Word: winters
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...1980s, climate scientists in Russia and the U.S. theorized that all-out nuclear war between the superpowers would result in a "nuclear winter," as smoke from the atomic explosions blackened the sky and sent summer temperatures plummeting below freezing - killing crops and eventually starving all those who survived the initial explosions. Now that the risks of an all-out U.S.-Russian exchange have diminished, scientists are looking at the climactic effects of regional nuclear war - and the predictions are still sobering...
...Alan Robock, a Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University who participated in the original nuclear winter research, recently completed a study on the results of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. He spoke with TIME from his office in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (See pictures from the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks...
...would heat the smoke and lift it into the stratosphere - that's the layer above the troposphere, where we live - where there is no rain to clear it out. It would be blown across the globe and block the sun. The effect would not be a nuclear winter, but it would be colder than the little ice age [in the 17th and 18th centuries] and the change would happen very rapidly - over the course of a few weeks...
...India and Pakistan engaged in nuclear war, they would use about 0.3% of the global nuclear stockpile. And still the effects on the climate would be dramatic. Our calculations on nuclear winter from the early 1980s have been confirmed by modern climate models. And fundamentally the situation hasn't changed - even with reduced stockpiles there still exists enough weapons to cause nuclear winter. That's something that maybe people don't realize...
Ballet enthusasists track the passage of time in terms of a ballet company’s spring season, winter season, and “The Nutcracker.” For those folks who instead rely on a calendar, the general consensus is that the opening night of “The Nutcracker” is the official beginning of the string of ensuing holidays. It is a time capsule of magic, warmth, and joy—for adults, a foray into childhood and innocent dreams; for children, an escape into an extraordinary land in which one can be transported...