Climatic AH: Warmer WWII.

In OTL, the six years of WWII where also the six coldest years of the 20th century. Cold played a major role in the war. What if instead of being the coldest years of the 20th century, 1939-1945 where the warmest? How would this effect the war?
 
In OTL, the six years of WWII where also the six coldest years of the 20th century. Cold played a major role in the war. What if instead of being the coldest years of the 20th century, 1939-1945 where the warmest? How would this effect the war?
Given that some of that has to be due to a) dust bowl dust providing a bit of cooling and b) lack of greenhouse gas emissions due to massively shut down industries, I think you'd have to get rid of the Great Depression, which probably then gets rid of WWII.
 
Given that some of that has to be due to a) dust bowl dust providing a bit of cooling and b) lack of greenhouse gas emissions due to massively shut down industries, I think you'd have to get rid of the Great Depression, which probably then gets rid of WWII.

On a short-term scale (less than a decade, six years in this case) we don't understand the climate well enough to make these kinds of absolute assertions. At that timescale, the climate is chaotic and variable enough that we can't rule out the POD.

But, if it hurts your sensibilities to have six much warmer years without butterflying the Great Depression, just posit that the warm years are a localized phenomena in Europe and the Northern hemisphere, not global.
 

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Given that some of that has to be due to a) dust bowl dust providing a bit of cooling and b) lack of greenhouse gas emissions due to massively shut down industries, I think you'd have to get rid of the Great Depression, which probably then gets rid of WWII.

I thought also the enormous amount of burning caused by the war also threw so much smoke into the air that it helped thicken the atmosphere to a degree like how the Krakatoa eruption threw so much dust into the atmosphere that it cooled the earth 1.2 degrees Celsius.
 

BlondieBC

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I thought also the enormous amount of burning caused by the war also threw so much smoke into the air that it helped thicken the atmosphere to a degree like how the Krakatoa eruption threw so much dust into the atmosphere that it cooled the earth 1.2 degrees Celsius.



The information I have read have it as a variation in the Arctic weather patterns - unusually warm in Arctic above Russia, unusually cold around Moscow. You had higher temperatures over the ice that winter than Moscow. In August 1940, the Germans sent AMC to Pacific via NE passage. Which was not open again until last 10 years or so.
 
I thought also the enormous amount of burning caused by the war also threw so much smoke into the air that it helped thicken the atmosphere to a degree like how the Krakatoa eruption threw so much dust into the atmosphere that it cooled the earth 1.2 degrees Celsius.

The amount of dust and ash flung into the atmosphere by krakatoa was at least an order of magnitude(if not several orders of magnitude) more that all of the dust and ash thrown into the atmosphere by all of the years of WWII even including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
I'm not going to argue about the climate whys, who really cares.

I wonder about the rasputista in Russia if the WW2 years were warm, specifically the interplay between war production, logistics and operational pauses in Barbarossa. Would warmer weather have allowed the Germans to peter out after actually having surrounded Moscow rather than falling 17km short? Or would other war production/logistic factors come into play?
 
I don't know about a warmer 1939-45, but if it got any colder, the Wehrmacht might be able to walk from Calais to Dover.:p

So it has been determined now that the easiest way for Sealion to happen is for The Germans to invent a weather control device and freeze The Channel?
 
I'd say that this is tremendously iffy to look at.

For example the century and a half long records of isotopic presence (including heavy metals) in straw taken at the Rothamstead farm show how as well as the recent trend for less lead in the atmosphere, there is also a large drop in the amount of lead emissions (which can be correlated with other associated emissions including Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases) directly resulting from the industrial shutdown of WWII outside specific areas.

The point being that it's just as likely that WWII was part of the reason for the cold snap due to lots of industrial complexes getting knocked out of action and other factors along the same lines as that it was due to previous decades also.
 
I'm not going to go into the likelyhood or otherwise of wars causing climate change. But a warmer 1940's certain can make big changes.

If it means more rain, this can delay the German attacks on Poland by a week or two (giving them more time to mobilise), France by a week or two (more time to modernise/prepare/notice). A longer autumn mud season in the USSR in 1941 and an earlier one in spring 1942 are going to have big effects on how far Germany gets in both offensives.

More or less cloud cover over Europe may make a difference to the USAAF bombing campaign and to Bomber Commands successes and losses.

If it affects the US grain growing areas with a drought, that will mean less to go to lend lease shipments to the UK and USSR. It may well also excacerbate the droughts that affected SE Asia causing worse famines than we saw OTL.
 
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