zlacker

>>LinuxB+(OP)
The biggest takeaway here for me is that we collectively achieved something previously considered impossible: by making different behavioral choices, as a species, we achieved the largest cut in CO2 emissions in 75 years.

It's tragic that only the threat of a deadly disease could compel such a change, but perhaps we may find other levers to help us achieve such widespread beneficial changes in the future?

>>just_s+nm
All it does it prove how fruitless the prevention of climate change is.

A total shutdown of the entire world economy on an unprecedented scale still doesn't track enough to prevent climate change.

If that isn't a clear indicator of how severe the situation is then I don't know what else is.

>>breakf+7s
Unpopular prediction: we're going to solve global warming by the 22nd century, but we're going to "solve" it with nuclear winter and the destruction of 80-90% of humanity. Once we're down to a billion people or so and most of what passes for advanced civilization has been destroyed, carbon emissions and warming won't be a problem.

>>nostra+Ou
Nuclear winter seems unlikely to me, and from what I understand I'm not alone. Cities are no longer prone to huge firestorms like they once were. Furthermore most nuclear strikes would probably be airbursts to maximize blast effects, but that means less material being thrown into the atmosphere. If the attack were calculated to cause maximum fallout instead, airbursts of salted bombs might be used, which would poison huge areas of land but would not particularly contribute to a nuclear winter.

>>stretc+Pz
The primary targets for nukes aren't cities, they're other nukes. Most of these warheads are set for groundburst (or underground burst - I remember a bunch of research in the 80s about burrowing/penetrating warheads), because to blow up a 3-4 foot thick reinforced concrete silo you basically need to land right on top of it. That's the big fallout threat.

>>nostra+QA
The nuclear winter theories I've read all involve the injection of soot into the stratosphere by nuclear-ignited firestorms. Buried nuclear blasts can dig pretty big holes (Sedan crater and all the other craters in the Nevada Test Site, which looks like the surface of the moon) and are certainly a huge fallout threat, but the claim of nuclear strikes against buried silos causing a nuclear winter is a new one to me.

Some napkin math: the Sedan test was optimized to dig a big hole, was buried almost 200 meters deep, and moved about 11 million tons of earth, leaving a crater of 0.005 cubic kilometers. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambura, which caused a 'year without summer', ejected 160-213 cubic kilometers of material into the stratosphere, something like 32 thousand times as much as the Sedan blast. I'm guessing each strike against a nuclear silo would probably create craters a fraction the size of Sedan.

>>stretc+ZC
Since the concept of 32 thousand nukes exploding in a war sounded realistic (a bit on the "too many" side, but nothing completely impossible), I got into wikipedia to check if that was any particularly large bomb. I have bad news for you:

> The fusion-fission blast had a yield equivalent to 104 kilotons of TNT (435 terajoules)

That is a quite small fusion-fission bomb. If your calculation is right, we are talking about some hundreds of more normal ones, not tens of thousands.