If nuclear war breaks out and tens of millions die, the Atlantic has figured out who the real victim would be: the climate.
The far-left magazine owned by Apple founder Steve Jobs's billionaire widow Laurene Powell Jobs is drawing relentless online mockery for a 1,200-word essay by Robinson Meyer warning that if the Russian invasion of Ukraine were to spiral into a nuclear war, it "would be worse for the climate than any energy policy that Donald Trump ever proposed."
"If you are worried about rapid, catastrophic changes to the planet’s climate, then you must be worried about nuclear war," writes Meyer. "That is because, on top of killing tens of millions of people, even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways."
Meyer lays out a parade of perhaps unintended consequences of killing millions, writing that use of nuclear weapons would also "produce winds equal to those in a Category 5 hurricane," ignite "urban and wildland forest fires," and send megatons of carbon into the atmosphere that would raise global temperatures.
In the dystopian world that would no doubt follow a nuclear holocaust, Meyer worries that survivors might continue to rely on fossil fuels, making "the permanent consequences for the climate system ... even worse."
"The ruins of our postwar society would be poorer, and fossil reserves are the easiest energy sources to locate," Meyer writes. "Renewables, wind turbines, and other decarbonization technology, meanwhile, require secure factories, highly educated engineers, and complicated global networks of trade and exchange."
Twitter users who already believed there was sufficient reason for humans not to want a nuclear war were not kind to Robinson's effort to inject climate change into the issue.
Talk radio host Buck Sexton said the essay is the latest example of how the left-wing chattering class has lost the plot.
"The elitist Left has gone truly insane," Sexton tweeted. "That’s not hyperbole, it’s an observation."
Others on Twitter ridiculed the article for stating the obvious — and superfluous.
"Next from the Atlantic: 'A nuclear war wipes out all life on planet earth, women and people of color hurt the most,'" tweeted Ryan James Girdusky.
"Got to hand it to the crack staff at The Atlantic. Yeah, pretty sure a nuclear war would be trouble for the overall climate. SMH," added Chris Summers.
"Raise your hand if you already know a nuclear war would be awful and dont need the atlantic to tell you. and you also know the sun is hot on its surface and dont need the atlantic to tell you that either," chimed in Twitter user Jim West.
Meyer acknowledged in the article that most people think of humans first and the climate much later, if at all, when contemplating nuclear war. But apparently, it's not the first time scientists have fretted over the effects a nuclear World War III would have on Mother Earth.
"Nowadays, we don’t tend to think of nuclear war as a climate problem, but concerns over these kinds of dangers were part of how modern climate change achieved political prominence in the first place," Meyer wrote. "During the 1980s, a set of scientists raised the alarm about the effects of a nuclear winter and of the growing 'hole in the ozone layer.'"
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/left-wing-mag-mocked-over-warning-nuclear-war-would-hurt-the-climate
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