Cali-Texas and big florida fighting the feds over who gets to be the true Heir of Hitler while the northwest has a Maoist Insurgency lol 
Cali-Texas and big florida fighting the feds over who gets to be the true Heir of Hitler while the northwest has a Maoist Insurgency lol
With how fires work it’s really not different. One firebombing is the same as a several nukes in that regard, which is the (condescending) yet misguided point I’m responding to.
i’m not saying nuclear weapons make special magic fire, i’m telling you a big concentrated fire has different effects on the environment than smaller, spread out (geographically or chronologically) ones. because two processes work the same on a micro level does not mean you can conflate them. campfires over a long enough period might produce the same amount of smoke and particulates as a volcanic eruption, but only one of those is blocking out the sun
Firebombing is what makes a big concentrated fire. When Tokyo was firebombed it continued burning for days and had significant impacts on the weather. Same for Dresden.
Nukes actually don’t make a big concentrated fire. The examples we have of them used in cities show that they make a large number of small fires. In [edit: Hiroshima], those fires then merged into much larger ones as they caught on through a very flammable city (mostly wooden structures). The fire risk is lesser than with firebombings, which intentionally use incendiary devices to ensure a given target lights on fire, usually in clusters to ensure the fires are past a critical point to be self-maintaining.
Nukes are not dangerous because they cause fires. They’re dangerous because they leave behind radioactivity and because you can blow up a lot of things at once. This was and is considered a significant tactical advantage, as you can disable “the enemy” in one round, but if they also have nukes they’ll try to do the same, and in the process you’ll destroy so many population centers and possibly leave them uninhabitable for decades depending on the exact kind of bomb used.
you’re being incredibly myopic, this isn’t about comparing the damage to individual cities based on munitions. if we went to the trouble of hand-placing a firebomb in every structure of a city we could ensure 100% damage! that’s the most dangerous form of warfare right there! MIRVs can target 10 cities, there’s hundreds of these missiles. the smoke of 100 cities in the same day causes crop failures and temperature changes, the year (optimistic estimate) it would take to do that with a normal air campaign would limit those effects.
this is why they’re different. if all 500 nuclear tests that have ever been done in 80 years all happened tomorrow, the effects on our climate would be substantially different from the same spaced out over 80 years.
I’m not being myopic, I’m just addressing items as they are presented to me and trying to do them one at a time. I’ll try doing multiple at a time, maybe it will be more constructive.
Consider that firebombing causes far more fire than nukes and that forest fires regularly release far more soot. I’m suggesting that we do think of the scale here, and think about the logic at hand, given that nukes’ primary impact is actually not starting fires or soot production. Both regular forest fires and volcanic activity produces comparable amounts of this already, and firebombing does way more of it. The number of nukes you’re describing would likely produce less cooling materials than Krakatoa.
I haven’t gotten to the topic of nuclear winter yet because I thought the other points might settle it first. But nuclear winter is, itself, very poorly evidenced and depends on speculation that flies in the face of what evidence we do have. It assumes that particulates in the stratosphere would hit some turning point where they stop acting like they usually do, with basically no mechanistic basis. It’s just a speculative and very very simple linear model from the 80s that got turned into pop science and water cooler chat.
Nukes are still horrible, as are all the weapons we’ve mentioned, but nuclear winter is not anywhere near the thing to rationally fear from them.
oh so you just have a bizarre bone to pick with nuclear winter theory. here’s some homework, why don’t you use this overview of modern research and tell me how all these post-2000 studies are based on 80’s line graph bunkum
“Deconstruct this paper” is not something I’m particularly interested in given the bad faith with which you’ve approached this conversation, including summarizing what I’ve said to you as simply, “a bizarre bone to pick with nuclear winter theory”, something so obviously false that it’s basically just lying. If you’d like to discuss this further some time a day or more from now in a comradely way I’d be happy to.
the belief that undergirds your arguments is the belief that nuclear weapons do not have climatic effects, you said lots of other things, but they only make sense in the context of that belief. clearly i got nowhere emphasizing scale because it doesn’t matter how much smoke or fire ever happens if it cannot cause climate change. therefore you need to look at the modern research and refine your criticism of it or reconsider your assessment of the theory.
Please disengage