Abstract
The nuclear winter hypothesis and the associated research effort represent a difficult challenge to the climate modelling community because of the inherently unpredictable nature of a hypothetical nuclear war, uncertainties involving the amount and optical properties of aerosols surviving initial rainout processes, the highly nonlinear nature of the various forcings and interactions involved in determining the climate response to a given aerosol loading and, associated with this nonlinearity, a strong dependence of the climatic response on initial conditions. At the same time, the nuclear winter hypothesis serves as a stimulus for climate model improvements, which should narrow some of the uncertainty in nuclear winter research, but should also aid in the study of other climatic and environmental problems, such as the CO2 increase, Arctic haze, and natural ice age atmospheric aerosol content increases.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Harvey, L.D.D. (1987). Nuclear Winter: Recent Climate Model Results, Uncertainties, and Research Needs. In: Nicolis, C., Nicolis, G. (eds) Irreversible Phenomena and Dynamical Systems Analysis in Geosciences. NATO ASI Series, vol 192. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4778-8_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4778-8_23
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