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National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
Nuclear winter is the global climate-cooling effect that scientists hypothesize could result from a nuclear war.
Nuclear Winter Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Nuclear Winter or refer to Nuclear Winter. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2
Quotes
On one level, then, the scientific process worked. Scientists took the nuclear winter hypothesis seriously, and worked through it, evaluating and improving the assumptions, data, and models supporting it. Along the way, they narrowed the range of potential cooling and the uncertainties involved, and came to a general consensus. Without actually experiencing nuclear war, there would always be quite a lot of “irreducible uncertainty” in the concept—no one denied that—but overall, the first-order effects were resolved. A major nuclear exchange would produce lasting atmospheric effects that would cool the Earth significantly for a period of weeks to months, and perhaps longer. It would not be a good thing.
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Within the scientific community, then, the nuclear winter debate took place at two levels: over the details of the science and over the way it was being carried out in public. The latter created a fair bit of animosity, but the former led to resolution and closure. The TTAPS conclusions had been reexamined by others, and adjusted in the light of their research. Whether it was a freeze or a chill, scientists broadly agreed that nuclear war would lead to significant secondary climatic effects. Out of the claims and counterclaims, published and evaluated by relevant experts, a consensus had emerged. Despite the egos of individual scientists, the jealousies and the sour grapes, science had worked pretty much the way it was supposed to.
“Does all this matter?” he asked rhetorically. Indeed it did. Seitz was painting a canvas of politically motivated exclusion—conservative victimhood, as it were. If all this were true—or even if any of it were true—it meant that science, even mainstream science, was just politics by other means. Therefore if you disagreed with it politically, you could dismiss it as political.
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Nuclear Winter Term Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the term Nuclear Winter appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...the SDI. Prominent astronomer Carl Sagan had shown that any nuclear war would create a nuclear winter and destroy much of the planet. In contrast, Teller and Jastrow believed that the U.S....
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...was nicknamed TTAPS, for its authors’ surnames—the last was Carl Sagan, who wrote about the nuclear winter theory in Parade and Foreign Affairs magazines just before the group formally published its results...
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...Institute. Robert Jastrow decided to start a new think tank. He wanted to undermine the nuclear winter research and the Union of Concerned Scientists, a powerful antiwar group that had long opposed...
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...of working for the Soviets and deceiving the public by deliberately inflating the risk of nuclear winter , while ignoring the way that rain and the oceans would mitigate it. But he...
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...Oreskes and Conway explain that Frederick Seitz’s cousin Russell Seitz published a harsh attack on nuclear winter research in 1986. He declared that the TTAPS model was unrealistic and simplified—but the authors...
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...scientists still worked freely—in fact, Edward Teller and Fred Singer even published rebuttals to the nuclear winter theory in Science, the journal that originally presented it. Most scientists were liberals, but the...
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