There are a whole bunch of things I love about this work. Among other things:
An end-to-end model of nuclear winter risk! I’m really excited about this.
The quantitative discussions of many details and how they interact are very insightful. e.g. ones which were novel for me included how exactly smoke causes agriculture loss, and roughly where the critical thresholds for agricultural collapse might be. The concrete estimates for the difference in smoke production between counterforce and countervalue, which I knew the sign of but not the magnitude, are fascinating and make this much clearer.
I really appreciate the efforts to make the (huge) uncertainty transparent, notably the list of simplifying assumptions, and running specific scenarios for heavy countervalue targeting. Most of all, though, the Guesstimate model is remarkably legible, which makes absorbing all this info so much easier.
There are a whole bunch of things I love about this work. Among other things:
An end-to-end model of nuclear winter risk! I’m really excited about this.
The quantitative discussions of many details and how they interact are very insightful. e.g. ones which were novel for me included how exactly smoke causes agriculture loss, and roughly where the critical thresholds for agricultural collapse might be. The concrete estimates for the difference in smoke production between counterforce and countervalue, which I knew the sign of but not the magnitude, are fascinating and make this much clearer.
I really appreciate the efforts to make the (huge) uncertainty transparent, notably the list of simplifying assumptions, and running specific scenarios for heavy countervalue targeting. Most of all, though, the Guesstimate model is remarkably legible, which makes absorbing all this info so much easier.