Climate change

NY Daily News -  Turn off the taps, New York! Officials declared a rare citywide drought watch Saturday, urging New Yorkers to help conserve water after a historically rainless spell.  Residents should take shorter showers, fix leaky faucets, report open fire hydrants to 311 and more, Mayor Adams said in a statement. 

National Security Archive -  A 1983 study from scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory said that a full-scale nuclear war between the superpowers would “dramatically affect the atmosphere’s temperature, dynamic, precipitation, and chemistry,” reduce “the light reaching the surface in the Northern Hemisphere by 90% or more,” and could cause “a cooling of continental land areas by up to 30°C.”

The recently released internal study of the “Global-Scale Physical Effects of a Nuclear Exchange” is featured in an update to the National Security Archive’s 2022 Electronic Briefing Book on U.S. government thinking about the possibility of a “nuclear winter,” in which the fire effects of multiple nuclear detonations would produce enough smoke and soot to block sunlight and dramatically lower the Earth’s temperature...

A longer version of the report published in Science had been circulating privately for some months when scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the two Department of Energy nuclear weapons labs, did its own internal study of the impact of nuclear war on the global climate. LLNL’s August 1983 report focused on the potential cooling effects of a nuclear war, finding that a superpower conflict involving the detonation of more than 6000 nuclear weapons could produce mass fires, both in urban areas and in forests. The fires would introduce a large amount of smoke and soot into the atmosphere, a phenomenon that could “reduce the light reaching the surface in the Northern Hemisphere by 90% or more” and that could “lead to a cooling of continental land areas by up to 30°C.”