The 2017 Wildfire season in B.C. allowed a Rutgers University Professor to study the effects of a nuclear war on climate change.

Alan Robock is with the school of Environmental and Biological Sciences. He says the smoke in the atmosphere mimicked the effects of a nuclear war on an extremely small scale and it showed how it would create a global cooling effect by blocking out the sun.

Robock referred to the effect as a global winter which would eventually wipe out our food supply. He says in a large scale nuclear war, cities and industrial areas would burn and pump smoke into the atmosphere above where we live which would lead to a nuclear winter. “Calculations previously showed that the smoke would be heated by the sun and then lofted far up into the stratosphere making it last there much longer and have a larger climate effect. Nature has done that experiment for us on a smaller scale by pumping smoke up into the stratosphere from these big forest fires.” Robock says he has more confidence in his experiment because of this natural event.

He stressed that despite this having a global cooling effect, this is not a solution to global warming, “After a nuclear war it would be basically instantaneous climate change. It would start to cool immediately. Within a month or two you would feel it. The smoke would be spread around the world by the winds and so depending on when it came over you it would start to cool, but if there was enough smoke certainly it would become darker and it would get cold.” He adds that there is an idea of creating a cloud in the upper atmosphere like volcanoes do, of sulfuric acid droplets. This is called climate intervention or geo-engineering. And while if you could do it, it would cool the earth, there are a lot of potential risks to that and no one is recommending we actually do that.