A Spectre is Haunting Europe: Nuclear Winter
with Dr. Alan Robock & Dr. Joshua Coupe
On Sustainability Now! Sunday, March 20th, 5-6 PM
on KSQD 90.7 FM and KSQD.org
“A spectre is haunting Europe,” but this time it is not communism. Vladimir Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on “special combat readiness,” bringing back memories and fears for some of us, reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War. What would be the climatic consequences of nuclear war? Our guest are Dr. Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor in the Environmental Sciences Department at Rutgers University and Dr. Joshua Coupe, a postdoctoral researcher at Louisiana State University. They and their colleagues are modeling the climatic consequences of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States, aka, “Nuclear Winter,” a notion popularized by Carl Sagan in the 1980s (some of us are old enough to remember both).
That’s our explosive show broadcast on Sunday, March 20th, 2022.
Previous broadcasts of Sustainability Now! are archived at KSQD.org and on Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.
Sustainability Now! is underwritten by the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation and Environmental Innovations.
Here are some resources:
Coupe, J., Bardeen, C. G., Robock, A., & Toon, O. B. (2019). “Nuclear winter responses to nuclear war between the United States and Russia in the Whole Atmosphere,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 124, 8522–43.
Jeannie Peterson, ed. The Aftermath–The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War (New York: Pantheon/Ambio, 1983).
Kjølv Egeland (2021) “The Ideology of Nuclear Order,” New Political Science, 43:2, 208-230.
Rutgers U. Research Archive: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/
