WW3 wouldn't affect world's population

[+DieChecker]

Thanks to a planet-wide dust storm on Mars, planetary scientists decided to look at the effects of dust in the atmosphere. That, in turn, led to dust studies of the earth and what would happen in a nuclear war. Conclusion: all we need to do to precipitate nuclear winter is detonate between 100 and 200 megatons of atomic weapons. Chemical spills, fires and the like will do the rest.

BTW: the closest natural analog to nuclear winter occurred about 70 to 75 thousand years ago with the eruption of Mount Toba. We almost went extinct. Human populations were down to less than 10,000 people, maybe as low as three or four thousand. Nuclear winter is a real risk.

Doug

Except that today we have technology that lets us adjust our environment. We have gigantic structures and can store vast amounts of food, and energy supplies. Which the nomadic hunter gatherers 70 thousand years ago didn't have and couldn't have prepared.

Certainly there would be famine and horrible shortages would occur world wide, but we'd not get down to thousands of survivors, it would be hundreds of millions, or billions of survivors.

[Doug1029]

Except that today we have technology that lets us adjust our environment. We have gigantic structures and can store vast amounts of food, and energy supplies. Which the nomadic hunter gatherers 70 thousand years ago didn't have and couldn't have prepared.

Certainly there would be famine and horrible shortages would occur world wide, but we'd not get down to thousands of survivors, it would be hundreds of millions, or billions of survivors.

If an accidental nuclear war started now - right this minute - 8:29 p.m. on November 10 - the bombs would be exploding before midnight. By morning, nuclear winter would already be engulfing much of the world. By two weeks from today, it would be here full force. And would stay for perhaps six years. Followed by a possible short-duration ice age of a thousand years or so, and maybe a full-fledged ice age of several thousand years. We'd all be hunter-gatherers before we got through the first year.

How many people could go underground right now and expect to stay there six years? Even during the Cold War, they were recommending two year's supplies. And only the wealthy could afford them. And they would emerge into a world where wealth was measured in what you could do - mechanics who could repair things, farmers who could grow things. Bankers would be considered unskilled labor - no matter how many worthless dollars they owned. And they'd only own them if the credit records had survived, because without those, the wealth wouldn't exist.

In such a scenario, we would be lucky to avoid extinction. All because some computer chip failed at the wrong time.

Doug

[+DieChecker]

Really though, we can grow food in warehouses and heat them electrically. Or even down in abandoned mines. As long as we can still dig up coal and transport it to the power plant we'll (The US) not do too badly. The third world would be hosed however. Simple snow we (humanity) could deal with, it would be glaciation that would be hard to deal with, but that would be years down the road.

Your basic assumption though is Worse Case, yes? Because just an accident wouldn't put thousands of nukes into the air.

Here is what Wiki says...

A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2006 found that even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could disrupt the global climate for a decade or more. In a regional nuclear conflict scenario where two opposing nations in the subtropics would each use 50 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons (about 15 kiloton each) on major populated centres, the researchers estimated as much as five million tons of soot would be released, which would produce a cooling of several degrees over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain-growing regions. The cooling would last for years, and according to the research could be "catastrophic".[34][35]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

That is 100 bombs of 15 kilotons each, or 1500 kilotons, or 1.5 megatons. Though it is not the bombs themselves which are the problem, but the fires started by them, so in that case the kilotons, or megatons really isn't that big a deal. As far as generating a nuclear winter.

I notice, as I said already, that this would generally be true of the Northern Hemisphere. Crops probably would do just fine in the Southern Hemisphere.

On the plus side, if such an event took place, 90-95% of humanity would already be dead, and so whatever could be grown wouldn't have nearly as many people to feed. The US, England, France, Germany, Russia, China, India... ProbablyJapan, Pakistan, Israel, Iran.... Would all have the urban centers wiped out.

[Jeremiah65]

I never said anything worked and certainly am not an advocate of socialism in the traditional sense. It is not a simple either/or socialism/capitalism since they are both just aspects of the same fundamental principle of materialistic consumption.

We need to analyses the flaws in our basic assumptions of living and this ping pong of if your against capitalism you must be a socialist will get us nowhere fast.

Br Cornelius

Daniel....

he is not wrong....

I rarely agree with Br Cornelius but...he is not wrong...

We have problems coming and no one is even trying to addres them...

It is the worst part of human capacity.....we see a problem and choose to ignore it....that is bad....very very bad

we can be better than this but it is going to take a profound change in humans....I just don't see it at this moment in time....I can wish......I can wish in one hand and sh!t in the other....which hand do you tink is going to fill up first?

[Doug1029]

Really though, we can grow food in warehouses and heat them electrically. Or even down in abandoned mines. As long as we can still dig up coal and transport it to the power plant we'll (The US) not do too badly. The third world would be hosed however. Simple snow we (humanity) could deal with, it would be glaciation that would be hard to deal with, but that would be years down the road.

Your basic assumption though is Worse Case, yes? Because just an accident wouldn't put thousands of nukes into the air.

Here is what Wiki says...

http://en.wikipedia..../Nuclear_winter

That is 100 bombs of 15 kilotons each, or 1500 kilotons, or 1.5 megatons. Though it is not the bombs themselves which are the problem, but the fires started by them, so in that case the kilotons, or megatons really isn't that big a deal. As far as generating a nuclear winter.

I notice, as I said already, that this would generally be true of the Northern Hemisphere. Crops probably would do just fine in the Southern Hemisphere.

On the plus side, if such an event took place, 90-95% of humanity would already be dead, and so whatever could be grown wouldn't have nearly as many people to feed. The US, England, France, Germany, Russia, China, India... ProbablyJapan, Pakistan, Israel, Iran.... Would all have the urban centers wiped out.

Every case I've studied where a large amount of volcanic ash was released into the atmosphere, the effects lasted six years. The size of the eruption doesn't seem to matter. I don't know why six years. That seems to be how long it takes the atmosphere to clear itself. I see no reason to believe that a nuclear winter would be any different in duration.

The full-scale ice age seems dependent on the climate being at a susceptible point and I don't think we're at such a point just now. But, I don't know for sure. Even if it did, the glaciers would form in areas not being heavily used for agriculture, anyway.

It takes time to get underground farms going and with the beginning of a nuclear winter no more than 24 hours away, I doubt we'd get them going in time. And then, how many acres of underground mines do you think it would take to grow enough food? I am thinking of a field in Colorado that covers 1280 acres - just one field. And what are you going to use as pollinators? Just how many honey bees could adapt to life in an abandoned mine?

I don't think the US would do so well, whether or not we survived the initial exchange.

Doug

[Guest]

Such notions of underground/space farms ignore the simple physics of energy conversion. The sun produces about 1.3kW/m2 which would have to be replaced by artificial light with a conversion ratio of electricity to light of about 20% that would need about 6kw/m2 of input energy, since the conversion of fossil fuels into electricity runs at about 30% efficiency that means we would need 18kw of fossil fuel energy for each square meter of agriculture. Given that we would need many thousands of hectares of agriculture with 1000m2/km I will leave you to calculate the vast quantities of fossil fuel needed to sustain such a futile effort.

Its more magic bullet thinking from people who seems incapable of doing basic maths.

Br Cornelius

[danielost]

Daniel....

he is not wrong....

I rarely agree with Br Cornelius but...he is not wrong...

We have problems coming and no one is even trying to addres them...

It is the worst part of human capacity.....we see a problem and choose to ignore it....that is bad....very very bad

we can be better than this but it is going to take a profound change in humans....I just don't see it at this moment in time....I can wish......I can wish in one hand and sh!t in the other....which hand do you tink is going to fill up first?

it is true that capitalism is a bad way to do business. but it is the best that we have.

[+DieChecker]

Well, I did say that ALL major cities would be gone anyway, so the US wouldn't be feeding 250 million people, it would be feeding about 20 million people.

[+DieChecker]

Such notions of underground/space farms ignore the simple physics of energy conversion. The sun produces about 1.3kW/m2 which would have to be replaced by artificial light with a conversion ratio of electricity to light of about 20% that would need about 6kw/m2 of input energy, since the conversion of fossil fuels into electricity runs at about 30% efficiency that means we would need 18kw of fossil fuel energy for each square meter of agriculture. Given that we would need many thousands of hectares of agriculture with 1000m2/km I will leave you to calculate the vast quantities of fossil fuel needed to sustain such a futile effort.

Its more magic bullet thinking from people who seems incapable of doing basic maths.

Br Cornelius

Here is a real world example.

https://energyfarms.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/energy-and-vertical-farms/

10,000 square feet of warehouse space are currently used for production;

7,000 heads of Bibb lettuce are harvested monthly;

a pound of tilapia is harvested for every four heads of lettuce;

the monthly electric bill is $2,800;

the farmers plan to expand to fill the 200,000 square foot warehouse.

Two-thirds of Wisconsin's electricity comes from burning coal (source: Union of Concerned Scientists. Click image for original report).

Photosynthesis is fueled by grow lights, since sunlight never reaches the lettuce. The lights run at night, when electric rates are as low as 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. At this rate, the farm is using about 56,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity each month (calculation). Most of Wisconsin’s electricity comes from burning coal mined out of state, at a conversion rate of about 2 megawatt hours per ton of coal. Therefore, providing electricity to this model vertical farm for a year requires the equivalent of 336 tons of coal (calculation) (220 tons of actual coal, plus nuclear, natural gas, hydro, and other electricity sources). If the operation expands to 20 times its current size it will eat up 6,700 tons of coal equivalent annually.

So a 200,000 square foot site would require 6700 tons of coal. At about 1 pound coal = 1 kWh. And 200,000 ft2 = 18600m2. That means 720 kWh/m2 over a year. Or about 2 kWh/m2 per day, not the 18 you assumed.

[+DieChecker]

he is not wrong....

I rarely agree with Br Cornelius but...he is not wrong...

We have problems coming and no one is even trying to addres them...

Wait. If BC is not wrong, and he says that no system works, then wouldn't there be problems coming regardless of what system we use? BC didn't say one was even better then the other. He said they all fail.

[Guest]

Here is a real world example.

https://energyfarms....vertical-farms/

So a 200,000 square foot site would require 6700 tons of coal. At about 1 pound coal = 1 kWh. And 200,000 ft2 = 18600m2. That means 720 kWh/m2 over a year. Or about 2 kWh/m2 per day, not the 18 you assumed.

You didn't read the bit about conversion factors and losses of conversion. Even by your own figures such a system would be infeasible.

Heres a hint, that article doesn't really support your position, it shows that it takes more coal by weight to to produce the weight of food output - an unsustainable system. The conclusion of the linked article which supports my position - not yours (try reading to the end next time);

While it’s possible that Despommier’s visions of vertical farms are akin to the Wright brothers’ early visions of flight, I suspect they’re more like alchemists’ dreams of turning lead into gold. Alchemists didn’t fail for lack of tinkering and engineering. They didn’t even fail because their task was impossible. Today’s physicists can change lead to gold by removing three protons from its nucleus, but doing so requires a vast energy input that is far more costly than the value of the gold produced. Like alchemy, growing food in skyscrapers is technically feasible, but isn’t worth the energy cost.

Br Cornelius

Edited November 12, 2014 by Guest

[Guest]

Wait. If BC is not wrong, and he says that no system works, then wouldn't there be problems coming regardless of what system we use? BC didn't say one was even better then the other. He said they all fail.

Yes they do.

The problem is to divine why they all fail and use that as the foundation of what might work. Easy to say but hard to do, but until we try any system proposed will likely be similarly doomed to fail.

This is why people find the environmental message so hard to grasp, because it undermines their certainty in the economic system which they have been taught is the one and only inevitable outcome of history. Question your indoctrination.

Br Cornelius

Edited November 12, 2014 by Guest

[Doug1029]

So a 200,000 square foot site would require 6700 tons of coal. At about 1 pound coal = 1 kWh. And 200,000 ft2 = 18600m2. That means 720 kWh/m2 over a year. Or about 2 kWh/m2 per day, not the 18 you assumed.

So you have 4.5 acres under glass. That would grow enough to feed maybe a dozen people - enough to tend the farm. Now who is going to bring you all this coal?

Doug

[JinxDeMynx]

Then let's skip it and have world war 4

[+DieChecker]

You didn't read the bit about conversion factors and losses of conversion. Even by your own figures such a system would be infeasible.

Heres a hint, that article doesn't really support your position, it shows that it takes more coal by weight to to produce the weight of food output - an unsustainable system. The conclusion of the linked article which supports my position - not yours (try reading to the end next time);

Br Cornelius

So you have 4.5 acres under glass. That would grow enough to feed maybe a dozen people - enough to tend the farm. Now who is going to bring you all this coal?

Doug

Errr..... Uhhh..... The coal gnomes. .... Yeah, the gnomes will dig it up for free and bring it to the coal plant and send me over electricity for free. I love those little gnome guys!!

Probably you could run the farm with half the 12 people, and then the other 6 would be required to run the coal power plant and mine the coal. So, that would mean each of the 3 miners would need to mine about 10 tons of coal a day. Outside edge of possible, but not likely, I give you.

Here is a story about a guy feeding people with a warehouse garden.

http://www.splendidtable.org/story/how-to-feed-10000-people-from-food-grown-on-3-acres-in-the-city

it says 10,000 people fed on the 3 acres, but I think that is 10,000 days of food, so that i about 9 people per acre.

[Doug1029]

Here is a story about a guy feeding people with a warehouse garden.

http://www.splendidt...res-in-the-city

it says 10,000 people fed on the 3 acres, but I think that is 10,000 days of food, so that i about 9 people per acre.

I suspect he grows enough to allow 10,000 people to get a few items, not enough to feed 10,000 people all the food they would need to live.

And how long did it take to get this going? Remember, you've only got a few hours, a few days at best.

Doug