Short summary: It's out of date science. Carl Sagan was one of the co-authors and he agreed he'd made a mistake already after the Kuwaiti oil fires. Some researchers continue to promote the idea but they put vast amounts of soot in the upper atmosphere in their models and never really explain how it got there.
The ones who look at the fires and how they work in detail can't get the soot to go up high enough to be an issue. It's just ordinary fires and not the mushroom cloud as that is over long before the fires start - it's already a mushroom cloud within seconds - and then slowly rises and spreads to the fully formed mushroom cloud at about 10 minutes. https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/mushroom-cloud.html - anyway far too late to lift the smoke from the fires. It's lofted up just from updrafts from the fires.
The nuclear winter hypothesis was effectively disproved long ago. I know that Robock and Toon, and others do publish papers about it still but they start their models with 5 gigatons of soot in the stratosphere ALREADY.
The nuclear winter is NOT caused by the mushroom clouds. It is caused by the fires that are set up AFTER the clouds.
There have been skeptics right back to the early days when Sagan and another author first proposed the hypothesis. The fires are not any different from the fires from the firebombing of Dresden or the vast wildfires some parts of the world have every year which do NOT cause nuclear winter because the smoke doesn't rise high enough.
Sagan agreed he made a mistake after the Kuwaiti oil fires didn't cool down the MIddle East in the way he predicted they would. The issue is that the smoke just didn't get high enough fast enough and quickly rained out.
Reisner's team works on that stage of the modelling and has never succeeded because they are just ordinary fires.
The initial explosion that leads to the mushroom cloud is long over before there are significant amounts of smoke from the fires it starts.
Mill et al. did find a way to get it up there but they didn't model the fireball in detail, essentially they start with the atmosphere already pre-loaded like Robock and Toon but at a lower level in the atmosphere and feed in assumptions about how much would rain out while other parts rise.
There's a long dialogue in the academic literature with Reiner's team doing the modelling of the start of the fires. Robock's team said that they used too little fuel loading because they based it on a city in the USA. The cities in Pakistan and India are far more crowded. So Reiner's team increased the fuel loading 4 fold. They also left out rubble because rubble would reduce the fires. They still didn't get it. to get into the stratosphere. .
My blog post to help:
BLOG: Debunked: Nuclear Winter and Radioactive Fallout myths - Nuclear winter is out of date science - and most radioactivity is gone in hours to days - and most of what is left is very localized
I can't edit it any more so I have comments on it that I may make up into a new article at some point here.
This is about a 2007 book by William Cotton which has a section about nuclear winter, he's skeptical about much soot getting high into the atmosphere and mentions many subtleties not looked at in the later research. E.g. the water from the wood, about 10% of the mass of the wood is water and only 1% becomes smoke and the water would move with the soot and form clouds. It's a long interesting section.
Yo
Found this concerning study, repeating "Nuclear winter is that severe with a ten-digit butcher's bill
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/nuclear-war-would-cause-global-famine-and-kill-billions-rutgers-led-study-finds
Short summary: It's out of date science. Carl Sagan was one of the co-authors and he agreed he'd made a mistake already after the Kuwaiti oil fires. Some researchers continue to promote the idea but they put vast amounts of soot in the upper atmosphere in their models and never really explain how it got there.
The ones who look at the fires and how they work in detail can't get the soot to go up high enough to be an issue. It's just ordinary fires and not the mushroom cloud as that is over long before the fires start - it's already a mushroom cloud within seconds - and then slowly rises and spreads to the fully formed mushroom cloud at about 10 minutes. https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/mushroom-cloud.html - anyway far too late to lift the smoke from the fires. It's lofted up just from updrafts from the fires.
The nuclear winter hypothesis was effectively disproved long ago. I know that Robock and Toon, and others do publish papers about it still but they start their models with 5 gigatons of soot in the stratosphere ALREADY.
The nuclear winter is NOT caused by the mushroom clouds. It is caused by the fires that are set up AFTER the clouds.
There have been skeptics right back to the early days when Sagan and another author first proposed the hypothesis. The fires are not any different from the fires from the firebombing of Dresden or the vast wildfires some parts of the world have every year which do NOT cause nuclear winter because the smoke doesn't rise high enough.
Sagan agreed he made a mistake after the Kuwaiti oil fires didn't cool down the MIddle East in the way he predicted they would. The issue is that the smoke just didn't get high enough fast enough and quickly rained out.
Reisner's team works on that stage of the modelling and has never succeeded because they are just ordinary fires.
The initial explosion that leads to the mushroom cloud is long over before there are significant amounts of smoke from the fires it starts.
Mill et al. did find a way to get it up there but they didn't model the fireball in detail, essentially they start with the atmosphere already pre-loaded like Robock and Toon but at a lower level in the atmosphere and feed in assumptions about how much would rain out while other parts rise.
There's a long dialogue in the academic literature with Reiner's team doing the modelling of the start of the fires. Robock's team said that they used too little fuel loading because they based it on a city in the USA. The cities in Pakistan and India are far more crowded. So Reiner's team increased the fuel loading 4 fold. They also left out rubble because rubble would reduce the fires. They still didn't get it. to get into the stratosphere. .
My blog post to help:
BLOG: Debunked: Nuclear Winter and Radioactive Fallout myths - Nuclear winter is out of date science - and most radioactivity is gone in hours to days - and most of what is left is very localized
https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Debunked-Nuclear-Winter-and-Radioactive-Fallout-myths-1
I can't edit it any more so I have comments on it that I may make up into a new article at some point here.
This is about a 2007 book by William Cotton which has a section about nuclear winter, he's skeptical about much soot getting high into the atmosphere and mentions many subtleties not looked at in the later research. E.g. the water from the wood, about 10% of the mass of the wood is water and only 1% becomes smoke and the water would move with the soot and form clouds. It's a long interesting section.
. Debunked: Nuclear Winter and Radioactive Fallout myths - Nuclear winter is out of date science - and most radioactivity is gone in hours to days - and most of what is left is very localized (https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Debunked-Nuclear-Winter-and-Radioactive-Fallout-myths-Nuclear-winter-is-out-of-date-science-and-most-radioactivity?comment_id=129653018&comment_type=3)
This is that conversation I talked about between Rainer's team and Robock's team and comparision with the results of MIlls' team.
. Debunked: Nuclear Winter and Radioactive Fallout myths - Nuclear winter is out of date science - and most radioactivity is gone in hours to days - and most of what is left is very localized (https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Debunked-Nuclear-Winter-and-Radioactive-Fallout-myths-Nuclear-winter-is-out-of-date-science-and-most-radioactivity?comment_id=19462485&comment_type=3)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/donal-trump-nlrb-purge-unions-organized-labor.html