Trakar
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- Feb 28, 2011
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Nuclear weapons' surprising contribution to climate science
Nuclear weapons testing may at first glance appear to have little connection with climate change research. But key Cold War research laboratories and the science used to track radioactivity and model nuclear bomb blasts have today been repurposed by climate scientists. The full story appears in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Full paper by Paul Edwards available at Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research
Nuclear weapons testing may at first glance appear to have little connection with climate change research. But key Cold War research laboratories and the science used to track radioactivity and model nuclear bomb blasts have today been repurposed by climate scientists. The full story appears in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Full paper by Paul Edwards available at Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research
...The national laboratories are contributing to climate change research in other important ways. Livermore also hosts the Earth System Grid, a federated system for storing, cataloging, and delivering the vast volumes of climatesimulation data currently produced by laboratories around the world. Some climate laboratories, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research, now outsource many of their model runs to supercomputers housed at the national laboratories. As it has since 1982, Oak Ridge continues to run the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, one of the world's most important data centers for the study of radiatively active gases (gases that absorb incoming solar radiation or outgoing infrared radiation, affecting the planetary heat balance). Thus, these labs play a fundamental supporting role in creating climate knowledge.
Many of the links that connect this story seem perverse. Without nuclear weapons and fallout, we might know much less than we do about the atmosphere. Without climate models, we would not have understood the full extent of those weapons' power to annihilate not only human beings, but other species as well. Today, the laboratories
built to create the most fearsome arsenal in history are doing what they can to prevent
another catastrophe, this one caused not by behemoth governments at war, but by billions of ordinary people living ordinary lives within an energy economy that we must now
reinvent.