How Many Hiroshima Bombs per Second?

Article from January 2023. From "Watching the World Go Bye - Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog." He was featured yesterday for the graph of current Antarctic sea ice during winter being 6.5 sigma below recorded mean. (here: https://boingboing.net/2023/07/25/graph-reveals-terrifying-trend-of-antarctic-sea-ice-loss.html)

In this article he breaks down the metric of Hiroshima bombs per second as applied to energy added to atmospheric and oceanic climates due to human activity, concluding:

"Adding the last 20 years all up, we get total warming due to the EEI over the last 20 years equivalent to lighting off 4,250,000,000 (4.25 billion) Hiroshima nuclear bombs, of which about 3.8 billion went into heating the oceans."

senorblackbean,

Having seen so many Hiroshima bombs explode, I know exactly how much this is.

Keep an eye out for meteors of 1,000 corgis or more in size that might head for the planet.

glimse,

I hope this article was written specifically for high-minded scientists or else it’s kind of stupid to Little Boy as the base unit when that is SO vague for laymen. How big was the explosion? I dunno, pretty big? And the resulting number of 4.25b is also unfathomably large so…what does this tell us?

The total warming is equivalent to a big number of a big thing. Not a very helpful way to educate the masses on the reality of climate change, it just seems sensationalist.

FormlessMartian,

Agree. Most people don’t even understand how large a number a billion is. Mixing in weird unit conversions is a good way to make sure your point is lost. Next we tell people how many football stadiums we could fill with all the bleached coral reefs?

glimse,

I’d even say that football stadiums would be a huge step up from this because at least most people have an rough understanding of the size of a pitch!

uphillbothways,
uphillbothways avatar

Article was written in response to the use of the terminology in mainstream media and inaccuracies in that application. First paragraph in link describes the why. Next couple paragraphs give further context.

glimse,

Personally I found it interesting! I just don’t think this a good way to convince the masses of the problem at hand, it’s WAYYY too abstract

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