King Hussein and Carl Sagan have one thing in common.
Both got burned by the Kuwaiti oil fires.
In November 1990, King Hussein of Jordan warned that Iraq's Saddam Hussein might ignite the oil fields. The carbon dioxide produced by the fires would accelerate global warming, the king said.
In an editorial published in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 30, 1991, Sagan pronounced King Hussein wrong. According to the editorial, smoke from the fires could cool much of the Northern Hemisphere and demonstrate the ''nuclear winter'' theory proposed by the astronomer and colleagues in 1983.
Two weeks later, Iraqis set Kuwait's oil fields on fire, testing the predictions of the king and Sagan with one of the biggest atmospheric experiments ever conducted.
The results of that experiment are coming in. The conclusion: The fires' smoke neither warmed nor cooled the globe, said atmospheric scientist Peter Hobbs, writing in a recent issue of Science.
That does not mean the global warming and nuclear winter theories are incorrect. It only means that burning a lot of oil all at once can make for some big surprises.
The fires did not contribute to global warming because they added only a tiny amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere compared with other sources. Scientists estimate the oil fires accounted for about two percent of the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere last year.
The oil fires also did not cause a nuclear winter because the smoke did not rise very high., said Tom Sullivan of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. To cause a nuclear winter, smoke would have to rise seven or eight miles. But in Kuwait, the smoke never got above three or four miles.
Nuclear winter models assumed that if the heat from the fires did not blast the smoke into the stratosphere, a process called self-lofting would.
Self-lofting occurs when black particles in the air absorb the sun's heat. If they get warmer than the air, they rise.
But the smoke was not as black as scientists expected, so it did not absorb much heat and did not self-loft.
Sagan's editorial in the Los Angeles Times suggested the smoke might drift over India and disrupt the monsoon, bringing famine. Other atmospheric scientists thought it would not affect India's rainy season at all.
But it may have intensified the monsoon. The rains were as strong as ever last year, and Sullivan thinks the smoke particles might have seeded clouds across Asia.
''There's some possibility (that the smoke particles) enhanced precipitation some distance from the fires,'' he said.
