A key insight for funders who value cost-effectiveness is that the negative effects of large-scale nuclear wars are disproportionately worse than the negative effects of more limited nuclear exchanges. In other words, nuclear wars are not created equal and the costs of nuclear war increase super-linearly with the size of nuclear war.
Are you thinking about size of nuclear war in terms of offensive nuclear detonations? If these are proportional to the soot injected into the stratosphere, it looks like the climatic effects would increase roughly linearly with the size of the nuclear war according to Fig. 5b of Xia 2022:
To be precise, from the data on Table 1, the linear regression with null intercept of the the number of people without food in year 2 on the soot injected into the stratosphere has a coefficient of determination (R^2) of 96.8 %. So I wonder whether this is compatible with your claim about superlinearity.
Hi Christian,
You say:
Are you thinking about size of nuclear war in terms of offensive nuclear detonations? If these are proportional to the soot injected into the stratosphere, it looks like the climatic effects would increase roughly linearly with the size of the nuclear war according to Fig. 5b of Xia 2022:
To be precise, from the data on Table 1, the linear regression with null intercept of the the number of people without food in year 2 on the soot injected into the stratosphere has a coefficient of determination (R^2) of 96.8 %. So I wonder whether this is compatible with your claim about superlinearity.
PS: you might want to reply to this comment.