• There’s this fucked up part of me that finds graphs like this comforting, that this will make the problem, and more importantly the liberal world’s mismanagement of it, impossible to ignore. Logically I don’t think about it that way. I felt the same way about COVID and the BLM movement but those didn’t turn out how I had hoped. Emotionally I guess I have an accelerationist streak lol

  • Droplet [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    Can someone with climate science knowledge help out with the following hypothesis:

    Let’s say the US wants to engineer a nuclear war in the Middle East to “cool” the global temperature for a determined period of time. This can be done by provoking Israel to use its nukes in a “last stand” as it is being militarily defeated by the regional forces, as an example.

    According to the climate model proposed by Robock et al. (2007), a regional nuclear conflict in the subtropics that detonated 100 Hiroshima-size (15 kt) nuclear weapons (0.03% of the global nuclear arsenal) could lead to a release of 5 Tg of smoke into the atmosphere, resulting in global climate change of -1 degree Celcius (which would revert the global temperature, at least transiently, back to the Little Ice Age period between 1400s and 1800s, and would also result in significant changes to precipitation rate, crop growth etc.).

    Guess what, Israel/Palestine is located exactly within the subtropical band.

    Let’s say several hundred millions of people die from the nuclear fallout (far away from the Imperial Core), and hundreds of millions more die to starvation due to crops failure, the global temperature goes down, the global population gets trimmed, reducing demand for global resources, the imperialists subsequently take advantage of the chaos and instability resulted to harvest the capital assets in the Global South.

    Is this something that would be dreamed up by the bourgeois class in the Western imperial core?

    • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      Is this something that would be dreamed up by the bourgeois class in the Western imperial core

      Maybe, not because it would be effective though

      resulting in global climate change of -1 degree Celcius (which would revert the global temperature, at least transiently, back to the Little Ice Age period between 1400s and 1800s

      We’re already 1.1 c above preindustrial levels, so -1c from 5 tg just brings us back to 1850

      This modelling covers a longer timeframe and other forecast impacts

      • Droplet [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Thanks. I was thinking this more from a perspective of the declining US empire using the vast power it has keep “exporting” the suffering to the Global South to buy themselves another decade of time, not that it would be a viable solution in the long term (“viable” here includes killings hundreds of millions in the process and screwing up the ecology).

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      This theory is horribly cursed but I do not think they could carry it out without their usual hubs sounding off about it. The thinktanks and the various people of influence. They all do this through various channels.

      If it were being seriously considered I do not think they could hide it as efficiently as is necessary. It would have to be the effort of like a very small group of 10-15 people otherwise and that group would have to include generals that would carry it out, the president, and several completely deranged neoliberal ghouls.

      Israel does not have enough nuclear weapons to do this by itself either. Israel has an estimated 90 nuclear weapons and to be frank I think that’s a high estimate. This idea would rely on someone else also firing nukes. The only possible partner is the US. But if the US fires nukes in conjunction with Israel it is burning itself on the world stage forever afterwards. People worldwide will not treat it like Japan.

      • Droplet [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        It is very cursed, but I can’t help noticing the mainstream media pushing to normalize nuclear escalations in recent months.

        This CSIS analysis from 2009 suggests that Israel does have more than enough yield in its nuclear arsenal to achieve the simulated impact. The climate model referenced above only needed 100 15-kiloton nukes (1.5 Megaton total) to achieve the effect of releasing 5 Tg of smoke into the atmosphere. According to the CSIS report, a single Jericho II ballistic missile alone can carry a 1000kg warhead of 1 Megaton yield. And that’s just a single warhead. So, probably 1-2 big nuclear explosions (or a dozen of smaller ones) are enough to irreversibly affect the global climate.

        The difficult (and unbelievable) part of this hypothesis is how can they contain the nuclear explosions regionally and not allowing it to escalate out of hand towards a global thermonuclear war.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          The difficult (and unbelievable) part of this hypothesis is how can they contain the nuclear explosions regionally and not allowing it to escalate out of hand towards a global thermonuclear war.

          I think the obvious answer would be to egg on a situation where an exchange would be between a nuclear power and a non-nuclear power.

        • volcel_olive_oil [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          5 days ago

          how can they contain the nuclear explosions regionally and not allowing it to escalate out of hand

          the solution is clear, you just have to think (much) dumber and refocus from nuclear war as an excuse to the core of “exploding nukes will lower the global temperature”

          greensicko-laser Greenwashing Nuclear Weapons: USA paying countries to let them explode nukes in the desert to save the climate

      • Hexamerous [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Israel does not have enough nuclear weapons to do this by itself either.

        Then again, It would be very on brand under-doing it so we just get nuclear fallout and radiation instead of the intended effect. Egged on by Christian Fascist/Zionists death drive, evangelical rapture prophesies and climate change denialists desperate to keep their treats. They already accepted that 100s of millions will die from climate change, what’s a few 10s of millions more.

        Remember that we live in the dumbest timeline.

    • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 days ago

      Nuclear winter isn’t science. Climate Satellite imaging has shown that even the largest ash clouds fall back to the ground in around 2 months and there is no reason that bigger smoke clouds will fall slower.

    • coolusername@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      Israel was on its way to detonate a nuke in the air over Iran but Russia shot down their F22.