This century¡¯s worst-case climate scenario isn¡¯t global warming of 4 or even 5 degrees Celsius. It¡¯s a nuclear winter that would trigger global cooling up to 12 or 13 degrees.
That would happen within weeks of the start of a nuclear war, as smoke from burning cities blotted out the sun. The result would be a massive famine as the ocean¡¯s food chain collapsed and global crops failed.
In most scenarios, hunger would spread around much of the globe and kill hundreds of millions of people, said Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University and co-author of two new studies on agriculture collapse and ocean destruction. How bad it gets depends on the size of the nuclear exchange, but even a ¡°smaller¡± nuclear war ¡ª say, between India and Pakistan ¡ª would cause enough global cooling to starve hundreds of millions. In a war that involved Russia and the U.S., which have more powerful weapons and larger stockpiles, the death toll would likely exceed half the world¡¯s population.
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