Earth in Flames: How an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs and How We Can Avoid a Similar Fate From Nuclear Winter
Earth in Flames: How an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs and How We Can Avoid a Similar Fate From Nuclear Winter
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Abstract
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid as large as Mt. Everest hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula at a speed ten times faster than the fastest rifle bullet. Debris from the impact blew into space, re-entered the atmosphere as a swarm of shooting stars that burned the global forests and grasslands, leaving behind a thin global layer containing rock from the asteroid and from Mexico and smoke from the fires. This layer marks one of the greatest extinctions in Earth history, including not just dinosaurs but also fish, plankton, ammonites, and plants making up about 75% of the known species. The major culprits in these extinctions are loss of sunlight due to absorption by the smoke and decade-long Ice Age temperatures. A nuclear war with just a few hundred of the world’s 12,000 nuclear weapons targeted on densely populated cities could plunge Earth into the same types of conditions that the dinosaurs experienced. Even a war between India and Pakistan could kill 1 to 3 billion people from starvation due to agricultural failure, while 6 billion people might starve following a war involving Russia, NATO, and the United States. This book describes how the dinosaurs died and how their deaths parallel what might happen to people after a nuclear war. The book reflects on the odds of future asteroid impacts, discusses how to stop them, and ends with what the readers personally and together can do to prevent a nuclear war so that humans don’t end up like the dinosaurs.
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Front Matter
- 1 Prologue
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Part I Impacts, Asteroid Winters, and Dinosaurs
Owen Brian Toon andAlan Robock -
Part II Humans and Nuclear Winter
Owen Brian Toon andAlan Robock-
6
You Too Could Build a Bomb: It Can’t Be Hard; There Are a Lot of Them
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7
How Many Bombs Are Out There, and How Could They Be Delivered?
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8
Scenarios for War and Near Misses
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9
Are You Being Targeted with a Nuclear Weapon?
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10
Assured Destruction by Nuclear Explosions
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11
Firestorms in Cities
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12
Climate Disaster, Climate Models, and Natural Analogs
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13
Impacts on Humans of Nuclear War
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6
You Too Could Build a Bomb: It Can’t Be Hard; There Are a Lot of Them
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Part III Epilogue. Could It Happen?
Owen Brian Toon andAlan Robock -
End Matter
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