Raging wildfires lofting huge amounts of smoke high into the atmosphere have been making headlines with increasing frequency — thanks in large part to their connection with human-caused climate change
Now, there may be another reason to pay attention to these fires: A new study, just published in Science, has used one such blaze as a kind of natural experiment to test aspects of an idea first raised by scientists at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s: nuclear winter.
A co-author of the study says the research supports earlier findings that even a relatively small, regional nuclear war would have dire climatic consequences. The cause: smoke billowing up from burning cities.
“The smoke would be lofted into the stratosphere, lasting for years and carried by winds around the entire Earth,” says Alan Robock, a Rutgers University climate scientist.
Robock was an early proponent of the original nuclear winter theory of the 1980s. Based on relatively simple computer modeling, the theory held that a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia would have indirect impacts even more cataclysmic than the direct ones from explosions, radiation and fires.
