[ELI5] What is “nuclear winter?” And if we can cause a winter-like reaction in our atmosphere, could it potentially counter global-warming?
In: Physics
Nuclear winter would occur after a large nuclear war. Basically, the bombs generate a lot of dust and heat, and heat makes smoke – hundreds of cities and forests alike would probably be on fire after a nuclear war. Both dust and smoke rise and block out sunlight.
If there were a nuclear war, the dust and smoke would eventually spread out and create a giant cloud over all of earth high in the atmosphere. We don’t know how thick or dark this cloud would be, but it would reflect some amount of sunlight back into space before it can reach the ground.
This means less heat reaches the surface, lowering temperatures around the world. This would be a “nuclear winter”.
It could backfire if we tried something like this to stop global warming, but people have thought about how it might work. There’s a lot we don’t know, and anything on this scale would need to be studied a lot before we could know what would happen.
It’s theoretical global cooling that would be caused by all the soot kicked up into the atmosphere by a small nuclear war
The soot would limit how much EM radiation the planet gets, y’see.
I guess it COULD offset global warming, but… y’know. You’d have to have a nuclear war to start it off. Not really worth it when there are easier options.
Nuclear Winter is what happens when some form of explosion (Super Volcano, Asteroid Impact, Nuclear War) blow enough material into the atmosphere that a thick cloud covers the whole Earth and blots out the sun. It doesn’t just lower the temperature a few degrees, it freezes the world, and completely shuts down photosynthesis. This is what is thought to have actually killed the dinosaurs, rather than the heat from the actual impact. The problem with climate-change (the better word since global warming, as shown in the questions existing, misrepresents what the actual problem is) is not that the world will become to hot to live on, it’s that it will massively alter the climate we depend on for food. Likely all our crops will no longer be sustainable, which is the problem. Nuclear Winter is just that but worse.
The nuclear winter is the theory that the destruction and fire caused by a full scale nuclear war would put so much smoke and debris into our atmosphere as to potentially block out the sun.
The name refers to the fact that it would be akin to winter time – less sunlight meaning colder temperatures, and also affecting the growth of plants.
Could we artificially trigger this to reduce temperatures? Not without causing so much unwanted damage and secondary effects as to do far more harm than good.
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