomorrow cuz the technology doesn't exist. But if you could invent airplanes that could fly up there and spray su you would probably cool earth, because that's what volcanic eruptions do. We've observed that, but there would be lots of risks that came along with it. And we're trying to right now quantify the potential benefits and risks so we can make an informed decision on the future if people are ever tempted to do it. But there's a long list of potential risks. Speaker 2 00:48:54 Yeah. And I, and I I I've read that you would have to keep doing it right because Right. It wouldn't be just a, a one time. Speaker 4 00:49:02 You have to keep doing it until we stop putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and figure out to take out what's there already the solution to global warming is to leave the fossil fuels, leave the coal oil and natural gas in the ground and not to burn it. That's the solution. Speaker 2 00:49:15 Yeah. Well, you know, a a lot of the, the sort of technological fixes are, are oriented towards, uh, not giving up fossil fuels. Right. I mean, the idea is not so much, uh, to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but to, to get it out in order to, uh, put more in. Or am I being too cynical Speaker 4 00:49:35 About that? No, I don't think that's right. Uh Speaker 2 00:49:37 Oh, okay. <laugh>, let's have an argument. <laugh>. Speaker 4 00:49:41 No, I mean, geoengineering, there's two, two ways. One is reflecting sunlight. Right. And the other is to take carbon dioxide out the atmosphere, if you take it out right now, we can do it. It's very expensive. Right? Yeah. We can't do it at large scale. And if you take it out, what do you do with it? Do you, uh, make fuel out of it and burn it and put it back in? That's probably not a good idea. Or do you bury it? So, but it's even cheaper not to put it in, in the first place. But the problem is we're not doing this mitigation very fast. And so as global warming continues, should we do a little bit of stratospheric geoengineering reflecting sunlight for a few decades to keep it from getting even warmer than it would while we figure out how to take it out and mm-hmm. <affirmative> and switch to an all electric economy. That's the, that's the question. Mm-hmm. Speaker 2 00:50:23 <affirmative>. So, so you're gonna be taking a look at that? Speaker 4 00:50:26 Oh yeah. We have, we've been doing that for a long time. Yes. Speaker 2 00:50:29 Okay. And, and but while continuing your, your work on nuclear winter Speaker 4 00:50:33 Yes. And also volcanic eruptions. Speaker 2 00:50:36 Okay. Okay. Well, we're just about out of time. Is there anything that we haven't addressed that you'd like to bring up? Speaker 4 00:50:44 I could talk a lot about this. Josh, what do you want to say first? Speaker 5 00:50:48 <laugh>. Yeah, I guess I could talk a little bit about the, uh, we didn't really talk about what's new in the new simulations in terms of like the, the main part that's important, which is the smoke. Yeah. Um, like the, the, the motivation for the new studies was that we had much better models and that our models were able to simulate smoke, uh, sticking together mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And we had a really high top model so the smoke can real was able to be simulated really high up in the atmosphere. And we included a process that would enable the smoke to, to be removed faster. But even, even though we included that, the impacts were still, um, the smoke still lasted five years mm-hmm. <affirmative>, which was an important, um, it was important to show that even including like a more realistic smoke representation mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it still lasted five to six years and the impacts really weren't lessened compared to previous studies. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So there's a, something like a 10 degree Celsius or, uh, almost 20 degree Fahrenheit reduction in global temperatures in this US Russia case mm-hmm. <affirmative> within a couple of years mm-hmm. <affirmative>, which is nuclear winter. Yeah. And which would be pretty horrible Speaker 4 00:52:03 <laugh>. There've been a couple large forest fires recently in Canada. And in Australia that pumps smoke up into the stratosphere and then the sun heated it and lofted it up another 10 or 20 miles. And so this is a process we've simulated in our climate models that would happen after nuclear war. And this is a way to test it. We actually saw it happen in the real world and our models did st a good job of simulating it, and that gives us more confidence. But of course, a nuclear war, we produce a lot more smoke than these forest fires as bad as they were. Speaker 3 00:52:32 And when, when you say in our, in our models, this is all digital modeling. Speaker 4 00:52:36 Yeah. This is the same computer program we use to make weather forecasts every day. We Okay. Start off with the initial conditions of the atmosphere and we calculate how the winds will change and how clouds will change and, and, and so forth. And we just do it for a long time and we look at, uh, we don't look at the actual weather on a day because chaos doesn't allow us to, we a we do a number of runs and we average them and that's the average climate that we get. Yeah. So their computer program is, they run on the biggest computers in the world. Speaker 3 00:53:04 Okay. Got it. Speaker 2 00:53:06 Okay. Well listen, thank you very much, uh, Dr. Alan Robach and Dr. Joshua Coop for being our guests on sustainability now. Speaker 4 00:53:15 Thank you so much for your interest in our work. Speaker 3 00:53:18 Yes, thank you. And hopefully, you know, let us know if you see those, um, numbers on your Google tracker go up for people looking up nuclear winter <laugh>, Speaker 1 00:53:28 Thanks to your show. Thanks very much. Thanks Speaker 3 00:53:30 To our show, <laugh>. Thank you both. Great. Okay, bye-bye. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find [email protected] g slash sustainability now. And you can also find them on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Pockets among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks Ronnie. And thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K S Q D, your community radio station. And so until next, every other Sunday, sustainability, now Speaker 1 00:54:08 We Speaker 6 00:54:10 Meet again. Don't know when. Don't know Speaker 1 00:54:16 When. Speaker 6 00:54:18 But I know we'll meet again some sunny day. Speaker 1 00:54:29 Keep Speaker 6 00:54:30 Smiling through just like you always do. Till the blue skies drive the dark clubs far Speaker 1 00:54:44 Away. Speaker 6 00:54:48 So will you please say hello to the folks that I know? Tell them I won't belong. They'll be happy to know. That is, you saw God, I was singing this Speaker 1 00:55:09 Song. We Speaker 6 00:55:13 Meet again. Don't know Speaker 1 00:55:16 When. Speaker 6 00:55:18 Don't know Speaker 1 00:55:19 When. Speaker 6 00:55:21 But I know we meet again. Song Sunny Speaker 1 00:55:27 Day.