The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 566-580
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From page 566... ...
Such long time frames may seem excessive, but if some of the speculated effects of nuclear war are actually realized, it may indeed take centuries before native ecosystems restabilize. Also, when referring to long-term effects of the magnitude required to have a major impact on entire ecosystems, it is clear that the driving force would not be the direct effects of nuclear war.
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From page 567... ...
Figure 1 represents my reaction to much of what I have read in this volume. The projected impacts of global nuclear war involve extreme extrapolations beyond observational experience.
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From page 568... ...
One of the central issues in the "nuclear winter" scenario is the very important question: Have we perceived and modeled correctly all of the relevant processes that might be important in this situation, which is far beyond our observational experiences? Of course, this concern is not one sided.
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From page 569... ...
The global climate models are now being used to predict the effects known as "nuclear winter"; these effects generally consist of lower temperatures and lower light levels on the Earth's surface, and some predictions include lower amounts of rainfall. Typically, effects are predicted that are most severe for about 30 days, and then a return to normality is indicated.
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From page 570... ...
Now that the predicted temperature changes are more moderate, the problem of predicting biological and ecological effects has become more difficult. The data plotted in Figure 2 are not the last word in predictions of changes in the global climate.
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From page 571... ...
Plotted in Figure 3 are some data taken from MacCracken,~2 who has examined the sensitivity of his calculated changes in temperature to the amount of smoke injected. (The temperature changes plotted here are calculated for 10 days after smoke injection into the Northern Hemisphere between 20° and 70° n.
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From page 572... ...
study. His presentation indicated that the SCOPE study had encountered difficulty in trying to predict biological and ecological consequences of "nuclear winter," when the predictions from the global climate models were undergoing substantial changes.
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From page 573... ...
and Stanford University recently cohosted a workshops with the goal of examining the current state of knowledge that can be applied to predicting the biological and ecological effects of a postulated "nuclear winter." A major result of that workshop was that the ability to make quantitative predictions is very poor, but there is a large body of expert opinion that can be used to identify and classify ecosystems with regard to their sensitivity, resilience, etc. Figure 4 is one such example from the LLNL-Stanford Workshop, in which major ecosystems were classified with respect to their susceptibility to the stresses following a nuclear war.
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From page 574... ...
) High Low Low Moderate ChaparralModerate Moderate Low Low Moderate TundraLow Low Moderate Low Moderate FIGURE 4 Susceptibility of the blames to the stresses following a nuclear war.
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From page 575... ...
One of the concepts illustrated in Figure 6 is the desirability of having models capable of dealing with a range of input data and having output specified as probability distributions. Reasonable models of global climate and individual organism response exist at present, but adequate ecosystem response and regional assessment models do not exist.
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From page 576... ...
SPECULATIONS ON THE LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES AND PROSPECTS FOR RECOVERY Finally, I return to my assignment of speculating on the long-term consequences and the prospects for recovery. My opinion is that it simply is not known what the long-term biological and ecological effects would be, because there is not a firm grasp of what the effects of nuclear war would be on the global climate.
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From page 577... ...
The most important is that the effects of moderate doses of radiation on the immune system are neither critical nor life threatening and they are reversible, whereas the effects of AIDS on the immune system are the major effect of the disease and they are not reversible. Thus, I find the comparison to be superficial at best and a later characterization of nuclear war as a "global case of AIDS" i~ to be substantially misleading.
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From page 578... ...
1984. Global atmospheric effects of massive smoke injections from a nuclear war: Results from general circulation model simulations.
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From page 579... ...
1986. Acute radiation mortality in a nuclear war.
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