> In its original form, Big Wind put out nine burning oil wells in Kuwait, more than many teams that were working with the more traditional method of blowing out well fires with the use of high explosives.
> The companies responsible for extinguishing the fires initially were Bechtel, Red Adair Company (now sold to Global Industries of Louisiana), Boots and Coots, and Wild Well Control. Safety Boss was the fourth company to arrive but ended up extinguishing and capping the most wells of any other company: 180 of the 600. Other companies including Cudd Well/Pressure Control, Neal Adams Firefighters, and Kuwait Wild Well Killers were also contracted.
The vast majority of Kuwaiti oil well fires were put out by flooding with sea water. A smaller number of problematic fires were put out with explosives.
Big Wind is a fun story but was a drop in the bucket compared to the work of the real well services companies that operated in Kuwait.
The Kuwaiti oil well fires are also a bit of science history because the data gathered there provided an experimental refutation of then-popular nuclear winter theories.
It’s not quite that simple, the dramatic reduction in nuclear stockpiles significantly reduced the threat.
What the oil wells did is suggest that the threat from burning cities was also lower outside of the bombs direct fireball which is very effective at transporting material to the upper atmosphere. However, more recent models show that fires across larger areas may be more capable of sending particles to the stratosphere.
Combined the overall threat still exists, but would be less severe than initial predictions.
Kuwait being in 1991, "then-popular nuclear winter theories" propagated the idea that nuclear war would essentially eradicate all life on earth, cause a drastic long-term drop of global temperatures, reduce the ozone layer to a level that plants would be burned by UV etc.
That's literally where the "uninhabitable, lifeless rock after WW3" idea comes from.
Public perception never really lines up with the predictions.
The Day After Tomorrow for example somehow jumped from slowing down ocean circulation resulting in lower temperatures in the north, to ice tornadoes. It’s like stuff can’t just be really really bad for a lot of people it also needs cause people to run somewhere or be flying around in helicopters.
The nuclear winter models and papers were explicitly designed to create that perception for political reasons. Starting with the outcome of your model, then designing your model to produce that outcome is not exactly fine science, and I don't understand why you're trying to act like that didn't happen or whatever it is you're trying here.
Because that’s not what happened. I don’t want to suggest politics had no role in why people where investigating it, but the models had to be plausible with available information.
Global temperatures where approximately 10C colder during the last ice age which humidity survived. So, initial estimates that global temperatures could briefly drop by 10-20C don’t automatically mean the kind of earth devoid of life that you described. That people looked at a range and only paid attention to the worst case says little about the paper involved.
> Their ominous conclusion was that the sooty smoke from burning cities could bring on a "nuclear winter" — months or even years of cold so severe it would gravely endanger living creatures.
> The scientists did this work mainly for public consumption. When they announced their results in 1983, it was with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control.
> ... The computer models were so simplified, and the data on smoke and other aerosols were still so poor, that the scientists could say nothing for certain. ...
Keep in mind that among the assumptions made here are that a 1D vertical weather model is meaningful when trying to estimate global weather effects from localized emissions and that Western and Russian cities are built mostly from wood, like WW2 Japan.
> When they announced their results in 1983, it was with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control.
That’s 25+ years after the initial research. “But secret studies supported by the U.S. military suggested that a war's effects on the atmosphere could be quite serious.” I am not saying politics never showed up, but it’s clear the initial research was of a more practical nature as was the 1958 paper.
As to the paper you’re referring to:
“As a side effect, the studies helped to improve scientific understanding of how aerosols could affect climate.” So it was actually an improvement on existing models.
Though science marches on and the debate continued, my understanding is that people found how the early models underestimated a specific issue they investigated and got more concerned. Others would discover areas the model was overestimating impact and investigate that, but overall the models got generally more accurate over time.
> In its original form, Big Wind put out nine burning oil wells in Kuwait, more than many teams that were working with the more traditional method of blowing out well fires with the use of high explosives.
while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Extinguishin... says:
> The companies responsible for extinguishing the fires initially were Bechtel, Red Adair Company (now sold to Global Industries of Louisiana), Boots and Coots, and Wild Well Control. Safety Boss was the fourth company to arrive but ended up extinguishing and capping the most wells of any other company: 180 of the 600. Other companies including Cudd Well/Pressure Control, Neal Adams Firefighters, and Kuwait Wild Well Killers were also contracted.
180 is clearly larger than 45.
What I was missing was the total number of teams involved. https://rlg.fas.org/Taming%20Wild%20Wells%20of%20Kuwait%2035... says "Nearly 30 crew were used", and the Wikipedia page says Big Wind was used for 43 days across the 7 month period.
Assuming 30 day months, that's a mean of 600 / 29 * (43 / (7*30)) = 4.2 wells per crew in a 43 day period, which is well less than Big Wind's crew.