Climate change and nuclear war are not orthogonal risks.
Climate change leads to conflict.
For example, the Syria drought of 2006-2010.
More climate change leads to larger conflicts, and large conflicts can lead to nuclear exchanges. Think about what happens if India and Pakistan (both nuclear powers) get into a major conflict over water again.
I don't see how the two aren't linked to be completely honest. Yeah the cold war "softened" a bit, but with conflicts arising due to climate change, the future wars could turn incredibly nasty, _especially_ with nuclear weapons and unstable people with access to them now asking why we can't use them....
If the USA, Russia or any other nuclear power does it there won't be a war. Nuclear is the key word here, Those wars are much more costly than any amount climate change.
India and Pakistan didn’t nuke each other last time(s)… even though they had nuclear weapons.
The assumption we’d need to use nukes is insane. For the same cost (and energy requirements) for a set of nukes we can filter salt from ocean water or collect rain.
I agree famine and drought can cause conflict. But we are no where need that. If you read the climate change predictions (from the UN), they actually suspect more rain (and flooding) in many regions.
It's probably not the US, China, or Russia that we need to be most worried about. I'd be most worried about India and Pakistan.
They both heavily depend on Himalayan glaciers for fresh water, and that supply will be heavily affected by climate change if the world does not act. They could easily end up at war over water rights.
Neither of them has the really big nukes the big players have, but it turns out that you don't need big nukes to cause serious worldwide problems.
This paper [1], summarized in this article [2], looked at a scenario where India and Pakistan have a nuclear war involving 100 nukes of the size as the one used on Hiroshima (15 kiloton blast), directed at the most populated areas. That's about 1/3 of the total number of nukes those two countries have.
They estimated based on the amount of combustible material in the target areas that the resulting firestorms would put about 1.5 Tg of soot aerosol into the upper atmosphere. They then apply climate models to predict the effect of that.
The result is a 1.8 C temperature reduction and 8% precipitation reduction for several years, which would have a serious effect on food crops. They used state of the art crop models to estimate food loss over time. They found the strongest effects would be in temperate regions of the US, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 years.
It's not an end of humanity scenario at that point, but would result in widespread world hunger for a long time, and not just in the poor countries. That could trigger wars involving more of the world's nuclear powers, including ones with much bigger bombs.
I would just like to remind everybody that nuclear war is still a major threat! It didn’t evaporate with the USSR, despite how people act. The US and Russia still have thousands of warheads ready to go at a moment’s notice. The numbers are down substantially from their peak, but the arsenals are still large enough to thoroughly wreck civilization.
I’m constantly baffled at how everyone acts like nuclear war is a historical curiosity.
This is not to take away from climate change, which is also a major threat. It’s not either-or, we should fix both.
Nuclear weapon proliferation is actually two risks fighting each other for total risk curves fighting each other - conventional war prevention and irrational actor risk. More proliferation prevents conventional wars. Pakistan and India have limited themselves to skirmishes at worst. However the more proliferation the greater the risk of a suicidal actor who doesn't care about or seeks mutually assued destruction.
If you want world peace betweeen nations at any cost give every nation ICBMs and nuclear warheads sufficient to break through enough of everyone's defenses - it will last unless and until thermonuclear war starts.
Do you have a citation on nuclear winter not being a thing? The last thing I read on the subject was that even a full blown exchange between india and pakistan would be enough to wreak havoc on agriculture in large swaths of the world for a year or two
This is akin to saying the risk of nuclear weapons isn't that they'll be used in large numbers, but that they'll cause a power imbalance that lets nuclear-armed nations extend the nuclear umbrella as a diplomatic tool, act with relative impunity, and use them at a small scale against non-nuclear opponents.
Yes, that's a problem, and it's a problem that has a lot more examples in the real world. It doesn't automatically invalidate the problem of large-scale nuclear war. They're both big problems.
Same with climate change vs air pollution, political scandal deepfakes vs naked celebrity deepfakes, etc.
Well even that is not an ethically straightforward issue. Nuclear proliferation reduces the frequency and typical intensity of violent conflicts, in exchange for risking an extremely high intensity conflict.
Dealing with climate change is going to be a fraught, expensive, and slow process no matter how you approach it. Nuclear technology has advanced and improved since the last plant was built in the U.S. If we don't reduce carbon emissions dramatically, the resulting catastrophe is going to make Fukushima -- and even Chernobyl -- look mild by comparison.
And who are we to say who can and cannot have nuclear weapons? The United States' claim to the moral high ground is pretty shaky nowadays, particularly with regards to Saudi Arabia. Saudi (and Iran too) is what it is in no small measure because of our meddling in their politics. If we don't like the results, well, you reap what you sow.
2 and 3 doesn't really matter when talking about countries that already have nuclear weapons. If they would get serious about climate change, they could provide those facilities to other countries at cost.
We were lucky nuclear war didn't happen, and it still might.
I think the risk of nuclear war is higher now, with more nations having more weapons, fewer treaties preventing profession, and an increasingly multipolar power dynamic in international affairs.
Climate change leads to conflict. For example, the Syria drought of 2006-2010.
More climate change leads to larger conflicts, and large conflicts can lead to nuclear exchanges. Think about what happens if India and Pakistan (both nuclear powers) get into a major conflict over water again.
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