- Bishop Hill blog

Pic Arctic Woof under CC licence https://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticwoof/7105477111To some extent, concerns over global warming have arisen as a direct result of environmentalists' scaremongering over nuclear energy. How much lower would carbon dioxide emissions have been if the world had gone nuclear in the 1960s?

That environmentalists were scaremongering is confirmed by a new paper in Current Biology, which reports long-term survey data from the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Despite numerous earlier studies reporting that radiation levels in the 1600 square miles zone are above dangerous levels, nobody seems to have passed the news on to the wildlife:

...our long-term empirical data showed no evidence of a negative influence of radiation on mammal abundance. Relative abundances of elk, roe deer, red deer and wild boar within the Chernobyl exclusion zone are similar to those in four (uncontaminated) nature reserves in the region and wolf abundance is more than 7 times higher. Additionally, our earlier helicopter survey data show rising trends in elk, roe deer and wild boar abundances from one to ten years post-accident.

Imagine then a world in which the world had not been set back half a century by a monstrous regiment of hippies.

Update on Oct 6, 2015 by

Bishop Hill

It's interesting to ponder what this tells us about the linear no-threshold model for ionising radiation. This is the idea that if lab rats are harmed by high doses of radiation then low doses must harm them too (you can't easily test this proposition in the lab because the effect is too weak).

Some recent research findings suggest that this could well be the case.

The LNT model... is inconsistent with biologic and experimental data, which show the nature and the effectiveness of immediate and delayed defense systems to vary widely with dose and dose rate. No convincing epidemiologic data support the LNT relationship. It has been said that for low doses, epidemiology faces its limits (166).