Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
![]()
![]()
As long as something like TerraforMARS doesn't happen, adding gereenhouse gases to Mars wouldn't be so bad.
Well, in the case of nuclear war I'd argue climate change would raise political tensions and make it more likely, so I would say the scenario of both happening at once is actually plausible.
Though I would say it is correct that a nuclear war would cancel out climate change, for the simple reason that it would destroy a lot of the pollution-causing infrastructure and people. So it is actually a brute-force way of stopping climate change.
Leviticus 19:34
Unless China, India and the US were all completely leveled (which isn’t really possible) I doubt enough infrastructure would be destroyed to create anything other than a temporary reprieve.
People tend to think of nuclear war as being capable of glassing the whole planet. It’s really not.
They should have sent a poet.> People tend to think of nuclear war as being capable of glassing the whole planet. It’s really not.
I think you'll find it is if enough of the blasted things are used,and when nukes fail they'll resort to chemical and biological weapons.A nuclear war may not wipe everyone out but the survivors would have live in the fallout of radiation and contamination
have a listen and have a link to my discord serverThe statement is not literally true per se. A nuclear war would be truly terrible (more or less the worst disaster in recorded history by a very wide margin), but humanity would actually recover. Humanity is the kind of species that tends to stick around-we're a bit less like giant pandas and more like cockroaches or rodents. Humans exemplify "Life finds a Way". And we actually have been through at least one catastrophe of almost similar scope back in the stone age (a supervolcanic eruption).
It might cause some technological setbacks, but not enough to literally send us back to the stone age. In fact, it actually might accelerate technological progress in some ways. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and there'd be a fuckton of necessity to go around.
Leviticus 19:34Yeah, that’s not really how it would work. I mean, people live in Hiroshima now. Fallout is called that because it does precisely that, it falls out of the air. There are two waves of deaths after a nuclear bomb, a small one a few weeks later and a larger one two years or so later. They don’t represent significant fractions of the deaths from the bomb because if you’re close enough to be irradiated the explosion probably already killed you. Nuclear bombs are very different from reactor disasters like Chernobyl, they don’t leave behind massive irradiated areas. Even the largest bombs in current arsenals only destroy buildings out to about 10-20km and most of that is from the shockwave, not the fireball.
As for chemical and biological weapons, why would anyone even bother using those of nukes are on the table? They’re not particularly effective, even if they hadn’t been banned for being inhumane we’ve long since reached the point where we would have abandoned them anyways. Chemical weapons in particular tend to not do much of anything against prepared targets.
Nuclear war would be a cataclysm of unprecedented scale, quite possibly the single largest loss of life in history, but it’s not going to turn the whole world into a radioactive desert like Mad Max or Fallout or kill every single human on the planet.
Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 5th 2019 at 4:51:59 AM
They should have sent a poet.Actually a full on nuclear war would leave large areas as nuclear wastelands.
Because not all of those nukes are going to detonate efficiently and the ones that go through incomplete detonations, which will be a lot of them once the nukes start flying and the waves of EM radiation start bouncing around in the atmosphere, are going to be really big dirty bombs.
The people who originally came up with what the aftermath of a nuclear war might look like understood this and that's why post-apoc settings feature irradiated wastelands.
Angry gets shit done.The bombs dropped during World war 2 were not part of a prolonged nuclear war,it was one side using a newly developed weapon to save sending in ground troops.Nuclear war would be far,far different because every side now has nukes and in a nuclear war everyone is using them,that's where you risk humanity wiping itself out,or destroying the planet
I don't buy humanity recovering from a nuclear war,not for a second,and if humanity does somehow survive I can't imagine there would be many left especially if you factor in what radiation can do healthy population aside from killing them
![]()
Edited by Ultimatum on Sep 5th 2019 at 11:56:05 AM
have a listen and have a link to my discord server![]()
Nuclear fizzles don’t create any significant increase in radiation, and it’s highly unlikely the weapons maintained in any modern arsenal would experience one even in a full shootout. There have been maybe 10 fizzles in the history of nuclear testing, and other than one potential from North Korea none of them are recent. EM radiation isn’t going to cause one either, they’re caused by geometry errors in the fuel.
Here’s a pretty concise explanation of the radiation hazards after a nuclear war, from Atomic Archive:
Most of the particles decay rapidly. Even so, beyond the blast radius of the exploding weapons there would be areas (hot spots) the survivors could not enter because of radioactive contamination from long-lived radioactive isotopes like strontium 90 or cesium 137. For the survivors of a nuclear war, this lingering radiation hazard could represent a grave threat for as long as 1 to 5 years after the attack.
That represents the most severe estimates. Depending on the location in question, lasting radiation hazards could be gone as quickly as a few months. These “hot zones” are also relatively small, maybe a kilometer or two in width. With the number of weapons on earth it wouldn’t be possible to render all inhabitable land radioactive.
Nuclear war would be incredibly bad. Like I said, it would most likely be the single largest loss of life in human history. However, the public isn’t exactly informed as to what the aftermath would look like, thanks to pop culture depictions of nuclear war. It would not be the end of the human race. It probably wouldn’t even be the end of the countries involved, though what the US plans to have left over after one is little better than a military junta. The most devastating estimates wargamed out by the US and Russia during the Cold War put the casualties around 300-400 million for full scale war, including casualties from conventional conflict. There are 7 billion people on the planet.
Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 5th 2019 at 5:19:27 AM
They should have sent a poet.I would actually describe Fallout as actually having the right idea in some sense. Yes, the world's a nuclear hellscape, but people are actually doing pretty well regardless in that setting.
It isn't that a nuclear war wouldn't leave the Earth a nuclear hellscape, it's just that humanity can probably survive in such an environment. Chernobyl is a technically livable place by a (low) measure. Recover would be slow and brutal process, but not an impossible one.
Leviticus 19:34Re: Renewables instead of Nuclear.
This right here is the deal breaker, its asking for something impossible.... We simply can not store energy on the scale that humans use it, not with current technologies.
There are some neat ideas in the pipeline on how to solve said issue, and at this rate they do look closer then fusion, but at the current they just don't exist...
Power storage is our weak spot in the whole energy chain. our best solution for industrial electricity storage is to pump water to the top of a tower at peaks, and drain it at lows using it to turn a turbine, which works well for grid stabilization, but not for trying to run the grid when most of it is working below capacity because the sun isn't out, or the wind isn't blowing.
And like all this is disregarding the environmental impact grid scale environmental will have themselfs, think of all the wilderness you are going to have to demolish to replace with panels, or wind turbines... that will then proceed to mulch up even more thousands of birds then what they already do.
Nuclear is by far the best option if you actually care about the environment, and after having seen what happened to my country when it tried to wind down on it... (Hint the decision was reversed in a year because of how bad it fucked up the grid and the economy), it has defiantly torpedoed my enthusiasm for Warren who was previously "I would like her if I thought she had a chance to win" to "I am no longer sure how to feel about her between this and several policies which have been talked about being actually illegal"
Being agianst nuclear is the same kind of anti-science "it feels right" bullshit that plagues GMO, and for all the claims the left makes of being the party of science, a lot of us seem to fall into the same trap as the Republicans just for different issues. :/
Edited by Imca on Sep 5th 2019 at 5:39:42 AM
That's a ridiculous thing to consider a deal-breaker, there is zero chance that the public is going to change its mind on nuclear power in a year. There is no harm to Warren deciding to forgo something that was politically nonviable anyway.
I mean, it's one thing to be unhappy that she decided against it but a deal-breaker? Really?
That's a ridiculous comparision, the Republican Party denies Climate Change. There is nothing comparably harmful in the Democratic Party, anti-nuclear energy hysteria is in no way unique to the Left. It's a problem with society as a whole.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Sep 5th 2019 at 5:42:02 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangI think it's somewhat worthy of side-eye that we have Japan's current nuclear crisis brought about by disaster and its near unsolvable status then state that "nuclear power is the only way forward." People have reasons to be upset about this given the environmental contamination that regularly happens from far less dangerous chemicals and pollutants. I live in an area with Mercury poisoning, chemical poisoning, toxic rivers, and more.
Yes, the Yucca Mountain facility would solve a lot of problems but until then the waste is just building up in every facility. The worst kind of toxic waste in the world that will last millennia.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.She wants to shut down existing reactors. This is unforgivable, because every reactor you shut down for no good reason is a hundred dead a year from extra air-pollution and an existential threat to the climate. A policy stance which would predictably kill 20000 people a year and torpedo all efforts to stop global warming is a perfectly sufficient deal breaker.
I suggest next time you actually read/listen to what she said.
So contrary to your laughable assertion her policy is not going "kill 20000 people a year and torpedo all efforts to stop global warming", it's not even going to fully happen until 2038. She's not some crazy anti-nuclear luddite who wants to shut them down overnight.
I get liking nuclear power and being unhappy that she opposed it but this is just ridiculous. Y'all are not being reasonable by acting as if she doesn't have an extensive climate plan
.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Sep 5th 2019 at 6:01:21 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang![]()
Exactly.
![]()
![]()
That's what I mean about my country, we tried shutting down plants in the wake of Fukashima, it did not work.
There was no way to keep the grid fueled, our nation that had an impeccable record with the electric utilities started to receive blackouts and the economy went down the drain.
Which is why one year later the plants were fired back up under the order of the prime minister.
Nuclear power is a necessity even if you need to be cautious about it.
Also as we discussed in the east asia thread most of the "disaster" is news clicks, the radiation leak is so incredibly minor that an international flight is worse, and the Fukushima plant itself was kept running for years after.
Warren does too.
Edited by Imca on Sep 5th 2019 at 6:04:36 AM

It was even a Futurama joke. The group goes on vacation at some winter lodge and this exchange happens while they're skiing.
Fry: I thought global warming would have melted all the snow caps by now!
Leela: It did, but nuclear winter canceled it out!