Saddam Hussein’s Climate Experiment

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 someday an eco-terrorist would have his army set 640 oil wells ablaze in Kuwait, thereby providing a real-world experiment to test his model.

On ABC’s Nightline program, Sagan got to debate S. Fred Singer with their conflicting models. Wikipedia documents the results of the experiment:

Sagan again argued that some of the effects of the smoke could be similar to the effects of a nuclear winter, with smoke lofting into the stratosphere, a region of the atmosphere beginning around 43,000 feet (13,000 m) above sea level at Kuwait,[35] resulting in global effects and that he believed the net effects would be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the Year Without a Summer.

He reported on initial modeling estimates that forecast impacts extending to south Asia, and perhaps to the northern hemisphere as well. Singer, on the other hand, said that calculations showed that the smoke would go to an altitude of about 3,000 feet (910 m) and then be rained out after about three to five days and thus the lifetime of the smoke would be limited.

Both height estimates made by Singer and Sagan turned out to be wrong, albeit with Singer’s narrative being closer to what transpired, with the comparatively minimal atmospheric effects remaining limited to the Persian Gulf region, with smoke plumes, in general, [1] lofting to about 10,000 feet (3,000 m) and a few times as high as 20,000 feet (6,100 m) …

Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World that his prediction did not turn out to be correct: “it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6 °C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared.”

Saddam’s experiment had falsified the TTAPS scenario. But the environmental cost was great. NASA satellite photographs showed a sooty cloud bank up to a thousand miles long.

Famed German film and opera director and producer Werner Herzog made a somber documentary film of the effects of the fires, Lessons of Darkness, with a distinctly European outlook. It was very pessimistic.

In contrast, David Douglas made an optimistic documentary, Fires of Kuwait IMAX, which presented an optimistic American perspective of the successful American-led efforts to extinguish the fires and then cap the wells.

It was nominated for an Academy Award.

As Saddam’s army fled they sabotaged the wells and stole everything they could carry. When the first American well firefighters arrived, they found very little equipment to use for their efforts.

They put out a call for suggestions. That is where I made my small contribution to the effort.

In response to an article in the Wall Street Journal, I faxed in my idea with a description, a sketch and a summary of the engineering principles involved, in effect a handwritten patent application.

I never got an acknowledgment, but soon I saw the firefighters using a “venturi tube”.

Oil and Gas Journal described the action in April 1991.

Firefighters have extinguished the first two oil well fires in Kuwait. Boots & Coots Inc. snuffed the burning wells by pumping liquid nitrogen onto the flames through a venturi tube positioned over the fires and spraying them with water from a Kuwaiti fire truck.

Boots & Coots said the procedure works on some small fires but not on most large ones. Red Adair Co. Inc.’s crews also were reported to be trying the method.

Boots & Coots seems to have shared a weakness with President Bush, they “lacked the vision thing”. Despite their assessment that the venturi tube would not work on large fires, it did.

Fortunately, George Hill of Wild Well Control had vision.  He not only used the venturi tube, but he added his own touches.

From Fires of Kuwait IMAX, we get his assessment of the power of the tool he had been given.

Narrator: At George Hill’s fire the heat is so intense that the men can’t work near it. A hollow steel venturi tube will lift the flame up and away from the men and machines.

George Hill: If it’s a 30 foot tube, it will roughly move your radiant heat circle back 50 to 70 feet. I mean it creates a low pressure at the base of that tube that is unbelievable. It will take your gloves off. You’ve got to be careful or it will suck your heart out.

Based on the record, who do you have more faith in, American engineers or Internationalist scientists?

Read more at American Thinker