Does anyone care anymore what Carl Sagan wrote 30 years ago? Half the population is too young to even know who he was. I question whether anyone who was under 30 in 1986 even remembers anything about the early debates. Surely what is more important now is our current understanding of the climate effects of a nuclear exchange, and even that is, frankly, not all that important, since the proposition that "a nuclear exchange would be bad" is amply supported by a thousand other variables.
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 9:59 PM, Russell Seitz <[email protected]>wrote: > Dear Alan; > > You are trying to deny the elephant sized apple in the room-- your effort > to redefine 'nuclear winter ' downward amonts to raw semantic aggresion in > the light of how Carl Sagan made its quantitative meaning perfectly clear > by telling a national television audience it was "precisely" like the K-T > impact. > > That astronomical megahype leaves you, as the neologism's defender, to > explain to us why you and a few true believers are still enamored of the > phrase when both parameter studies and more sophisticated models have so > thoroughly defrosted it? > > The numbers talk, even if you don't like the look of them side by side > - TTAPS publicists( Porter Novelli) were retained before the paper was > published to create a cold war factoid by applying the tern to a fruit > salad of over twenty ( not three) scenarios. Some were based on > non-existant arsenals and others injected* no *smoke or carbon black into > the atmosphere, let alone the 5 Tg Alan has modeled. The failure of Sagan > to incorporate ocean thermal mass from the one dimensional model TTAPS was > one of many reasons Steve Schneider took him to task in Foreign Affairs. > > Another was Sagan's insistance in its pages that just the sort of > low-yield regional exchange Alan has modeled " a pure tactical exchange, in > Europe say" fought with sub-Hiroshima yield neutron bombs would still > precipiate a global deep freeze. > > > History is full of prophets of doom who fail to deliver, but I appreciate > that you have wisely refrained from emulating TTAPS most unrealistic > parameterizations in your work. So would I, because the early models > larger-than-life fuel loadings and arsenals have long since been > discredited . perhaps you should recall the sober title of the *Ambio* > article > in which Paul Crutzen first broached the subject ; *Twilight at Noon*, > > That phrase pretty well nails what you've modeled, and may indeed explain > why first broad-ranging study to review the TTPS results, the 1985 NAS > /NRC report*The Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear Exchange *does > not even contain the expression 'nuclear winter , and succesive > generations of more advanced models all failed to reproduce the " > apocalyptic predictions" publicized at the Cold War's height. > > Having known Sin at Hiroshima, science was bound to run into advertising > sooner or later - anybody can tell a systems programmer to paint a model > sky pitch black but justifying such an action on retrospect is an > altogether different matter.. > > On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 7:49:34 PM UTC-4, Alan Robock wrote: > >> Dear Russell, >> >> You are comparing apples and oranges, or apples and something that is not >> even fruit. Are you doing this on purpose to fool readers or did you not >> even read the papers and understand what was done? >> >> Here are the differences: >> >> 1. TTAPS looked at three scenarios of global nuclear war, and our >> scenario was only 100 Hiroshima size weapons, with a total explosive power >> of 1.5 MT (which could produce 5 Tg of smoke). So the scenarios differ by >> factors of 67 to 6,667 in terms of explosive power and about 100 in terms >> of smoke generated for the TTAPS baseline case. Why would you expect the >> response to be the same? >> >> 2. The TTAPS model had no heat capacity at the surface, so it was a >> model of the response in a continental interior. I think what you plotted >> was our global average response. The globe is 70% ocean. So the global >> average response would be more than10 times smaller than the middle of a >> continent. >> >> Do you think anyone will be fooled by your figure? Wouldn't you be >> surprised if the response did not differ by factors of 100 to 1000? >> >> >> Alan >> >> Alan Robock, Professor II (Distinguished Professor) >> Editor, Reviews of Geophysics >> Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program >> Associate Director, Center for Environmental Prediction >> Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-848-932-5751 >> Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644 >> >> 14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected] >> >> New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~**robock >> <http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock> >> >> On 9/26/2012 6:32 PM, Russell Seitz wrote: >> >> Here are the time-temperature curves of the 1983 'nuclear winter ' model, >> and those of Robock et al. 2007 , superimposed on the same scale: >> >> >> http://s1098.photobucket.com/**albums/g370/RussellSeitz/?** >> action=view¤t=**TTAPSROBOCK.jpg<http://s1098.photobucket.com/albums/g370/RussellSeitz/?action=view¤t=TTAPSROBOCK.jpg> >> >> >> >> >>>> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "geoengineering" group. >> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/** >> msg/geoengineering/-/**jfeEpqIpJ0gJ<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/-/jfeEpqIpJ0gJ> >> . >> To post to this group, send email to geoengi...@googlegroups.**com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineerin...@** >> googlegroups.com. >> >> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** >> group/geoengineering?hl=en<http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en> >> . >> >> >> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "geoengineering" group. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/-/1U0iCTqy8lIJ. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. 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