~     APOCALYPSE NEVER (Letter to the editor WSJ 1/29/87
     The Dec. 12 letter from the team of researchers known as TAPPS defending their "nuclear winter" thesis is long on words and short on numbers. As the science has slowly evolved, the climate effects of a possible nuclear war have devolved drastically.
     The decline and fall of nuclear winter has been quantified. Just two things are at issue: How cold for how long? It is the same unit that determines our annual heating bills - the degree day - that is the measure of the apocalyptic hypothesis. In 1983, the worst-case outcome of their model was a 22,000 degree-day apocalypse. They predicted temperatures failing to 60 below, yard-deep hard frost and pitch darkness lasting for more than a year.
     In today's model's of the "severe" outcome of a 6,500-megaton holocaust, the patchy overcast cooling lasts two to six weeks; what scattered frost remains threatens uplands that are chilly to begin with.  TTAPS Big Chill has vanished; scarcely 200 degree-days remain.
     Vastly more sophisticated computer modeling today projects worst-case average temperatures around 53 degrees Fahrenheit - more than a hundred degrees warmer than TAPPS did.
     "There must be a way of testing any valid idea. Scientists have been known to change their minds completely and publicly when presented with new evidence or new arguements. I cannot recall the time a politician displayed a similar openness or willingness to change...when nature is more intricate that we have guessed, when deeper study is required for understanding...Here, very often, we bambboozle ourselves." I commend to all the essay from which the words are taken. It is subtitled "Sense and Nonsense at the Edge of Science." Carl Sagen, a member of the TTAPS team, wrote it in 1979; it is high time he read it again.
     On Jan. 23,1986, Nature, a leading scientific journal, roundly denounced the media hype and political hard sell: "Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent literature on 'nuclear winter' research which has become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity." 
     This is pretty strong stuff, and Nature is sort of the SEC of international science. No wonder  the TTAPS authors seem upset. But the intemperate letter can but add to that notoriety. It marks a dismal exception to scientists' general preference for the acceptance of hard truths when cornered by the facts.
     Thefalsel asser tha V.V.Alexandrov' criticis o one-dimensional climate models "was never made" and that "Kosta Tsipis of MIT, whom Mr. Seitz claims as his source, flatly denies the whole thing." I quoted Dr. Tsipis verbatim from a Dec. 21, 1984, tape-recorded interview. Tellingly, TTAPS have repeatedly refused to relealease the "peer review" transcript to which they refer to both the press and their colleagues.
     They imply the sanction of federal funding for TTAPS's do-it-yourself "peer review conference". In fact, the W.Alton Jones Foundation footed the bill. This was after NASA refused to sponsor such a process. Lack of space prevents my listing all 26 Foundations that bankrolled their nostrum's media campaign. Only TTAPS would "fantasize" that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Common Cause share the "motivation" of the National Center for Atmospheric Research or the Defense Department.
     They dismiss as "absurd" the notion that their still unpublished 1983 text "was not adequetely evaluated by our scientific peers" and invoke the authority (but not the content) of the National Academy of Sciences 1984 report, which states forthrightly: "The underlying analysis has not yet undergone the peer review process that precedes publication in most scientific journals." Mr. Sagan's semantic aggresion never prevailed over the academy's better judgement. The expression nuclear winter is nowhere to be found in the NAS report.
     The authors' appeal to authority instead of evidence is revealing. They invokke the "competent judgement" of the "44 Nobel laureates" who grace the Federation of American Scientists' masthead, but it has never been brought to bear on "nuclear winter."  Indeed, Prof. George Rahjens of MIT, former FAS chairmen and present board member, is quoted in Science (Jan. 16,1987); "The claim that the original nuclear winter model is unimpeached is the greatest fraud we've seen in a long time."
     Mr. Sagen writes of the "vitality of the nuclear winter theory." He has failed to convince the foundations that finaced TTAPS's media outlet of this. The Center on the Consequences of Nuclear WAr has ceased operation. Its quarterly, Nuclear Winter News, has also vanished. Airbrushed visions of TTAPS's antartic nightmare may linger on videotape until the turn of the millennium, but its "educational" newsletter is already extinct. It couldn't stand the heat.
     An apocalyptic hypothesis, like any other, is advanced only at the risk of its being falsified by further research. Stanford President Donald Kennedy reminded those attending nuclear winter's inagural news confrence in 1983 that "we ought to worry whenever obsolete date are being used to inform public policy choices." Just so.
     Both science and the public interest would have been better served by a simple retraction in the pages of Science, where TTAPS first appeared, than by their lengthly diatribe in the WSJ.
     A computer begat "nuclear winter." A supercomputer and a more ample data base have laid it low.
                         Russell Sietz, Associate, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.