Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #8 "We need nuclear weapons to stop nuclear war" with Alan Robock

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Bad Idea #8 "We need nuclear weapons to stop nuclear war" with Alan Robock · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
Story of nuclear weapons will have one of two endings.
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It will be the end of nuclear weapons or it will be the end of
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us. For deterrence to work, the
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other party has to assume that we're willing to kill ourselves
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and so that doesn't make any sense.
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That means we're acting like a suicide bomber.
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There have been many war games between India and Pakistan and
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and they give a scenario so they use 1 weapon to stop you.
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What would you do? And it always escalates to using
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the entire hours. There's no such thing as a
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limited nuclear war. Welcome to saving the world from
0:37
bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
0:39
few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
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time to destroy GMO crops, and I also posed nuclear power.
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But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
0:49
Oops. I've learned the hard way that
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none of us are right all the time.
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So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
0:55
often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
0:58
it right, I guess. Today, someone who's dedicated
1:01
his life to understanding the climate system and what happens
1:04
when humanity interferes with it in the most extreme,
1:07
catastrophic ways. Alan Robach is a Distinguished
1:10
Professor of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University,
1:13
a leading authority on climate modelling, and one of the
1:16
world's foremost experts on nuclear winter, which is an
1:20
issue of extreme interest to me. His research has shaped
1:24
international understanding of how a nuclear exchange, even a
1:27
limited one, could trigger catastrophic global cooling,
1:31
threatening food systems and even a breakdown in human
1:33
civilization. More recently, he's been a
1:35
central voice in the fraught debate about solar
1:37
geoengineering, which we've covered already in a couple of
1:39
podcast episodes. And he's often to be found
1:43
warning that the cure could be as dangerous as the disease.
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Now, I can't wait to get into all of this.
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So, Alan Robach, you're very welcome.
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Thanks for thanks for your interest.
1:55
Now our format as you no, it's bad ideas, saving the world from
2:00
bad ideas. And we discussed this a bit and
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we thought that the bad idea that you could be saving the
2:05
world from is that we need nuclear weapons to prevent major
2:09
wars, let's say, because that's a that's a pretty pervasive.
2:12
You know, if you speak to people about nuclear weapons, a lot of
2:14
people will come back to come back to me.
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And who's saying this, that, you know, that nuclear weapons, the
2:20
existence of nuclear weapons and perhaps Mooch deterrence has
2:24
prevented the least superpower wars for the last 80 years,
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since 1945. I mean, what would you say to
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that? Yes, deterrence is the religion
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that they subscribe to to argue that we need nuclear weapons.
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The problem is the theory of deterrence is faulty.
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The theory is we will attack you if you attack us.
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We will try to deter your attack, and if you attack us, we
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will attack you back. And that's called mutual assured
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destruction. The problem is, if we use our
3:02
nuclear weapons to attack, say, Russia, we'll all die from the
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resulting impacts on climate and Food and Agriculture.
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So if we're threatening to use our nuclear weapons, that means
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we're acting like a suicide bomber.
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For deterrence to work, the other party has to assume that
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we're willing to kill ourselves. And so that doesn't make any
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sense. And so the problem is that the
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existence of nuclear weapons means that they can be used.
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And since the first nuclear war 80 years ago, as you mentioned,
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we've come very close several times, and it's only by luck
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that we've not had another nuclear war.
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So that's the problem. The deterrence does not work in
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deterring attacks by non nuclear nations, by cyber terrorists, by
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extremists. There are many examples that
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nuclear nations have been attacked by non nuclear nations
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and their nuclear arsenal didn't deter anybody.
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For example, most recently Hamas attacked Israel.
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Even more recently than that, Ukraine attacked Russia.
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Ukraine invaded an edge of Russia and their nuclear weapons
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didn't deter the attack. In the past, Israel was attacked
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during the Six Days War. The Falkland Islands were
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attacked by Argentina. UK has nuclear weapons.
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And so when there was only one nuclear power, the United
4:40
States, Eastern Europe was invaded by by the Soviet Union
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and our nuclear arsenal didn't deter them.
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And so clearly nuclear weapons that a terrorist attacked New
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York City in 2001, our nuclear arsenal didn't deter them.
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So clearly nuclear weapons don't act as a deterrent against non
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nuclear nations. They say, Oh no, that's not what
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we meant. We meant that that they deter
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attacks from other nuclear nations.
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And it's true there haven't been wars between nuclear nations.
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But why? Is it deterrence or is it
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something else? There's many other possible
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theories. Yeah, I mean, I, I guess also
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the, the deterrence picture is reversed.
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If you consider that, you know, that, that North Korea, well
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that is a, it's a guarantee for regime survival, for
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authoritarian regime, doesn't it?
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I mean, that's what enabled Russia to invade Ukraine almost
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with impunity, at least with the knowledge that NATO wasn't going
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to come and come in on on Ukraine's side because that
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would lead to nuclear war. So deterrence is definitely a
5:42
thing in, in that we were deterred from defending Ukraine
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in in that situation in case it led to nuclear war.
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And that was a big part of the Biden administration's thinking
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in terms of how far they would allow American weapons to be
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used by the Ukrainians to strike back inside Russia.
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Isn't that right? I don't know.
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I don't know what the people were thinking.
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I mean, that's one theory. But Putin threatened to use
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nuclear weapons and didn't use them.
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And so do you believe that they would use nuclear weapons?
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Because they know that using nuclear weapons is suicide also,
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not just because of other countries attacking them.
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When I give talks about nuclear winter, I ask how many weapons
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do you have to threaten to put on the capital city of your
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enemy to deter them from attacking you?
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And the answer is always one that would be so horrific that
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we wouldn't want that. So I say so how?
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How do you decide how many weapons to have?
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Maybe you need 2IN case the first one doesn't work.
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All the countries in the world, first of all, there's only nine
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countries in the world that have nuclear weapons.
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So there's more than 180 countries who've decided they're
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better off without them. What can we learn from them?
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Second of all, there's only two countries that have huge
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arsenals, the United States and Russia.
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All the other countries have a few 100. the US and Russia have
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thousands. Why do we need thousands?
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If you want to look at all potential targets in Russia, for
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example, cities over 100,000 people, there's only a couple
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100. So if you have thousands of
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weapons, what are you going to do?
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Bounce the rubble? How many do you have to to use?
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And there is no way to defend yourself from nuclear weapons.
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The the anti ballistic missile systems have been tried but they
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don't work. So in fact the ABM treaty
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understood that if there were a huge anti ballistic missile
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systems and they worked, that would threaten other countries
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because it means you could attack them with impunity.
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So that's why they agreed not to have them.
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But even when the US tried to make them as Star Wars,
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so-called Star Wars, it doesn't work.
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You, you can't. It's very hard to shoot down an
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incoming missile. And even if you wanted to, you
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could put lots of decoys in the rocket too.
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So you'd have 100 things coming at you, not one.
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How do you know which one to shoot down?
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Way to do it is is in boost phase so when the Rockets first
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launching is going slowly. If you could shoot it down then
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that would be easier but you've got to get close enough to do it
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and can't do that either. So the existence of nuclear
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weapons means that they can be used and we've come very close.
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And, and the existence of nuclear weapons, I mean, to my
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thinking and I think you you would agree, means that there
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will eventually be a nuclear war just through the laws of
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probability. I mean, you say we've been lucky
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several times. There's been near misses from
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the Cuban missile crisis to the able Archer exercise in 1983.
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The in fact and, and, and also there's the sort of hair trigger
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alert aspect as well. I called my book 6 minutes to
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winter because the US president has literally 6 minutes
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potentially or a smaller window, 6 minutes to decide whether to
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retaliate to incoming missiles, which are at that point just a
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dot on a, you know, a few blips on our radar screen.
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So you don't even know whether to believe it.
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So it's even, it's even crazier than than people might think in
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that you know that you could, you could literally have the
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destruction of civilization based on a on a faulty computer
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reading. What if you're sitting there in
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a missile silo in Montana, another person, and you're given
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the order to actually turn the key and launch, launch the
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weapons? What would you think?
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Why would you do it? I guess you're brainwashed to do
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it, otherwise those people wouldn't be there.
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They have training exercises all the time.
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But why would you do it? Does that mean that we're under
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attack and you want to get rid of the missiles before they're
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destroyed? That means deterrence didn't
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work. So what's the point of killing
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millions and millions of people, more people?
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Or it means that we're launching a first attack again, what's the
9:48
point of of doing that? And so that just just the idea
9:51
of using nuclear weapons, what I can't think of a reasonable way
9:55
to actually use them that would make any sense.
9:58
Some countries supposedly have a theory that will just use 1
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weapon that will shock the enemy so much that they won't
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retaliate. But they've been many war games
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played between retired army generals and between India and
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Pakistan and with with other countries.
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And they give a scenario. So they come across your border,
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you use 1 weapon to stop you, what would you do?
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And the answer always is, well I'll going to use another weapon
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against them, I can't just let them use 1 weapon again.
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And then what? And then what's the other go to
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the other room. What do you do now?
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And it always escalates to using the entire arsenal.
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There's no such thing as a limited nuclear war in theory,
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but perhaps. But so we, we started working on
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this in the 1980s when the US and Soviet Union were the big
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powers. But since then, they've been a
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number of more countries that have had nuclear have nuclear
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weapons. India and Pakistan, for example,
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have fought for wars across their border.
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And fortunately, none of them ended up being nuclear wars.
11:00
So we looked at what would happen if there was a nuclear
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war between India and Pakistan. And the smoke from the fires
11:08
that would be started by the attacks on cities and industrial
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areas would put up would cool the earth so much.
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That would have a huge impact. Not on local.
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Look, the local effects would be horrific.
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As we know, blast radioactivity fires, but the smoke would cause
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global cooling and it would last for years.
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And so we've calculated how many people would die from famine,
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how much it would affect global agriculture, and depending on
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the scenario, 1 to 2 billion people might die after a couple
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years once you ran out of storage.
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This is this is where the limited nuclear war.
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It's limited only by the the Indian and Pakistani nuclear
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arsenals. I mean, that's just one story.
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That's just one scenario. It doesn't matter who's actually
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fighting the war. What matters is that the amount
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of smoke. And so you can think of
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scenarios between India and China, for example.
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That's why India got their nuclear weapons in the 1st
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place. They were afraid of China.
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And there are constant little battles on the on the border.
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They're not allowed to use guns, so they use knives and and rocks
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and stuff, but that's just arbitrary rule.
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They could use nuclear weapons. Talk us through the the big one,
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like the big nuclear winter scenario where you have a full
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scale exchange between let's say the the US and NATO versus
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Russia. Like what, what, how does that
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unfold and what does it look like in terms of the impact on
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the climate then? So first of all, I don't like
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the word exchange. That's sanitized jargon to make
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it. I think of exchanges you, but
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you buy a assured and it's the wrong size and you take it back
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to the store. That's an exchange.
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But but blasting and burning and producing huge fires that kill
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thousands of people and produce lots of smoke and and burn
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people and radiate them, that's not an exchange.
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In any case, the US and Russia have a treaty, a New START
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treaty, which will expire next year unless it's renewed.
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When Trump was president before, he refused to renew it for five
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years, which was one of the provisions.
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That's one of the first things that Biden did when he became
13:16
president. But now it's going to expire
13:18
next year. That limits both countries to
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about 2000. Strategic weapons, Strategic
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weapon, that's another jargon means that weapons that can be
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used in long distance. So it's the US land based
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missiles, the submarine missiles and bombs on long range bombers.
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And Russia has about about the same.
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So there's also a lots of other nuclear weapons that aren't even
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covered by the treaty, so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which
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sounds like they're to be used on a battlefield, but they're
13:50
these days larger than the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima
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and Nagasaki. So they would do tremendous
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amounts of damage to on on cruise missiles, for example.
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So if we attack Russia and they attack us and we've looked
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calculate how much smoke would be generated and it would be so
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much smoke that temperatures would get below freezing even in
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the summertime. That's why we call it nuclear
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winter. There would be freezing
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temperatures in the middle of cotton.
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That's where we grow our food even in the summertime.
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And so once we used up, let's assume the places that would be
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destroyed, of course, would be destroyed, but let's look at the
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rest of the world where there wouldn't be any bombs dropped,
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that people would use up the food that they have.
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And then we did a calculation of what are the diets in each
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country, how much food is exported or imported.
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Let's assume there wouldn't be any trade after that.
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People would hoard their food like they we hoarded toilet
14:46
paper during COVID. And so a few countries which are
14:51
big exporters now and don't have large populations would still be
14:56
able to have enough food for the entire population if everything
15:03
was the same as it is now. So let's look at places like New
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Zealand or Argentina or Australia.
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They're big food exporters. They are don't have big
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populations. But would they have access to
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fertilizer? Most of them don't don't make
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their own fertilizer. Would they have access to fuel?
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I was just in New Zealand. They have, they're an oil
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exporter, but they don't have refineries there.
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So they export their crude oil and have to import diesel fuel
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and gasoline, petrol you call it, I guess.
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And, and most of their food that they export is is cows, sheep,
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some deer that use pasture. Not, not, not.
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They don't grow food to feed the animals.
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Very much so. But even if they could do that,
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even though it'd be less pasture, there'd still be enough
15:49
food. How could they transport it to a
15:51
people to eat it? How could they preserve it?
15:55
Would there be any refrigeration?
15:56
Would there be electricity? How could?
15:59
And so there's lots of other things that countries need, like
16:05
medicines or high technology equipment that they don't
16:08
produce locally. And then if you think
16:11
immigration is a problem now you can imagine flotillas of hungry
16:16
people on their way to these places from places that don't
16:20
have enough food. So how would they even prevent
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invasions of people from other countries in in like in South
16:28
America or, or from for case of New Zealand and Argentina?
16:33
So our we've had very simplistic scenarios that show those places
16:37
as doing OK in the first with these very simple assumptions.
16:42
But we're looking at more sophisticated assumptions about
16:46
how food would be distributed. What else would you need in
16:48
terms of seeds, in terms of agriculture, in terms of
16:51
fertilizer, in terms of fuel for farm machinery to to continue to
16:55
produce as much food as you do? Right.
16:57
So, so the, the scenario really is nuclear famine, isn't it post
17:01
apocalyptic nuclear famine? And there's a if this is if,
17:05
this is the paper that was in nature of Food in 2022, I think.
17:10
Which you are, Lily Show's Lily. Show yeah, which you are a
17:13
co-author on and that has this really scary table which which
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lists the percentage of people who cannot survive put in on a
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country by country basis. I think for the UK it's like 99%
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die, similar for the US, similar for China.
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So for pretty much all of the northern hemisphere countries,
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they lose virtually all of their population in a in a full scale
17:33
nuclear winter. That's right.
17:35
It turns out the nuclear nations which are at higher latitudes
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except for India and Pakistan would be in a lot of trouble,
17:43
North Korea, China, Russia. And so now some countries say,
17:49
well, we don't have nuclear weapons because we're in a
17:51
treaty with countries that do have nuclear weapons.
17:54
They'll, they'll use their nuclear umbrella to defend us.
17:57
So NATO, UK and, and US have nuclear weapons.
18:02
So France sort of has an independent nuclear arsenal, but
18:07
they, they will, will, will they defend us.
18:10
And so that's why they no, I, I, that's why they won't sign the
18:16
treaty to ban nuclear weapons. In the last decade, the
18:20
International Campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, I can,
18:23
along with the government of Austria and other countries and
18:27
Mexico, had a campaign to educate the countries of the
18:33
world about the humanitarian impacts of nuclear war.
18:37
And so there's the direct horrific effects, which I
18:40
already mentioned. And they had Ibakasha survivors
18:43
from Japanese attacks testifying, but also these
18:47
indirect effects from nuclear famine, from not being able to
18:50
grow food. And I went to two of the three
18:53
international conferences. My colleague Mike Mills went to
18:56
the third one, and we ambassadors from more than 100
18:59
countries came and learned about it.
19:01
Then they went to the General Assembly of the United Nations,
19:04
and in 2017 they passed a treaty to on the prohibition of nuclear
19:08
weapons, the Ban Treaty. And it's been signed by 73,
19:13
ratified by 73 countries now and signed by 94 countries.
19:18
The rest of the world learned about the how they would suffer
19:22
even if no bombs were dropped there.
19:23
And this is their message to the countries with nuclear weapons,
19:26
that we want you to get rid of your nuclear weapons.
19:28
They threaten us even if you don't drop any bombs here.
19:32
There's places in the world where nuclear weapons are
19:35
prohibited, like, for example, the southern hemisphere.
19:37
There aren't any. In South America.
19:40
There aren't any. And even in Asia, Kazakhstan was
19:43
one of the first countries to sign the ban treaty because they
19:46
suffered horrifically by the Russia testing their nuclear
19:51
weapons there. And in 2017, ICANN got the Nobel
19:54
Peace Prize for WARN for warning the world about the humanitarian
19:58
impacts and for getting a treaty through the United Nations.
20:03
I mean, as a, as a scientist, do you work with, I can and, and
20:08
sort of advocate abolition? I mean, it's, it's not like
20:11
anyone's pro nuclear war. So it's, I guess it's
20:13
uncontroversial that you can do that and do your atmospheric
20:16
studies at the same time, right? Well, nobody's pro nuclear war,
20:20
but some people are pro nuclear weapons.
20:21
I think we should get rid of nuclear weapons.
20:23
And that's, and I even got an award from Rutgers University
20:26
for my global influence for doing that.
20:29
And so and I have grants and we do we do the calculations here,
20:33
we do the studies right at the papers.
20:34
So I'm, I'm rewarded for doing that part of my, you know, I'm a
20:38
professor. So I have three things I'm
20:39
supposed to do. I have to do teaching, research
20:42
and service. And when I document what I've
20:45
done, when I'm up for a promotion or for a raise, for
20:49
example, under service, I put global service, I put, I'm
20:52
worrying the world about nuclear war.
20:54
And they like that I do that. So it it's, it's feels good to
20:59
be supported in that. We all like you.
21:01
Do you do that? Well, it let's say we we If we
21:04
don't abolish nuclear weapons, what do you think the
21:07
probability of nuclear war is? When Beatrice Finn accepted the
21:10
Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, she gave an amazing speech.
21:14
She said the story of nuclear weapons will have one of two
21:18
endings. It will be the end of nuclear
21:21
weapons or it will be the end of us.
21:24
One of these things will happen. So we have to get rid of nuclear
21:27
weapons to save us. So as you mentioned, their
21:30
existence means they can be used.
21:33
People claim that they're under control and, and, and there's,
21:38
but you know, as Dan Ellsberg pointed out, the, the, the locks
21:43
on them were the, the code was 0000.
21:45
So for a long time until they, they changed it.
21:48
And so, and they're run by humans.
21:51
Humans make mistakes. Complicated technical systems
21:55
fail. It's easy to think of recently
21:58
like the Fukushima nuclear reactor or the Boeing 737 Max.
22:03
Things done by complicated things made by people.
22:07
Or just last time you were in a car, I'm sure you wore your seat
22:09
belt, so God forbid you have an accident that would help save
22:13
you, but it wouldn't destroy the world.
22:15
Anything built by humans, anything operated by humans can
22:19
fail. Yeah, and to, to look at the
22:21
atmospheric chemistry of, of nuclear winter.
22:25
I mean, I, I've studied this a bit for, for my book as well,
22:29
but it seems the mechanism is, is sought from fire, from urban
22:34
fires, right. And that's, you know, there's
22:37
hasn't fortunately hasn't been large urban fires since 1945,
22:41
since maybe Dresden and Hamburg and Hiroshima, of course, and
22:44
and maybe Tokyo, which was fire bombed as well in I think in
22:48
1944. It was March 10th, 1945 when the
22:53
when the US dropped more, sent over 300 planes over Tokyo and
22:57
and burned it down. And more people burned to death
23:00
in 24 hours that day than the other time before since in world
23:04
history. But that was the start of the
23:06
American firebombing of Japan. Every three days after that they
23:10
sent fleets of airplanes over other cities.
23:13
And when it came to the end of the summer in August, the 60,
23:19
8th and 69th cities that were burned were Hiroshima and
23:22
Nagasaki. So it wasn't the only difference
23:26
was I only needed one bomb to do it rather than a whole bunch of
23:29
incendiary bombs. So it was already the US policy
23:31
to burn cities and they killed over 800,000 people that summer.
23:35
So I calculated what would be the climate effect from the
23:38
smoke from all those fires. And it was hard to do because we
23:42
didn't have a lot of data on the smoke.
23:44
We didn't know whether the fires all produced firestorms that
23:48
pumped the smoke up into the stratosphere, but the estimate
23:53
was it would cool the Earth by a couple tenths of a degree
23:57
Celsius. And then we looked at the data,
23:59
which also weren't great. And there's a lot of chaos, a
24:05
lot of natural variability in the climate system.
24:07
And so it could have gotten cold.
24:09
It was a little bit colder, but it for a couple years, but it
24:12
could have gotten cold just by chance.
24:13
So that wasn't enough smoke to cause global climate change.
24:17
But in in San Francisco in 19 O six, there was an earthquake and
24:22
the earthquakes produced a fire that raged for three days.
24:26
And Jack London wrote an article about it.
24:28
He described it that the east, West, North and South wind was
24:31
pouring in upon the doom City. The rising air made an enormous
24:35
suck. Thus did the air fire of itself
24:38
burn a burn a colossal chimney through the atmosphere.
24:42
So that's a a perfect description of a of a
24:44
pyrocuminimus of a firestorm that pumped the smoke up into
24:47
the stratosphere. So but you're right.
24:49
We're lucky we don't have very many examples of that.
24:51
We can't do the experiment in the real world.
24:53
So we're trying to calculate how much smoke there would be from
24:56
from cities. We use data from the cities that
25:00
you mentioned that that burned in in World War 2, but we that's
25:04
the biggest unknown. How much smoke would there be
25:06
given a, a bomb of a certain size drop down a particular
25:09
city? And so we have a team of people
25:11
at San Jose State University that's working on that now
25:13
trying to calculate. We have high resolution detailed
25:18
models that will study forest fires, but nobody's ever done it
25:24
for a city. So well, we're, we're sort of
25:27
doing new work to try and figure that out.
25:29
That's the biggest unknown, but given a certain amount of smoke,
25:32
the climate response is pretty well known.
25:35
Right. But I mean, forest fires also
25:37
produced these big pyrocumulonimbus clouds, right?
25:40
And they then put soot above the weather bearing troposphere into
25:44
the stratosphere. And that's where these particles
25:46
can persist for a long time and call the climate.
25:49
Is that right? Yeah, there were a couple
25:50
examples. In 2017, there was a fire, big
25:53
forest fire in British Columbia and Western Canada and that put
25:57
smoke up into the stratosphere. And then the sun heated it and
26:02
it rose up. And we observed that with
26:05
satellites. And then we use the same models,
26:08
the same climate model calculations that we use for
26:10
nuclear winter to model that smoke.
26:13
And the, and both of the the model and the observation showed
26:17
the smoke rose by 10 kilometers because it's lofted.
26:20
It's it, it, it, it's heated and lofted that makes it last
26:24
longer. And it, and it blew around the
26:26
world. And then unfortunately, a couple
26:28
years later in Australia, they were much bigger fires that
26:32
burned and that put smoke in the stratosphere, which then was
26:36
heated by the sun loft lofted 20 kilometers, 12 miles farther up
26:40
into the stratosphere. And that lasted for a long time.
26:43
And so we have those examples. But if cities burned, there'd be
26:47
much, much more smoke. I don't know if you've seen
26:50
pictures of recent force, recent fires, like in California, you
26:56
look at the what, what's what's left?
26:59
The house is gone, but the trees are still there.
27:01
It's harder to burn trees because they had they're thick.
27:05
And so, so, but I I don't know if you're old enough to remember
27:09
the movie The Graduate. No, sorry, have.
27:13
You ever seen the movie The Graduate?
27:14
No, I've never seen it. It's a great movie with Dusty.
27:17
Rob says he's he's put his hand up, he's seen it, but how?
27:19
How long ago is this? I don't know the 1970s maybe
27:23
Dustin Hoffman plays a young Dustin Hoffman plays a a guy
27:27
who's who's going to meet this girl in Berkeley and the father,
27:33
the uncle pulls him aside. His name is Ben that care Ben,
27:36
I've got one word for you about your future plastics.
27:41
And it's a great line for many reasons.
27:44
But the production of plastics since then has more than doubled
27:47
or or a factor of 10. So there's so much more
27:50
flammable material inside of houses, inside of buildings,
27:53
that it doesn't have to be the structure of the building.
27:56
But the in fact, if if you give a fire alarm in your building,
28:00
in your house, you got to better get out of there quickly because
28:03
you've got a lot more flammable stuff in there than you did when
28:06
you were younger when things were made of more natural
28:08
things. And so, so that the amount of
28:11
smoke would be a lot until we're trying to calculate how much
28:15
there would be. Is it is it analogous to
28:17
volcanic eruptions? I mean like Mount Pinatubo in
28:21
Rome, was it 1991 famously called the planet down by half a
28:24
degree or so? I mean, was that a mini nuclear
28:25
winter or is the mechanism a bit different?
28:28
It's similar, but there's one difference.
28:30
Volcanic eruptions emit sulfur dioxide, yes.
28:33
SO2, which reacts with water to form sulfuric acid droplets.
28:37
And those are like clear water, clear droplets.
28:42
And so the sky looks white and it reflects sunlight and cools
28:48
the earth. And for a year or two, it looks
28:51
the observation showed yes, the global average temperature was
28:54
about 1/2 a degree colder in the middle of of continents.
28:57
It was several degrees colder that summer.
29:01
But the aerosol, the particles, the droplets that are formed by
29:05
volcanic eruptions are not black.
29:07
They don't absorb very much sunlight.
29:09
And so the mechanism I just described where the black set
29:13
absorbs sunlight and rises up to the top of the stratosphere and
29:16
less for five, five years or more wouldn't happen.
29:20
And so the the lifetime of volcanic aerosols is we could
29:24
talk about the E folding lifetime, the time it takes for
29:28
it to decay by by to about a third 1 / E So that's about a
29:33
year. So after a volcanic eruption,
29:35
about a year later only a third of the stuff is left, and a year
29:39
after that only a 9th of it's left.
29:41
But the lifetime of soot particles is five to seven
29:44
years, and so it would last for much longer and the climate
29:47
response would last. It would be 5 years of of
29:51
nuclear winter of low temperatures before the the
29:54
temperature slowly started to rise again.
29:56
In fact, I mean, there are geological parallels as well,
29:59
right? Perhaps the asteroid that ended
30:02
the dinosaurs, what, 66,000,000 years ago?
30:05
I mean, I looked into this a bit and it probably was fully dark
30:09
for a longish period of time and presumably the temperatures went
30:13
down to, you know, really sub zero and across most of the
30:18
planet. I mean, have you, have you
30:19
looked into that as a sort of analogous example as well?
30:22
Yes, we have. In fact, Brian Tune, who I work
30:25
with, and I have a book coming out from Oxford University Press
30:28
in June, Earth in Flames. And we talk about what happened
30:31
to the dinosaurs and how we can prevent the same fate.
30:35
Now, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, it's, it's
30:38
actually a bit more complicated than that.
30:41
First of all, they they burned it.
30:43
They were roasted to death before it got cold because the
30:47
asteroid smashed into near what's Chicxulub, Mexico now
30:52
made a crater 180 kilometers across.
30:55
And the energy of it hitting it was 10 times faster than the
31:01
fastest bullet vaporized the rock in the asteroid and also
31:05
the rock that it hit. And that rock vapor went up and
31:08
covered the world. And then it gradually settled
31:11
down. And as it settled down, it
31:14
coagulated into small droplets like the size of grains of sand
31:19
of rock. And then as it came to the
31:21
atmosphere, it got heated by friction and it was like the
31:25
whole world was like in a broiler.
31:28
And so it was just burned everything on the surface of the
31:32
Earth, including all the dinosaurs, but also all the
31:35
vegetation. And then that smoke from those
31:39
fires went up in the atmosphere and behaved as we were
31:42
discussing it. It absorbs sunlight, prevent it
31:45
from getting to the ground and made it very cold for a long
31:48
period of time. And that had a huge impact on
31:51
the ocean biosphere too, because it they'd need a light.
31:54
And so we know that because you can find a layer in rocks around
31:59
the world that has Iridium in it.
32:03
Iridium is a very rare mineral on Earth, but it was in the
32:08
asteroid. And so you can tell that's the
32:10
layer that was the the that the asteroid produced.
32:14
And below that you find dinosaur bones.
32:16
And above that you don't find any.
32:18
So it's clear that dinosaurs in it.
32:20
But in that layer also there are these microspheres, these little
32:24
grains of sand, like pieces of rock.
32:27
And there's also smoke from, from all the, the, the fires.
32:30
And so we find all three of those things in this layer.
32:33
And if you go closer to Mexico, you also find shocked courts.
32:38
You find pieces of rock that were just shocked and, and from
32:42
that blast. And they were bigger, bigger
32:44
pieces and they fell out closer to where the, to where the
32:48
impact was. But these other things I
32:50
mentioned the were spread around the whole world.
32:52
And so you find them everywhere. So it's the same mechanism that
32:56
after after the asteroid hit that killed many species became
33:01
extinct because of that. So they were broiled and then
33:04
frozen. You know, it's pretty difficult
33:06
to survive that, I imagine unless you're underground or, or
33:10
hibernating or, you know, a seed or a rhizome or something like
33:13
that. So.
33:14
Yeah. So there were mammals that were
33:17
able to do that and so that they, they took over the world
33:21
and there were some dinosaurs that were able to, some flying
33:26
dinosaurs that were able to get into holes and, and, and, and do
33:30
that too. And we call those birds now.
33:32
So you want to cook it. If you want to see what would
33:35
happen after an asteroid impact, you just take a piece of
33:38
chicken, put it in a broiler, and you'll see.
33:42
Right. It's a it's a funny thing, but
33:44
when you talk to people about nuclear winter, they often
33:48
respond that this was something from the 1980s and also, and,
33:51
and consider that it was, it got debunked at some point.
33:54
I'm not sure where this idea got around that nuclear winter had
33:56
been debunked, but sure, it doesn't sound like it from from
33:59
your work. So how, what, what?
34:01
What was going on there? The theory of nuclear winter is
34:05
an existential threat to the nuclear weapons industry and to
34:10
some some parts, careers of people in companies that build
34:15
rockets, for example, and careers in the military of
34:18
generals that that are in charge of these weapons.
34:21
And so there was a big push back from the military industrial
34:25
complex, and they sent out people who claim to be
34:28
scientists who said, oh, there wouldn't be very much smoke.
34:31
In fact, it's still happening today.
34:33
There's the US National Academy of Sciences is doing a report on
34:37
the environmental impacts of nuclear war and it's been going
34:41
on for two years now. I, I hope the, the final
34:44
report's been written and sent out for review.
34:46
So I hope it will be published this summer.
34:49
And people from the Los Alamos lab where they build nuclear
34:52
weapons claimed that there wouldn't be very much smoke,
34:56
that buildings now are made of concrete or steel.
34:59
They did a model which had fundamental deficiencies in it
35:04
that that couldn't get the smoke up to the stratosphere, but they
35:08
didn't allow water vapor in it. So the energy of convection is
35:12
water vapor condenses and forms clouds.
35:14
And so they there are many, several mechanisms in their
35:18
model that would prevent the smoke from going.
35:20
And they were they, they claim still that oh, there won't be
35:23
very much smoke, they'll be rubble.
35:25
And so the rubble will stop the the fires from burning.
35:28
But that's only a small area where there would be that
35:30
rubble, that fires would be much larger.
35:32
And so I'm looking forward to seeing what the committee says
35:37
because Brian Tune and I testified at their first hearing
35:40
two years ago now. And what?
35:42
You're not you're not a reviewer on the panel's report on the
35:45
National Academy of Sciences report.
35:46
Nope, because I'm one of the people they're reviewing so.
35:51
Right, right. That would be a conflict of
35:53
interest, I guess. I know, but I know people on the
35:56
on the committee and they're very good scientists.
35:58
And so I think that they'll do a good job of evaluating the
36:01
claims and the evidence from different people.
36:03
But I'm I'm sure that report will say we need more work.
36:07
But the problem is 1. One of the things we we told
36:10
them was we need more work, but the US government won't fund
36:14
this work. Normally we get funded by
36:17
National Science Foundation by NASA to do our science, but none
36:20
of them will give us any money to do this.
36:22
The only way we were able to do it was philanthropic funds have
36:27
have given us money, the Open Philanthropy Project and now
36:30
more recently the Future of Life Institute.
36:32
We But without that money, we couldn't do it because the the
36:36
even the Defense Department won't won't give us any funds.
36:39
You'd think they don't want to know what would happen after a
36:41
new or or. Maybe, maybe President Trump
36:44
will kick in some funds. I mean, I'm, I'm only partly
36:46
joking given his massive swinging cuts to science, but
36:50
he's actually said some quite interesting things on nuclear
36:54
weapons, right. He's he's talks about a third
36:55
World War. He does say that he's he's
36:57
worried about worried about weapons.
36:59
He's not, he's not sort of let's let let's go in there.
37:03
What's your reading of of the administration on on on this
37:06
issue? Trump can't help lying when he
37:09
opens his mouth, that's my my first reaction.
37:13
Would that it would be true. Actions speak louder than words.
37:17
Let's see him. You know, when he first won the
37:20
first election, I was in shock like everybody else.
37:22
I wrote an open letter to him and I said, dear president-elect
37:26
Trump, you now have access. We'll have access to the US
37:29
nuclear arsenal. If it's ever used, it would
37:32
produce nuclear winter. But what you could do is you
37:35
could get rid of the weapons or you could at least get rid of
37:38
the land based missiles, which are the most unstable part of
37:40
it. And if you do that, they'll give
37:42
you a Nobel Peace Prize and it's gold and shiny.
37:45
Wouldn't you want one of those? But I guess he doesn't read.
37:48
So he didn't do it. So.
37:49
And then I, I said it to him again this time when he got
37:53
elected. So let's see, he has an
37:55
opportunity and then to sign a new treaty with Russia to cause
38:00
a new START treaty is going to end next year.
38:03
But he could take unilateral action.
38:05
It's the Republican presidents over history in the United
38:08
States that have reduced our arsenal much more than the
38:10
Democratic presidents because it's harder to accuse them of
38:14
being weak, weak on communism or weak on Russia.
38:17
George HW Bush drastically reduced our arsenal as the
38:20
Soviet Union was falling apart and then the Russians followed
38:23
suit, didn't need a treaty for that.
38:25
So all Trump has to do is order the stop the spending on the
38:30
Sentinel missile, which is this new missile that they're
38:34
building to replace the current Minuteman missiles, which are
38:38
sitting in silos out West. So they're going to build these
38:40
new missiles and bury them and not be able to use them and cost
38:45
trillion dollars and they're many years behind schedule and,
38:50
and over but and tremendously over budget.
38:53
And there's rules if if something goes over budget by a
38:56
certain amount, you've got to review it.
38:57
But they're ignoring those rules.
38:59
And so it would be easy to take simple actions like that, like
39:02
like declare that we will have a no first use policy.
39:06
But instead, Trump says all options are on the table.
39:09
Even with respect to Greenland, all options are on the table.
39:13
When you say options are on the table, that's threatening to use
39:16
nuclear weapons. That's what he says.
39:18
So he might say that he doesn't like nuclear weapons, but he
39:21
also says stuff like that. So if if he would just declare a
39:25
no first use policy or take the these weapons off air trigger
39:29
alert. I mean, if they're being
39:31
attacked, then one way that they refer to these missiles is a
39:36
sponge layer. The Russians know where they
39:38
are. So you can count on Russia
39:41
wasting a lot of weapons on those on those targets rather
39:45
than targeting cities. But of course, they have so many
39:48
weapons, they can do both if they want to.
39:51
So what if they're being attacked?
39:53
Why do you even have to use them?
39:54
It's too late then, so what's the point of so if we ever want
39:58
to use violence to solve our problems?
40:01
There's plenty of nuclear weapons on submarines which are
40:05
invulnerable and you can use those and you don't have to do
40:07
it instantly. We have plenty of nuclear
40:10
weapons that can be put on these stealth bombers that can go drop
40:13
bombs places and we can do that in a more deliberate manner if
40:17
we ever want to do that. We don't need the land based
40:19
missiles. So he could get rid of the land
40:21
based missiles. Although you know, it's it's
40:24
it's a lot of money. Certain companies that are
40:28
building it, it's a lot of military careers are in charge
40:31
of it. So that's the what we few
40:35
professors, which the government won't fund are fighting against.
40:39
So I'm glad that this is an opportunity to tell people about
40:43
this. But but nuclear winter was never
40:46
debunked. There was never any, nobody ever
40:49
showed that if you put that much smoke in the atmosphere, you
40:52
wouldn't get the cooling. In fact, the Los Lawrence
40:56
Livermore National Laboratory, one of the other nuclear weapons
40:59
lab in the US, did a study of the India, Pakistan case and
41:02
they said if you put the same amount of smoke up that we did,
41:04
you would definitely get same amount of cool cooling.
41:07
So the theory of blocking out the sun, it gets cold is pretty
41:11
well established. I mean, it happens every night,
41:13
it happens every winter, there's less energy and it gets colder.
41:17
So that's pretty simple physics. Yeah, we had a solar eclipse at
41:21
the weekend and it got colder. I mean, it was it was very
41:24
noticeable in the in the temperature and that was only
41:26
like 1/5 of the sun that was blocked off.
41:28
But when you've been listened to it before by by presidents, I
41:33
mean I, I as I am I right that nuclear winter theory back in
41:36
the 80s did have an impact on on both Reagan and Gorbachev and in
41:40
terms. Of yeah, yeah.
41:41
At the same time the the American team, Turko, Tun
41:44
Ackerman, Pollock and Sagan were working.
41:47
So in 1982, I went to the American Geophysical Union
41:51
meeting, that's the the biggest meeting of geoscientists every
41:54
year. And there was a talk on the
41:57
climatic effects of nuclear war. And I went to the talk and
42:00
there's a little sign on the door.
42:01
It said, this talk's been cancelled.
42:03
It turns out several of them worked for NASA, for the NASA
42:06
Ames research Lab. And the center director said you
42:09
can't use the word nuclear war in your work.
42:11
If Reagan finds out about that, we'll lose our funding.
42:15
We we don't do nuclear war. We're NASA.
42:18
So they went back to the drawing board and what are we going to
42:20
call it? And Rich Churko thought up
42:22
nuclear winter, the cause and effect in 2 words.
42:26
It was brilliant branding, but they also publicized it.
42:29
And a a Russian team, Alexandrov and Stenchakov, took that idea
42:34
and used a climate model to calculate what would happen.
42:37
And they got the same thing. They also got nuclear winter.
42:39
And their paper was published at the same time as this American
42:42
TAPS paper. And so both Reagan and Gorbachev
42:46
heard from their scientists and the scientists on the other side
42:49
with the same answer. And they both said that message
42:53
helped them decide to end the nuclear arms race.
42:55
Amazing. And you also met Fidel Castro a
42:58
decade or so later, is that right?
43:00
Were you trying to persuade him of something or what?
43:02
What was that about? I had a student, Juan Carlos
43:05
Antonio from Cuba, who got a master's degree with me at the
43:10
University of Maryland. And when I came to Rutgers, got
43:12
a PhD, went back to work in Cuba.
43:15
One day I got an e-mail from him.
43:16
He said, the Cubans want you to come here and talk, give a talk
43:19
about climate change. And I said, I don't understand
43:21
what's this about but for meetings.
43:23
And he found a website The next day, he showed to me.
43:28
And there was Fidel Castro with Thomas Gutierrez, the head of
43:31
the Cuban Weather Service, looking at a report about
43:34
nuclear winter. Fidel had fallen down and broken
43:39
his leg and also apparently got cancer and gave up control of
43:44
the government to his brother Raul.
43:46
But then he got better. And in his spare time, somehow
43:50
he discovered my work. And so I said OK.
43:53
And so they said, we'll, we'll pay for your trip so you can go
43:58
to the Cuban mission. Cuban didn't have an embassy,
44:01
but they had a mission to the United Nations.
44:03
So I live in New Jersey. I went to the New York City.
44:05
I went to the Cuban mission. We want to pay for your trip.
44:08
How much is it going to cost? I said, well, I got a ticket.
44:11
I have to go to Canada and then I can fly directly to Havana.
44:15
And so the one night hotel in in Canada and the flight $1400 and
44:21
they said, OK, here's $1400 in cash.
44:25
And this was before I said, can you give me a check Now it's
44:28
easier for us to give you cash. So that was even before I went.
44:32
So I thought this is kind of special.
44:34
It's quite different. And I walked around New York
44:37
City with a lot of money in my pocket.
44:38
Fortunately I got home with it and I went there.
44:41
I got off the plane and Thomas was staying there waiting for me
44:45
and said come with me. And we went to this air
44:47
conditioned room to give me a passport.
44:48
Well, give you your visa. They took me to the Hotel
44:51
Nacional, this beautiful Art Deco hotel along the the water
44:55
that was built by American gangsters in the 1930s.
44:58
There was 5 people standing there waiting for me, including
45:00
the director of the hotel. Welcome, come with me.
45:03
And they took me up to the VIP floor and I got a suite at the
45:08
end of the floor. So I had two bedrooms and a
45:10
living room, 2 bathrooms just for me.
45:14
This is kind of strange. And then Thomas said, let's go
45:18
have lunch. Would you like a mojito?
45:20
I said no, I don't think so. I'm going to have to give a
45:22
talk. And we were in this very nice
45:24
restaurant there. And his cell phone rang, which
45:27
was new because they didn't have cell phones before in Cuba.
45:31
CC Momentito, would you mind if the commandante comes to your
45:36
talk? No, because they had a they had
45:40
a little conference room there, the former casino where we were
45:43
going to have a little conference on climate change.
45:45
But so they took me to this Conference Center out edge of
45:48
town where there were 150 people in the room that all the
45:51
scientists from Cuba were asked to come.
45:55
And. And so Fidel was there and, and
45:59
it was introduced to him. And give your talk and.
46:01
And he says, do you mind if we if we record this?
46:06
No. So I gave my talk and then I
46:09
talked to him afterwards and he gave me pictures that he
46:13
autographed. And my talk was put on
46:17
nationwide television the next day during prime time.
46:19
And they only have two channels. And so I got a private tour of
46:23
Havana and we went to a hotel and I said, let me see if I'm on
46:27
TV. And we went up to the TV there
46:30
and there was a Julia Roberts movie from a bootleg DVD.
46:33
And I said, can you change a channel?
46:35
And there I was giving a lecture.
46:37
So that taught me you have to connect with people's emotions,
46:41
not with their intellect. You've got to have a movie where
46:44
there's this beautiful scientist from Saint Petersburg who falls
46:47
in love with a handsome scientist from Oak Ridge.
46:51
Meanwhile, along the border between India and Pakistan and
46:55
Kashmir, there's a skirmish going on.
46:57
And they they, they save the world from, from nuclear war.
47:01
But I haven't been able to get that movie made so amazingly,
47:05
you've got a script half written.
47:06
In your head, by the sound of it, you didn't tell.
47:09
You didn't complain to Fidel about him having nearly caused a
47:12
nuclear war in 1962 in the Cuban Missile crisis.
47:15
No, but. That was the first time I met
47:18
him and a week later he he and his weekly blog.
47:21
So we have to get rid of all the nuclear weapons or we'll have
47:24
nuclear winter. So he basically repeated what
47:26
I'd said in the, in the, there, the, the newspaper, the grandma
47:31
the next day had A4 page spread about my talk in the front page.
47:36
So he really publicized it and, and agreed it to it.
47:39
And then a year later there was this a science delegation that
47:43
went to Cuba and Fidel's son Fidelito, who's my age, who's a
47:48
nuclear physicist. He's the president, science
47:51
science advisor met me. He said, let's let's come to
47:54
lunch. And I said, oh, hi.
47:55
I I didn't know I was going to get to meet you or your father.
47:59
When I was here last time, I didn't have any presents for
48:01
you. But now I brought you some
48:03
Rutgers baseball caps because, you know, baseball is a big
48:05
sport there. And he said, which one is for me
48:09
because I had a blue one and a black 1.
48:11
He said, I don't care, Keep one and give the other one to your
48:13
father. He said, well, we'll let him
48:14
decide. I said, what?
48:15
He said, yeah, we're going to go see him after lunch.
48:18
So we had this big, nice lunch and we went.
48:21
I sat across the table from him for more than three hours.
48:23
Fidel, who told his whole life story, including the whole story
48:27
of the Cuban Missile crisis and how they distributed all the
48:31
planes to different airports so they couldn't bomb one at the
48:34
same time. And, and how lucky they were
48:37
that Kennedy was the the president.
48:38
Because if Nixon had been the president, they would have
48:40
invaded and it would have, they would, the Americans would have
48:43
lost because we know how to fight guerrilla war.
48:45
But it would have been much worse for both countries if that
48:47
had happened. And so he told his whole story
48:50
in, in three hours and it was all videotaped.
48:52
So that was pretty surrealistic too.
48:55
Amazing. I mean it was a close run thing.
48:56
That Cuban missile crisis, so is is it Black Saturday when the
48:59
the Soviet submarine was really seconds away from firing a
49:03
nuclear tipped torpedo, right. So they were dropping these.
49:08
Sort of practice depth charges on the submarines to get them to
49:12
surface. And they were diesel submarines,
49:14
so they couldn't stay underwater that long.
49:16
And, and there they had a nuclear torpedo that nobody knew
49:19
about. And two of the three commander
49:22
said, let's launch it. But, but Vassili Arhipov, who
49:25
was an Admiral, happened to be on that ship, said, no, don't
49:28
launch it. So he's known as the man who
49:30
who's saved the world. The same day AU2 spy plane was
49:35
shot down over Cuba. That was when we came very
49:39
close. When Juan Carlos came to
49:41
Maryland to be my student, I took him to the Air and Space
49:45
Museum. And there's a in Washington,
49:47
it's part of the Smithsonian. There's a room which has remote
49:50
sensing and hanging from the ceiling is an ER 2 airplane,
49:54
which is a civilian version of the U2 spy plane 'cause it can
49:58
fly up to 20 kilometers and measure the stratosphere.
50:02
And he said, I've seen one of those before.
50:04
I said what he said. Well, when that plane was shot
50:08
down over Havana, it ended up crashing near Santiago and they
50:12
took its engine and it's on display in this in this square
50:16
in central Havana as sort of the war prize.
50:19
And they have a couple of the Russian guns that they used to
50:22
shoot it down. So he'd seen that before.
50:25
Wow. Well, well.
50:27
Segue here. Planes that fly in the
50:28
stratosphere could also release particles which could call the
50:33
planet and reverse global warming.
50:35
To whatever extent is decided and so geoengineering, solar
50:40
radiation management, whatever we want to call it, that's
50:42
something you've studied as well, right.
50:44
So what the climatic effects of that would be because it's
50:46
pretty, I mean it's pretty similar mechanism to the the
50:49
nuclear winter issue, right. Take on that.
50:53
First of all, I'd like to call it.
50:54
Climate intervention, because it's it's, if you call it
50:57
engineering, it makes it sound like you know what you're doing.
51:00
But first of all, it can't be done because the technology
51:03
doesn't exist. There are some airplanes,
51:05
research planes or military planes that can get into the
51:08
lower stratosphere, but they're small planes.
51:10
They can't carry anything with them.
51:12
And so you need to spray a lot of SO2 gas or, or, or other
51:16
particles and you need bigger planes that could do that.
51:18
And they don't exist. So people are on the drawing
51:22
boards, have invented certain planes, but they don't.
51:25
They never built them. And so we want to do today.
51:28
We couldn't. You can fly into the the
51:30
stratosphere, which is as you said, it's the area we live in
51:33
the troposphere where there's rain and weather that can wash
51:36
particles out. The lifetime is about a week for
51:38
particles in the stratosphere, but these sulfur particles is
51:42
about a year. So it's 50 times more effective
51:45
if you can get the pollution up into the stratosphere.
51:48
If you go to high latitudes where the tropopause is lower,
51:51
where the stratosphere is easier to get to, you can fly planes up
51:55
into there. In fact, every time you fly
51:57
between the US and and Europe in the especially in the winter
52:00
time, you fly through the lower stratosphere.
52:03
But they can't put so. They can't.
52:05
Couldn't put particles in that you could.
52:07
You could take a. A tanker plane that's used like
52:10
to refuel airplanes and, and, and modify it perhaps to, to
52:13
spray stuff. But if you put it at higher
52:15
latitudes, it won't be very effective at cooling the Earth
52:20
because the part the circulation in the stratosphere is upward in
52:24
the tropics and forward and downward.
52:26
And so it would only last for a few months, not for a a year.
52:31
And it wouldn't cool the the warm part of the Earth.
52:34
So that wouldn't wouldn't be nearly as effective.
52:38
So, OK, anyway, there was a meeting at NASA Ames, the same
52:43
place where Tune and Ackerman and Palak used to work in 2006,
52:47
where they were discussing geoengineering, climate
52:51
intervention. And there were scientists and
52:54
engineers getting up saying, oh, this is really cool, we could do
52:58
this. We could do that.
52:59
We could, we could control the Earth's weather.
53:01
And I started writing down reasons why it might not be such
53:04
a good idea. And I got up to 20 reasons and I
53:06
published that they had a lot of hubris.
53:09
They thought that they and they didn't understand natural
53:11
variability. So for example, Lowell Wood, who
53:14
was Edward Teller's right hand man and making the H bomb, was
53:17
there and he said, well, we're going to manufacture particles.
53:20
We're going to engineer them so they don't destroy ozone.
53:24
He didn't say how he would do that.
53:25
And we'll put them just in the right places so that we will
53:28
control the regional climate. And I said, Lowell, there's a
53:30
problem with what you want to do.
53:32
He said, yeah, what is it? I said it's called wind.
53:35
You can't just put stuff in the stratosphere and have it stay
53:38
there. It blows around.
53:39
Oh, we'll solve that problem. So I wrote down a bunch of
53:43
reasons why it might not be such a good idea, and now I have a
53:46
list that's even longer than that.
53:48
So I think governance would be the biggest problem if you could
53:50
do it. How do you set the planetary
53:53
thermostat? Who decides?
53:55
Countries in the tropics would like it cooler.
53:57
Countries that high latitudes wouldn't mind it being a little
53:59
bit warmer. And we're looking at impacts on
54:02
agriculture again, because it would get not only sea level
54:05
rise, but also agriculture. It would be too hot in the
54:08
tropics, so they would like a little bit cooler, but higher
54:10
latitudes could grow more food if it was a little bit warmer.
54:13
How do you do that 'cause you can't control one part of the
54:16
world and there's no boundaries in the atmosphere.
54:21
At least we haven't figured out how to do that yet.
54:23
And so, you know, we have a summer monsoon every year where
54:27
the land heats up over Asia and the ocean doesn't warm up as
54:31
much. And so the temperature
54:33
difference produces a pressure difference and winds come in and
54:36
produce a lot of rain in the summertime over India, China.
54:39
If you put particles in the atmosphere to cool the earth,
54:43
you would cool the land more than the ocean.
54:46
And so this temperature difference wouldn't be as large
54:48
in the summer. Monsoon would be weaker.
54:51
We actually observed that after the Pinatubo eruption in 1992.
54:54
You mentioned the eruption in 1991.
54:56
There was a much less rain over India that summer because the
54:59
monsoon was weaker. And so do you want to do
55:03
something that would affect the food supply of a couple billion
55:05
people? And now it's all about 3 billion
55:08
India plus China, plus lots of other people.
55:11
So there's there's regional differences.
55:14
You can't control temperature and precipitation at the same
55:16
time. You destroy ozone.
55:18
Do you want to not have any more blue sky?
55:21
Do you want to not be able to see the Milky Way if you ever
55:23
get out of a out of cities and go out in places where it's dark
55:27
and clean air? Do you want to mess up remote
55:31
sensing from satellites or or astronomy?
55:34
And what if something goes wrong?
55:35
I mean, as I mentioned before, anything made or or by humans or
55:40
operated by humans can fail. Would you trust the whole world
55:43
to to some very complicated system?
55:47
Well, our producer Rob is in favour of.
55:48
Solar geoengineering so he's he's waving he's waving like are
55:52
you persuading Rob? No, I think I think all 22 of
55:56
your reasons will be will be necessary for that one.
55:58
But just to finish off here and because we've taken a lot of
56:01
your time and I'm really grateful people like I'm as you
56:06
as you are I'm an advocate for the total abolition of nuclear
56:09
weapons. I don't think anything else
56:10
makes sense. As soon as as soon as any actor
56:12
has one, you need one to deter them.
56:14
And then you get escalation and you get, you know, an arms race
56:17
and ultimately you get nuclear war.
56:19
But people always respond to say, well, it's just frankly,
56:23
it's completely impossible. It's it's it's inconceivable
56:26
that that the nuclear powers would give up, give up their
56:30
nuclear weapons. So is there any kind of counter
56:34
argument you've found that people that that shows that it
56:37
is realistic that we can get to a world free of nuclear weapons
56:40
eventually? Well, first of all, most of the.
56:42
World is free of nuclear weapons.
56:43
They don't have any at all, so there's only nine countries that
56:46
have them. Anything created by humans can
56:49
be taken apart. We had 70,000 nuclear weapons in
56:53
the 1980s and then the arms race ended.
56:55
The number has been going down and down and down.
56:57
There's about 12,000 in the world.
56:59
Now. What do we do with those?
57:00
We took them apart. In fact, the Nunn Lugar Act gave
57:04
money to fund Russian engineers and scientists to dismantle
57:08
their bombs and send the radioactive material to the
57:12
United States to be diluted and used as fuel for nuclear power
57:16
plants. And so we we know how to take
57:17
them apart. We know what to do with them.
57:20
And why do countries like the UK have 200 weapons and not 2000?
57:25
They decided 200 was enough. So the first thing we could do
57:30
was the US and Russia could get down to the same levels that all
57:33
the other nuclear nations have, a few 100 rather than a few
57:36
thousand. So that's the first step.
57:38
That would make the world safer. And then if you kept enough to
57:44
deter and attack, say 10, but you didn't have enough to
57:47
produce nuclear winter, that would make the world safer too.
57:50
It doesn't have to go all the way to 0 that quickly.
57:52
Just like with global warming, you don't have to get rid of all
57:56
fossil fuels. It's nobody's figured out how to
57:58
fly an airplane halfway across the world with without jet fuel
58:03
because it the energy density is so high that you can take the
58:06
fuel with you. So but you have to reduce other
58:09
things can be electrified pretty easily, like like cars, for
58:12
example. So you can take it in steps.
58:15
And there's a, a group called Global Zero that's figured out
58:18
different steps. Now the treaty to ban nuclear
58:20
weapons has been signed by most of the countries of the world
58:24
and that that that commits you to not only not have them, but
58:27
not use them, not threaten to use them and to work to help the
58:32
people that were damaged terribly by by the production
58:36
testing and and production of nuclear weapons in the past.
58:39
So we there are paths to take. It just takes political will.
58:43
It doesn't take rocket science to do that.
58:46
Well, I I hope that. Our books can help and your your
58:50
books out in June. Did you say yes?
58:53
And what was the title? Remind us, Earth in Flames.
58:57
Earth in flames. Wow.
58:58
I'm so much looking forward to to that also to the National
59:02
Academy of Sciences report, which I'd forgotten about.
59:03
So that that I mean, all of this will hopefully UPS the ante and
59:07
help put this a bit more on the agenda and maybe give some more
59:09
impetus to to arms control talks.
59:12
Also, the United Nations just. Voted in December to have an
59:15
international study of the impacts of nuclear weapons on on
59:19
agriculture, but on on trade, on infrastructure, on everything.
59:23
And they're putting together a team of 22 people, 22 experts to
59:27
write this report. But that won't be done for
59:29
another couple years. So I nominated myself.
59:33
I'll see if they take me or not. So right, right.
59:35
Well, well, good luck with. That and well, let's hope, let's
59:41
hope some people can can hear this and and take note because a
59:44
world with nuclear weapons will not will not survive
59:46
indefinitely. I think we can both agree on
59:48
that. Let me just mention do.
59:50
You know about the Drake equation?
59:52
Yes, yes, I I talk. About a bit about that, but no,
59:55
tell us, tell us what your take is on that finally.
59:57
Well, the question is. Is there life on other planets?
1:00:00
We don't have any evidence of it.
1:00:01
Why there's so many in theory tells us there's so many
1:00:04
planets. And, and the probability of
1:00:07
having intelligent life is, is high.
1:00:09
So why haven't we heard from them?
1:00:11
And one idea that Carl Sagan had was, well, once you develop a
1:00:14
certain level of technology, you end up destroying yourself
1:00:17
pretty quickly. And so you don't have very much
1:00:20
time to broadcast a signal or another theory, of course, is
1:00:24
they, they want the cable rather than radio.
1:00:26
But is that why? Is there some way we can avoid
1:00:32
their fate? That's what I'm trying to to
1:00:34
educate people about. Well, so if we have a nuclear.
1:00:37
War, the silver lining will be that we've solved the Drake
1:00:39
equation for the rest of the universe, which at least
1:00:42
there'll be some cold comfort there.
1:00:44
But anyway, Alan, thanks. Thanks again.
1:00:46
Thanks so much for your time. I hope we can stay in touch And
1:00:49
please everyone, if you're listening in June, do go and
1:00:52
buy, do and go by the book. So for now, thanks very much,
1:00:56
Alan. Thank you very much.
1:01:01
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1:01:02
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