Quick — What possible disaster poses the most savage environmental threat to Alaskans?
One obvious answer might be a massive earthquake that collapses the docks at the Port of Anchorage and cripples the natural gas power plant at Beluga, plunging the state's population center into a terrible food-and-fuel crisis that lasts for months. Or how about a mid-winter, ice-choked blow-out from one of those oil wells Shell would like to drill in the Beaufort Sea?
Or maybe our worst-case disaster is already erupting before our eyes in slo-mo? Like the incremental tick-tick of climate change and the subsequent thawing of permafrost across the Interior. Or an ocean that grows ever more acidic with each passing season, a trend that may eventually jeopardize Alaska marine life from plankton to salmon to killer whales.
All those outcomes are bad for Alaska, no doubt, and worth avoidance or preparation. But there is one human triggered catastrophe that dwarfs them all.
It's fallen off our collective radar screens in recent decades and yet still carries the potential to ruin our ecosystem in just a few months. It's something with the power, ultimately, to end civilization. Something that can't be mitigated and must never be allowed to occur.
We're talking about the nuclear winter brought on by the detonation of hydrogen and atomic bombs. Is this a preposterous outcome made obsolete by the end of Cold War? Think again.
A professor from Rutgers University this week argued that nuclear war still looms over humanity's future.
"The environmental threat of nuclear war has not gone away," wrote Alan Robock in a commentary published this week in the prestigious journal of Nature. "The world faces the prospect of a smaller, but still catastrophic, nuclear conflict."
Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, and several others may be racing to obtain them. Just as the prospect of a nuclear exchange between the former Soviet Union and the United States produced the unthinkable concept of "mutually assured destruction" in decades now past, a more limited exchange of bombs now would trigger the most destructive environmental catastrophe in history.
"A 'small' nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each using 50 Hiroshima-size bombs … if dropped on megacity targets in each country would produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history," Robock wrote in the article.
"Five million tonnes of black carbon smoke would be emitted into the upper troposphere from the burning cities, and then be lofted into the stratosphere by the heat of the Sun. Temperatures would be lower than during the 'Little Ice Age' (1400–1850), during which famine killed millions. For several years, growing seasons would be shortened by weeks in the mid-latitudes."
For Alaska — a region where average annual temperatures range from the low teens to the 40s (and the annual temperaure of Anchorage is just four degrees Fahrenheit above freezing) — any "small" nuclear war on the other side of the home planet poses huge consequences.
"We found that for a nuclear war between India and Pakistan using much less than 1 percent of the global nuclear arsenal, summer temperatures in Alaska would be several degrees Fahrenheit colder than normal," Robock told Alaska Dispatch in an email.
And the cold snap might not lift for a decade.
Nuclear winter will last longer than once thought
The commentary in Nature springboards off new research by Robock and others into the modern-day risks of "nuclear winter" — an issue that Robock says has been ignored by policy forums and shrugged off by government officials.
"There are several wrong impressions that people have about nuclear winter," he wrote in a briefing presented to Congress in 2007. "One is that there was a flaw in the theory – that the large climatic effects were disproved. Another is that the problem, even if it existed, has been solved by the end of the nuclear arms race. But these are both wrong."
The notion that a nuclear war would fill the skies with sun-blocking dust and cause a "winter" that exterminates the global plant life dates from research and analysis in the early 1980s. Robock traces the term "nuclear winter" to a now famous essay by Carl Sagan and four others that appeared in Science in 1983.
The subsequent international debate over the environmental consequences of nuclear war led to a series of historic agreements to reduce arms: from 70,000 stockpiled weapons in the 1980s to an estimated 22,000 today, Robock wrote.
"In another five years that number could go as low as 5,000, thanks to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia, signed on 8 April 2010."
With such reductions, plus the disappearance of Cold War level tensions between the United States and Russia, it's as though the concept that a nuclear war still poses existential threat to the world has been dismissed. Some even argue that concept of "nuclear winter" was debunked by research in the late 1980s showing that the impact wouldn't be as bad as originally predicted.
"They coined the term 'nuclear autumn', noting that it wouldn't be 'winter' everywhere in the aftermath of a nuclear attack," Robock wrote. "They didn't mean for people to think that it would be all raking leaves and football games, but many members of the public, and some pro-nuclear advocates, preferred to take it that way."
But new research suggests that the threat of nuclear winter will continue as long as countries stockpile weapons because the dust and soot would spread much higher than estimated and block sunlight for years longer than once predicted, Robock said.
"By 2007, models had began to approximate a realistic atmosphere up to 80 kilometres above Earth's surface, including the stratosphere and mesosphere," Robock wrote in Nature. "This enabled me, and my coauthors, to calculate for the first time that smoke particles would be heated by the Sun and lifted into the upper stratosphere, where they would stay for many years. So the cooling would last for much longer than we originally thought."
Robock and five co-authors concluded that "several other countries now possess enough nuclear weapons to not only severely damage themselves and others directly by a regional nuclear war, but also to damage the rest of the world through significant global climate changes," in an article published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Despite these new analyses, Robock and his colleagues have so far been unable to get major policy forums or U.S. government officials interested in the issue — although he was invited to a "somewhat surreal" conference in Cuba by Fidel Castro with his talk broadcast to the entire country.
"We have had no luck getting attention from the US government," he wrote. Robock and atmospheric scientist Brian Toon gave briefings to the U.S congressional staffers, but nothing happened.
Still, they keep trying to get the word out. Last year, Toon and Robock wrote in Scientific American that a nuclear war between Pakistan and India would "blot out" the Sun and trigger starvation across the globe.
"We scientists must continue to push our results out to the public and to policymakers, so they can in turn push political will in the direction of disarmament," Robock said in the new Nature commentary.
10 years without forget-me-nots, sockeyes or moose
If the nukes go off, even in a regional conflict, Alaska would be among the first places on Earth to suffer the consequences. Call it a decade with no spring.
Ramp up the conflict to an exchange between major nuclear powerhouses, and the outcome becomes the most chilling disaster for life in the Far North since the Ice Age.
"For a nuclear war between the US and Russia, indeed temperatures would be below freezing" across Alaska for years, Robock told Dispatch in an email. "The smoke from burning fires in cities and industrial areas that would be targeted would produce climate change around the world, far removed from the locations where the bombs would be dropped."
But let's say only 100 Hiroshima size bombs go off, and it's only some regional conflict. Say a long feared war between Pakistan and India.
The entire world would still undergo "unprecedented climate change," according to NASA scientist Luke Oman, in a presentation during the 2011 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"Earth is currently in a long-term warming trend," reported a National Geographic news story about Oman's talk. "After a regional nuclear war, though, average global temperatures would drop by 2.25 degrees F ... for two to three years afterward."
In Alaska, this nuclear triggered chill-down would be two to three greater than the globe at large, as much as 7.2 degrees F colder than normal, according to the estimates.
That's an Alaska with no breakup.
With the sky shrouded in soot and dust and the temperature stuck below freezing, the Susitna Valley and Chugach Mountains don't thaw. The Copper, Kenai and other great rivers don't open and then, never swell with silty runoff, with the result that salmon remain at sea and never try to spawn.
No sap rises from the still-frozen ground, killing the boreal forest before our eyes. The birch fail to leaf out. Spruce stay dormant and finally die.
No berries ever ripen. No gardens start to grow. No feed greens up for moose.
Insects don't hatch. Mammals and migrating birds starve, at least once they run out of carcasses. Desperate bears rummage frantically through what's left of our urban garbage. Soon they're dead too.
And the people? How long would the container ships continuing to dock once wheat and soybean crops fail across Iowa? If the Washington apple crop, and the California vegies, and the chicken farms and cattle yards and tomato fields all shrivel away, where will our food come from?
Within a couple years of nuclear winter, we Alaskans might be starving refugees in our own homes, boiling boot leather for pudding. Cabin fever would never be the same.
Conntact Doug O'Harra at doug(at)alaskadispatch.com.