Talk:Kuwaiti oil fires
From Academic Kids
Does anyone have a source for whats on this page? Apart from formatting, its unchanged since "conversion script" wrote it. Seaching google, I find nothing but multiple copies of this rather dodgy article requoted in copies of wiki...
(William M. Connolley 16:36, 2004 Mar 18 (UTC)) I found something, not quite the same:
> "Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible. The > fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out... The > resulting soot might well stretch over all of South Asia... It could be > carried around the world... [and] the consequences could be dire. > Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and > droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected... This > endangerment of the food supplies... appears to be likely enough that it > should affect the war plans..." > > - Sagan and Richard Turco, The Baltimore Sun, January 31, 1991, > commenting during the Gulf War on the impact of oil well fires
Also:
>"In 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, some 800 oil wells in Kuwait were >set on fire by Iraqi troops. Prior to the war a number of predictions >were made concerning the possible environmental impact of such an event. >Early predictions warned of a "petroleum winter" effect: a significant >enhancement of the greenhouse effect due to the large amount of carbon >dioxide released in the combustion of the oil and global temperature and >precipitation depressions associated with a thick cloud of smoke being >lofted into the stratosphere. A number modeling studies discounted the >"petroleum winter" hypothesis, arguing that insignificant amounts of >smoke were likely to reach the stratosphere, and concluding that the >effects from the smoke plume generated were likely to be important on >only a regional scale. The predictions made in these modeling studies >are generally confirmed by later satellite and aircraft observations of >the smoke plume."
