A full-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia could cause 5 billion people to die of hunger, according to a study.
Alan Robock, a distinguished professor of climate science at Rutgers University and co-author of the study, said that the data tells them that we must prevent a nuclear war from ever happening. The lead author of the study is an assistant research professor at Rutgers.
In order to calculate how much sun-blocking soot would enter the atmosphere, Xia, Robock and their colleagues built on past research. The researchers used the size of each country's nuclear arsenal to calculate soot dispersal from war scenarios.
The Community Earth System Model is supported by the NCAR. It was possible to estimate the productivity of major crops on a country-by-country basis thanks to the NCAR Community Land Model. The researchers looked at projected changes to livestock pastures.
Within five years of a war between India and Pakistan, global average caloric production went down. After a full-scale U.S.-Russia nuclear conflict, global average calories decreased by about 90 percent.
Crop declines would be the most severe in the mid-high latitude nations, including major exporting countries such as Russia and the U.S., which couldtrigger export restrictions and cause severe disruptions in import dependent countries.
The changes would cause a catastrophic disruption of the global food markets. The largest anomalies ever recorded by the Food and Agricultural Organization were a 7% global decline in crop yield. More than 75% of the planet would be starving within two years if there was a war.
Reducing food waste and using crops to feed livestock could be used to offset the loss of calories in a war, but the savings were not great.
There will be more detail to the crop models.
She said that we need to understand the impact on food supplies if the ozone layer is destroyed by the heating of the stratosphere.
Climate scientists at the University of Colorado, which collaborated with Rutgers on the study, are creating detailed soot models for specific cities, such as Washington, D.C., to get a more accurate picture of how much smoke would be produced.
According to Robock, there is more than enough information to know that a nuclear war of any size would kill billions of people.
Robock said that the world has come close to nuclear war several times and that if nuclear weapons exist, they can be used. The only long term solution is banning nuclear weapons. The UN treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons has been in effect for five years, but no nuclear states have signed it. It is time for those nine states to listen to science and sign the treaty.
The Rutgers-led study was conducted with scholars at institutions around the world.
More information: Lili Xia, Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection, Nature Food (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0. www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0 Journal information: Nature Food
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