Nuclear war: More gloomy forecasts

Gloomy in Glenburn.

Environmental consequences of nuclear war

groups made valuable contributions to elaborating the consequences of nuclear warfare.1 Paul Crutzen and John Birks proposed that massive fires and smoke emissions in the lower atmosphere after a global nuclear exchange would create severe short-term environmental aftereffects. Extending their work, two of us (Toon and Turco) and colleagues discovered “nuclear winter,” which posited that worldw...

Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War

Accidental nuclear war--a post-cold war assessment.

BACKGROUND In the 1980s, many medical organizations identified the prevention of nuclear war as one of the medical profession's most important goals. An assessment of the current danger is warranted given the radically changed context of the post-Cold War era. METHODS We reviewed the recent literature on the status of nuclear arsenals and the risk of nuclear war. We then estimated the likely ...

More intense experiences, less intense forecasts: why people overweight probability specifications in affective forecasts.

We propose that affective forecasters overestimate the extent to which experienced hedonic responses to an outcome are influenced by the probability of its occurrence. The experience of an outcome (e.g., winning a gamble) is typically more affectively intense than the simulation of that outcome (e.g., imagining winning a gamble) upon which the affective forecast for it is based. We suggest that...