Monday's Dance of the Absurdities: Nuclear War is Baaaaad, Climate Change Version

Honestly, if liberals didn’t exist, you just could never make them up in a million billion quadrillion years, and why would anyone in their right want to try?

Over at The Atlantic, that brain dead journal for brain dead liberals who live in New York City’s Upper East Side, writer Robinson Meyer weighs in with the opinion that a nuclear war in Europe would be a baaaaaad thing, and not just for the Russians and the Ukrainians who would perish. No, it would be baaaaaad for all of us, Meyer reasons, because of…wait for it…climate change.

Because of course that’s what any self-respecting, virtue-signaling staff writer at The Atlantic whose preferred pronouns are most likely worried/posing would write. This is a story that was as inevitable as the sun rising in the east each morning.

Meyer’s piece begins badly and only deteriorates from there.

Check out this opening paragraph:

When we talk about what causes climate change, we usually talk about oil and gas, coal and cars, and—just generally—energy policy. There’s a good reason for this. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which enters the atmosphere, warms the climate, and … you know the drill. The more fossil fuels you burn, the worse climate change gets. That’s why, a couple of years ago, I spent a lot of time covering the Trump administration’s attempt to weaken the country’s fuel-economy standards. It was an awful policy, one that would have led to more oil consumption for decades to come. If pressed, I would have said that it had a single-digit-percentage chance of creating an uninhabitable climate system.

[End]

I mean, what do you even do with that? What do you even do with a liberal Democrat who apparently isn’t aware that oil companies are reporting record profits in the midst of a Democrat presidency accompanied by a Democrat congress? That Biden’s own Energy Secretary was in Houston last week, begging U.S. oil companies to…wait for it…PRODUCE MORE OIL. That U.S. overall emissions fell throughout the Trump administration and have been cut to 1992 levels in recent years because we’ve used more, not less, natural gas in power generation.

But, as I said above, it only gets worse from there.

Check out this passage:

Consider a one-megaton nuke, reportedly the size of a warhead on a modern Russian intercontinental ballistic missile. (Warheads on U.S. ICBMs can be even larger.) A detonation of a bomb that size would, within about a four-mile radius, produce winds equal to those in a Category 5 hurricane, immediately flattening buildings, knocking down power lines, and triggering gas leaks. Anyone within seven miles of the detonation would suffer third-degree burns, the kind that sear and blister flesh. These conditions—and note that I have left out the organ-destroying effects of radiation—would rapidly turn an eight-mile blast radius into a zone of total human misery. But only at this moment of the war do the climate consequences truly begin.

The hot, dry, hurricane-force winds would act like a supercharged version of California’s Santa Ana winds, which have triggered some of the state’s worst wildfires. Even in a small war, that would happen at dozens of places around the planet, igniting urban and wildland forest fires as large as small states. A 2007 study estimated that if 100 small nuclear weapons were detonated, a number equal to only 0.03 percent of the planet’s total arsenal, the number of “direct fatalities due to fire and smoke would be comparable to those worldwide in World War II.” Towering clouds would carry more than five megatons of soot and ash from these fires high into the atmosphere.

All this carbon would transform the climate, shielding it from the sun’s heat. Within months, the planet’s average temperature would fall by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit; some amount of this cooling would persist for more than a decade. But far from reversing climate change, this cooling would be destabilizing. It would reduce global precipitation by about 10 percent, inducing global drought conditions. In parts of North America and Europe, the growing season would shorten by 10 to 20 days.

[End]

Yes, again, we can all concede that all-out nuclear war is a bad thing, and we’d all very much be better off without one. That’s a given. It’s also likely a given that such a war would have extremely disastrous effects on the global climate, although, since we’ve never had such a war, we can’t know if any of the impacts Meyer details above would actually come about. They’re all fright scenarios put out by the same “scientists” whose computer model-based studies have been wrong about literally every fright prediction they’ve made about the climate for the past half-century.

Then, there’s this gem:

Outside of the direct effects of the bombs themselves, the full effect of a nuclear exchange could be even worse. If several years of gasoline- and diesel-fueled conventional military operations followed the global destruction, then the permanent consequences for the climate system would be even worse.

[End]

Man, if only we could run tanks and armored personnel carriers and jets on windmills and solar panels, all would be well. But we can’t do that for the same reasons why we will never be able to run our power grids solely or even mostly on wind and solar, and why electric vehicles can never displace the internal combustion engine. It’s all a question of physics and thermodynamics and energy density: You can’t replace energy sources with a high degree of energy density - oil, gas, coal and nuclear - with sources with a low degree of energy density. It has never happened in human history, and it isn’t going to happen now, no matter how many trillions of dollars the global elites who fly their private, fossil fuel-powered jets to all these annual “climate” conferences around the world decide to print and skim at our expense.

Yes, armies and navies and air forces all over the world run on fossil fuels for one simple reason: That’s the only way to run them. It isn’t about climate change, it’s about national security, something that any rational government takes very seriously.

At the end of the day, what we see in this story in The Atlantic are the childish fantasies of a liberal mind that wants desperately for the world to run on the energy equivalents of unicorns and sugarplum fairies. That would be nice, but the laws of physics simply won’t allow it to happen.

But again, we can all agree that nuclear war is baaaaaaad, so we got that going for us.

That is all.