The greatest threat is that airborne soot from petroblazes might cancel springtime in the Northern Hemisphere and stifle the Asian monsoons on which millions of people depend for their very lives. This would happen if the soot rose high enough to alter the way the sun’s energy is absorbed: usually, the ground soaks up heat, creating warm air whose rise creates the turbulence that drives weather. The height of the soot cloud depends on the fires’ temperatures and size, as well as on how much fuel combusts. Scientists can’t predict with certainty what will happen, but in the worst case a huge conflagration that shoots soot three to five miles up would cause solar heat to be absorbed high above the ground. That would dampen atmospheric circulation, says William Chameides of the Georgia Institute of Technology, raising “a vast potential for climate changes over six to 12 months.” The British Meterological Office concludes that cooling “could locally reduce rainfall [during] the summer monsoon.”
If oil-fire fighters are unable to reach the blazes, there is enough oil in the depots and wells to burn for three to six months. In that case, the world could suffer another “year without a summer.” After the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, crops failed massively and New England had snow in July. Atmospheric scientist Richard Turco of the University of California, Los Angeles, calculates that burning the Kuwaiti oilfields and depots would produce cooling akin to that after a volcanic explosion. After 12 to 25 weeks of burning, 1.5 million tons of smoke would be in circulation, says Turco. A soot cloud half as large as the continental United States would form, decreasing solar energy by 20 percent and lowering average temperatures 4 degrees Fahrenheit. That could bring frosts in spring and freeze crops.
If the soot does not rise high, the effects would be less severe. In one computer simulation done under a Pentagon contract, atmospheric physicist Richard Small of Pacific Sierra Research Corp. in Los Angeles calculates that blowing up all of Kuwait’s producing wells would produce 15,000 tons of smoke every day they burn. Based on data from accidental oil-well fires, the black cloud would rise no more than one kilometer, he says. Igniting refineries would send up an additional 90,000 tons of smoke, which might shoot as high as three kilometers. Blowing over the Persian Gulf, Iran, Pakistan and India, the gunk would fall out as greasy rain over 30 days. “The effects would be similar to the Yellowstone fires of 1988,” says Small, “a decrease in solar radiation of maybe 5 percent and a slight cooling regionally.”
What seems unlikely is a nuclear-winter-like freeze. In 1982, researchers led by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and Turco concluded that smoke and dust rocketed into the atmosphere by nuclear blasts would block out sunlight and plunge parts of the earth into frigid darkness. But such severe cooling would occur only if smoke were lifted into the stratoshpere, says climatologist Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In the wintertime, sunlight is not strong enough to do that. But if the war and the petroleum fires drag on into spring, then the extra solar heat “could be sufficient to loft the smoke into the stratosphere,” says Schneider. “This is an experiment we’d be better off leaving inside the computers.” Based on his actions in the gulf last week, it seems clear that Saddam regards the environment as fair game for what could turn into a dangerous experiment.
