Part 1 of 2 Parts
     I have seen a lot of questionable ideas about how to deal with climate change but today I am going to post about one of the most outrageous suggestions. There is an idea circulating that nuclear war might be the answer to climate change. The validity of this idea was fact-checked by Newsweek.
     International nuclear tensions have been getting a lot of attention due to the ongoing war waged by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. There has been discussion of the potential for a small nuclear ware to cause a global cooling. Now the possibilities of such global cooling are being explored.
     Following a nuclear war, the whole Earth would be covered with a layer of soot that would prevent sunlight from reaching the surface because of smoke rising high into the atmosphere from the burning cities. After even a small nuclear war, it has been estimated that global temperatures would fall by more than two degrees Fahrenheit for two to three years. In some tropical areas, temperatures could drop from five to seven degrees Fahrenheit.
     Ron Filipkowski is a former federal prosecutor. Following the appearance of a Twitter thread about this idea, he uploaded a video of Donald Trump Jr. to Twitter. In the video, Trump Jr. is seen speaking to the camera about nuclear war. Trump Jr claims to have read a new article in the previous week that discussed how a minor nuclear conflict might help with global warming or maybe the climate crisis. Trump Jr gave no source for his claims.
     ‘Climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are neither equivalent, not interchangeable. The consensus among scientists has moved from use of climate change to climate warming. Climate warming is deemed to be more accurate and comprehensive when describing the great changes that Earth’s weather and temperature patterns are undergoing.
     Newsweek Fact Check investigated the scientific consensus on the subject in order to see if there was any research to support the claim. The is a great deal of evidence that suggests that a nuclear war would temporarily lower global temperatures. The evidence points to this being particularly true only on land, does not solve the problem of global warming or the wider climate crisis.
     Researchers from various institutions around the globe have suggested in a study that was published in the August issues of the journal Nature Food in August that a nuclear war would eject significant amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere of the Earth. This cloud of soot would then spread around the globe and “rapidly cool the planet.” The severity of the impact, of course, would depend on the size of the nuclear war.
     The study suggested that a hypothetical nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India could release from five to forty-seven million metric tons of soot into the atmosphere. A more serious conflict between the U.S. and Russia could release over one hundred and fifty metric tons of soot.
Please read Part 2 next