Comment
Comment
re: #320 Charles
Sorry, but this is a very ugly distortion of Carl Sagan’s “nuclear winter” controversy. If you rely on FrontPage to tell you the truth about this kind of stuff, you’re going to be misled.
I suggest you research what actually happened with this issue, and Sagan’s actual positions and opinions, because that article is complete BS.
I did. Front Page is hardly the only source noting Sagan’s shabby nuclear winter research. A lot of well qualified scientists noticed his research was intended to be propaganda.
“Physicist John Maddox, editor of the prestigious British scientific journal Nature, did take the TTAPS authors to task in the September 27, 1984, issue of his magazine: On such a matter, certain to stir the public imagination, it seems to me improper that the results of calculations should be published even in sober language without a warning to all potential readers of the pitfalls there must be. This is doubly unfortunate when, as on this occasion, a purportedly scientific publication is so fully amplified by popular articles, first in parade [magazine] …”
“Howard Maccabee, past president of Docotors for Disaster Preparedness, points out in the May issue of Reason magazine: This sequence of events—a publicity campaign paid for and launched before the publication and circulation of a scientific study—is very unusual. In fact, most scientists agree that this type of arrangement is destructive of the goals of honest inquiry and more consistent with attemps at stock-market manipulation or disguised political purposes.”
“MIT arms-control advocate George Rathjens is an ally of Segan’s in the fight against Star Wars. Yet he has charged that winterists suppress research contradicting the winter theory because “people don’t want it to be dis-proved.” Rathjens told an audience on the Berkeley campus on October 3, 1984, that winterists see the winter idea “as a tool for fighting pernicious public policy” (i.E., President Reagan’s).”
TTAPS used research on dust storms on Mars to support its findings. Mars’ amount of surface liquid water and atmosphere is very different from earth.
Sagan assumed that the Soviets would focus their attacks on cities. Actually, they first priority was on military targets.
Another article:
“In December 1983 the “TTAPS” study was published in Science [20]. The study was partly inspired to write the paper both by the suggestions of one Dr. A.M. Salzberg (who, unlike the TTAPS authors, believed that the initial dust thrown into the air would be primarily responsible for the climate changes) and by cooling effects due to dust storms on Mars[citation needed]. To carry out a calculation of the effect they used a very simplified two-dimensional model of the Earth’s atmosphere that assumed that conditions at a given latitude were constant. The model also assumed a solid, smooth Earth.
