Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change: Part Two

I agree with Eben Harrell, nuclear weapons are the #1 threat.
The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists also places nuclear weapons as the #1 threat.
Al Gore placed global warming "alongside" nuclear war.
However, it really doesn't matter which is #1 and which is #2,
as long as it's recognized that these are the top two threats to the environment.

It must also be recognized that these can act synergistically:
- nuclear winter will cause conservative crackpots to say "see, it's snowing all over the world, that disproves global warming"
- the survivors of nuclear winter will burn lots of fossil fuels trying to survive and rebuild civilization, making long-term global warming even worse
- misguided attempts to reduce emissions with nuclear energy will increase the frequency of deterrence failure
- political destabilization from global warming will increase the frequency of deterrence failure

From the original blogpost:


I would argue that it's not just nuclear deterrence that has avoided a nuclear war, but diplomacy. According to Wikipedia we have reduced the number of active nuclear weapons in the world from 65,000 in 1985 to 8,000 today. Over that same period (1985-2009) we have increased our emissions of CO2 from 21 Gt/yr to 31 Gt/yr. This represents an increase of 55% in CO2 production compared to an 85% decrease in nuclear warheads over the last 25 years.

8000 nuclear warheads is still too many of course, but the reduction is evidence of the effectiveness of diplomacy on the risk of nuclear war. There is no corresponding evidence that diplomatic action has done anything to combat the ongoing increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, because it hasn't. It's a truism to say that it's not the warheads themselves that pose the greatest risk, it's their use. In contrast, the mere existence of excessive CO2 in the atmosphere poses a clear and present danger to a wide variety of life on earth, including us. Unlike nuclear war, we don't need to push a button to unleash this holocaust on the earth - it's already underway.

It's disingenuous to point to the Doomsday Clock and the BAS as "evidence" that nuclear weapons are "the #1 threat". That was not one of their findings, it's one of their assumptions. That distinction is what identifies them, in this capacity, not as scientists but as polemecists. IOW, it's not science, it's their opinion.

Regarding your personal points:

- nuclear winter will cause conservative crackpots to say "see, it's snowing all over the world, that disproves global warming"

That's just stupid. Nuclear winter will cause everyone to say, "Gee we had a nuclear war. I wish we'd worked a bit harder at diplomacy."

- the survivors of nuclear winter will burn lots of fossil fuels trying to survive and rebuild civilization, making long-term global warming even worse

Unlike what we are already doing? We already burn all the fossil fuels we can get out of the ground, just trying to expand our existing civilization. If anything a nuclear war would reduce the FF consumption because the existing FF infrastructure would be severely compromised and there would be no cheap oil with which to rebuild it.

- misguided attempts to reduce emissions with nuclear energy will increase the frequency of deterrence failure

I'm not quite sure what this means. I think it means that you think that nuclear power lets people build more bombs. There are a couple of problems with that. The first being that deterrence rests on there being bombs in the first place. In the world of MAD more bombs = more deterrence - kind of like an insane reductio ad absurdum of the Second Amendment. But that's just a nit-pick of your personal formulation of the issue. The real problem lies in the fact that this view completely ignores the role of diplomacy as outlined above in preventing war. Of course the use of thorium would obviates this and other problems in their entirety.

- political destabilization from global warming will increase the frequency of deterrence failure

If you're saying that political destabilization increases the chances of war, I agree. However, climate change isn't the only destabilizing factor at work in the world. The rising costs and reduced economic activity portended by Peak Oil suggests that poverty, inflation and infrastructure breakdown is on the way world-wide. This is, IMO, a much greater threat to global political stability in the next two decades than climate change. And it's a threat that can be reduced through the use of non-fossil energy. One very convenient, concentrated form of such energy is, of course, nuclear power. So I could make the claim that the increased use of civilian nuclear power for electricity actually reduces the probability of nuclear war. And I think such a position is better founded than yours.

So, in sum, I think your fears are misplaced, and your opposition to nuclear power is misguided.

You use raw number changes in nuclear stockpiles vs CO2 production in a bizarre exercise attempting to paint the extinction of life on the planet by a full nuclear exchange as somehow not of concern. That's just sick.

Claiming that another's science is "just opinions" is a tried and true ploy of sophists for decades now, especially in the climate change realm. The basis of the falsehood lies in the philosophy of science and the difference between verifiability and falsifiability as a means of discovering useful knowledge via the scientific process. In the laboratory of the real world appeals such as you have made here to Popper are seldom based on an actual understanding and are little more than a standard ploy of shallow argumentation. The findings of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist are based on probability theory and represent the best theories that are in existence.


I'll leave it for Bananas to point out the details of your shallow spin on behalf of the nuclear industry in the "personal points" you recite.

In short though, your claims that nuclear power is needed and that nuclear power is not related to nuclear weapons proliferation are simply not supported by the empirical evidence. The fact is that pressure to deploy more nuclear power is counterproductive to the goal of moving away from a carbon-based economy in the most expeditious manner possible. Should we pursue it, there are significant attendant environmental and human risks that do not exist with the renewable alternatives.

I didn't say "the extinction of life on the planet by a full nuclear exchange (i)s somehow not of concern". I said that the extinction of some fraction of life on this planet by nuclear war is less probable than the extinction of some fraction of it by global warming. Both are of concern, but the higher probability event (the one that is in progress and is not currently being managed) should be of higher concern.

I didn't call BAS members' science "opinion". I said that "their position that nuclear war is the number one threat to the planet" is an opinion. It has to be, since it's impossible to say that an event that has never occurred and whose necessary precursor (the deployment of active nuclear weapons) is being reduced is the number one threat to the planet. As far as I can tell that's an opinion, since proving it would involve doing comparable risk analyses of all similar large-scale threats - and that hasn't been done. The awareness of global warming as a planetary threat is still too new, and is even still controversial in some quarters, so it has never been put head-do-head with nuclear war (so far as I know) in such an analysis. BAS has great theories about the effects of nuclear war, but their starting point - that this is the worst threat the world faces - is an assumption. With nuclear war on one side and PETM on the other, PETM wins the die-off contest hands down. And if there is the slightest risk that our activities could recreate PETM and we're not doing anything to avoid it, then (IMO) it's a greater threat than nuclear war.

The comparison of the effects of diplomacy on the global arsenal of active nuclear weapons (the ones that would be used in any hypothetical exchange) to the effects of diplomacy on the active CO2 in the global atmosphere doesn't speak to the relative risks posed by an atomic bomb versus a quantity of CO2. Rather, it's an acknowledgement that diplomacy, negotiation, treaties and regulation are the only means we have at our disposal to contain the risks of our activities - and that they seem to be working quite well in the case of nuclear weapons, but not at all in the case of CO2.

You may feel that my slightly mischievous observation about spreading nuclear power reducing the chances of nuclear war is sophistry, but I assure you it's not intended that way. Political instability is the main cause of war, and as we're seeing in the Middle East, poverty, inflation and disempowerment (in both the political and energetic sense) are contributors. Anything that reduces political instability will reduce the threat of war, whether nuclear of conventional. If declining energy is a cause of poverty then increasing it should improve the situation (ceteris paribus, of course). If we can get windmills spinning in every oil exporting nation that is near or past its peak, we will help the situation. Those nations are much more likely to favour a nuclear power infrastructure, though - it's the sort of thing they are used to, and in the short to medium term is more likely to implemented to the scale required.

Edited to add: Regarding the number of weapons decommissioned between 1985 and 2009, even if you count the weapons not currently on active status, the reduction has been 66%. The point remains that we have done something about nuclear war, while we've done nothing whatsoever about climate change. That alone puts climate change on the top of my hit list.

> Regarding the number of weapons decommissioned between 1985 and 2009, even
> if you count the weapons not currently on active status, the reduction has been 66%.
> The point remains that we have done something about nuclear war, while we've done
> nothing whatsoever about climate change. That alone puts climate change on the top
> of my hit list.

Good post.
:toast:

You wrote:
It's disingenuous to point to the Doomsday Clock and the BAS as "evidence" that nuclear weapons are "the #1 threat". That was not one of their findings, it's one of their assumptions. That distinction is what identifies them, in this capacity, not as scientists but as polemecists. IOW, it's not science, it's their opinion.

First, it's not disingenuous to use expert opinion as evidence, expert opinion is recognized as valid evidence by the courts, primary care physicians will refer patients to various experts in different specialized fields, etc.

Second, it's not one of their assumptions, it's a conclusion they've come to based on their many years of experience as scientists. Your attempt to disregard them is similar to how conservatives try to disregard the conclusions of the IPCC scientists.

You claim that the people behind the "doomsday clock" are scientists but I've never read in any science text that you start with your conclusion and then find the facts to match it. That is what the "clock" does, there is no other way to describe it.

Instead of looking at all the environmental threats that face the world, analysing each to determine their relative effect or relative risk, then from that data deducing which one is the most pressing danger facing humankind, these "scientists" start with the conclusion that nuclear bombs are the #1 threat to the species and then work backwards to find "evidence" or "justification" for their claim. That just doesn't sound like a proper application of the scientific method to me.

There are so many environmental time bombs that are ticking away as we speak:

Poisoned rivers:
A Poisoned River Means a Dying Population -- http://www.irenees.net/fr/fiches/analyse/fiche-analyse-633.html
Fishing for a solution for Texas' Trinity River, poisoned with PCBs - http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/64555507.html
Dow poisons its own back yard: dioxin levels are more than a thousand times higher than state safety limit -- http://bhopal.net/petition/application/views/midland_more.html

Toxic air:
Schools near industry face chemical peril -- http://content.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/smokestack/index
How are people exposed to air toxics? -- http://www.epa.gov/oar/toxicair/newtoxics.html
EPA: 600 neighborhoods have toxic air -- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31514205/ns/us_news-environment/
Major primary pollutants produced by human activity -- http://downwindersatrisk.org/air-101.html

Global Climate Change:
We have only 100 months to act on the climate crisis -- http://www.greenpeace.org/india/en/news/cricket/
Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase -- http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/key-findings
Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States -- http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40079

Peak Oil:
The dangers of peak oil -- http://www.planestupid.com/blogs/2008/05/19/dangers-peak-oil
The Peak Oil Crisis: The Crunch -- http://www.postcarbon.org/article/73961-the-peak-oil-crisis-the-crunch
Oil crunch: An ‘urgent, clear and present danger’ -- http://www.greenbang.com/oil-crunch-an-urgent-clear-and-present-danger_13644.html

Etc., etc., etc.

There are a thousand crises happening all at once yet these "scientists" declare that nuclear war is the most pressing problem of all. That just shows their lack of research and their myopic focus on a non-existent problem.

The truth: nuclear bombs *prevent* war. North Korea (we're never going to attack them), the USSR (we would never have attacked them openly), Iran (might have the bomb we don't know), Iraq/Afghanistan (do NOT have the bomb, we invaded as soon as the lunatics thought they could get away with it).

Now for the countries that didn't have a nuclear bomb, the CIA and our US Military attack at will:

• 1947 -- Greece
  
• 1953 -- Iran
  
• 1954 -- Guatemala
  
• 1954-1958 -- North Vietnam (failed attempt to prop up a puppet regime)
  
• 1956 -- Hungary (failed attempt to incite a coup/revolt)
  
• 1957-1973 -- Laos — The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections.
  
• 1959 -- Haiti
  
• 1961 -- The Bay of Pigs (failed), Dominican Republic (assassination of national leader), Ecuador, Congo (Zaire)
  
• 1963 -- Dominican Republic, Ecuador
  
• 1964 -- Brazil
  
• 1965 -- Indonesia, Dominican Republic (U.S. Marines land to uphold the military regime by force), Greece, Congo (Zaire)
  
• 1967 -- Greece
  
• 1969 -- Uruguay (CIA torturer Dan Mitrione arrives in Uruguay... The torture techniques he teaches to the death squads rival the Nazis’)
  
• 1970 -- Cambodia (The CIA overthrows Prince Sahounek, ultimately resulting in the Khmer Rouge, which achieves power in 1975 and massacres millions of its own people)
  
• 1971 -- Bolivia
  
• 1973 -- Chile
  
• 1975 -- Australia, Angola,
  
• 1979 -- El Salvador
  
• 1980 -- El Salvador (CIA-trained death squads roam the countryside... By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans will be killed.)
  
• 1989 -- Panama
  
• 1990 -- Haiti
  
• ... just to name a few governments that have been violently overthrown or destabilised by the USA
  
• ... courtesy of: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

I'm sure that the citizens of those nations are soooo glad that they didn't have any nuclear bombs, thus allowing the CIA and the US Military to run them down and gun them down. I'm sure that they feel so secure without those *scary* nuclear bombs hanging around.

You wrote, 'You claim that the people behind the "doomsday clock" are scientists ...'
:rofl:
You don't even understand how stupid and ignorant your statement is.
:rofl:

I think I fucked up regarding the BAS. I'll be back later.

I just took a look at their web site. Colour me chagrined.

The last time I'd really looked into the organization was ten years ago, at which time they were a single-issue group. I think their focus was warranted at the time too, because climate change hadn't yet percolated up as a serious global risk. As time went on and I developed my interest in the intersecting crises in ecology, climate change, population and Peak Oil, I left my concerns about nuclear war behind. I didn't bother thinking about BAS any more, because I knew what they were all about, and I felt that their position on nuclear war had been overtaken by events (and much bigger Horsemen).

So just now I went over for a look, and what do I find? Their top issues are nuclear weapons, climate change, threats from the life sciences and the effects of population growth and human activity on the planet. Whey they move the hands of their infamous clock they take all these factors into account, and any one of them can assume precedence based on their current assessment of the threats. They've morphed into a group of interdisciplinary ecologists. James Hanson of NASA, Tony Haymet of Scripps and Robert Socolow are on the science board.

Now, their board still has an obvious bias towards nuclear security, but at least they are no longer the one-trick pony I thought they were. I seem to have a lot of new, pleasantly doomerish reading in front of me.

Recommended: http://www.thebulletin.org/

He makes a very convincing argument. Nicely done GG.

It's the logic.

Thanks, josh.

Covert wars in Central America and across the globe
A massive conventional military build-up
"Peacekeeper" MX missiles
Strategic Defense Initiative
Space-based nuclear weapons systems
Destabilizing anti-ballistic systems

The very idea is ludicrous.