The passing of President George H. W. Bush and the ruckus caused by the Yellow Vests in France make this a good time to review the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and as a deterrent to those who might oppose him, he threatened environmental warfare. This threat took advantage of the concerns first aired by a group known as TTAPS, an acronym of the names of the authors, Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan. They had postulated that a nuclear exchange would induce a “Nuclear Winter”. The TTAPS climate model was a one-dimensional radiative-convective computer model. Trying to model the Earth’s climate with a one-dimensional model was a fool’s errand, but Carl Sagan’s name recognition from his PBS Series, Cosmos, gave him an outsized reputation. Little did Sagan expect that some day an eco-terrorist would have his army set 640 oil wells ablaze in Kuwait, thereby providing a real-world experiment to test...(Read Full Article)