Thread

Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second

60 points · 84 comments · blondie9x

voxic11 · 1790689045 · focus · HN ↗
To heat all the water in all the Earth's oceans by 1 degree Celsius it would require the energy equivalent of the detonation of roughly 87 billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
1. iamgopal · 1790689348 · focus · HN ↗
  Just ~250000 years ( in atmospheric absorption rate )
  1. RIMR · 1790730884 · focus · HN ↗
    Weird thing to say to a comment that explicitly says this is about warming the oceans. The original calculation, assuming all the energy is dumped directly into the ocean would be: 87B / (60*60*24*365*4) = 689.69 years.
    Funny thing about the atmosphere though is that it requires ~1300x less energy to heat up by 1 degree, so if you dump all that energy into the atmosphere, the temperature would go up by ~2 degrees per year.
    The reality is that global warming warms up both the oceans and the atmosphere to varying degrees (and the earth's crust, to much lesser degree), with the ocean absorbing most of that. The atmosphere only absorbs about 23% of that, and a significant amount of the of the excesses radiate back into space.
    But even with a conservative estimate that only 1% of this heat is being stored in the atmosphere, that would still lead to a global atmospheric temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius every 50 years. The worst-case scenarios estimate 2% of this heat is retained, dropping that down to 25 years.
    I'm going to go ahead and guess that waiting 2.5M years isn't the answer. That's geological time scales anyway, Humans could have gone extinct and been replaced with new intelligent life in that kind of time. Whatever math you did to reach that figure, it's completely wrong.
2. altcognito · 1790689409 · focus · HN ↗
  On the front page the counter is up to nearly 4 billion since 1998. The real problem is that we continue to do things to accelerate this, and as we all know, humans are terrible with exponentials.
  1. t0bia_s · 1790723076 · focus · HN ↗
    How do you know? Btw, about 8 (1) times more people die because of cold than heat. Isn't rising temperature good for humanity?
    (1): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524696">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524696
    piva00 · 1790750715 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it's not, unless you think drought, crop failures, desertification of arable land, etc. is good for humanity.
    t0bia_s · 1790774407 · focus · HN ↗
    If that means less deaths in global scale, what is wrong with that? What would be ideal situation according to your subjective opinion? More cold areas? More ice? More humidity? Do you actually belive that we should and can change weather? Isn't that against nature?
    piva00 · 1790777175 · focus · HN ↗
    How would that mean less deaths in a global scale? Show me your line of thought on how less food, less access to drinkable water, including all the social strife, violence, etc. that scarcity of those basic resources bring, mean less deaths.
    > What would be ideal situation according to your subjective opinion? More cold areas? More ice? More humidity? Do you actually belive that we should and can change weather? Isn't that against nature?
    Ideal situation is to stop artificially increasing the concentration of CO2 to allow nature to vary this concentration on much longer natural cycles as it's been, which allow not only humans but other lifeforms to adapt to it without causing mass death.
    What do you mean "actually believe that we should and can change weather"? Do you understand what climate is, and its relationship to weather patterns? Do you understand how humans have changed the climate through burning fossil fuels? Do you understand the magnitude of increased energy being trapped in the atmosphere from those human actions?
    Or wait, are you one of those who do not believe the evidence of climate science at all?
    t0bia_s · 1790794851 · focus · HN ↗
    I see no point of continuing in this conversation since you did not read anything in link I posted earlier.
    piva00 · 1790795954 · focus · HN ↗
    Because I'm not focusing on ambient temperatures, and have no idea why do you think this is the major impact from a warming climate at all.
    The major issues about climate change are not about the comfort of ambient temperature to humans, far from it.
    (And yes, I did take a cursory look at all the links)
3. treyd · 1790689789 · focus · HN ↗
  This is a dishonest comparison. The atmosphere warming has a much more immediate impact and the ocean isn't a perfect heat sink.
  Air has a specific heat (~1) less than a quarter per unit mass than water (~4.1). The atmosphere has a mass of ~5 billion kgs and the ocean has a mass of ~1.4*10^21 kgs.
  It requires a lot less trapped energy to warm the atmosphere by 1 C than the ocean. We're well on track for 2.5 C increase since preindustrial levels.
4. conartist6 · 1790691998 · focus · HN ↗
  If we're trying to give perspective, may as well leave it to the master: <a href="https://xkcd.com/1732/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1732/
5. ricardobeat · 1790692029 · focus · HN ↗
  Then one of these is wrong. If this counter is at 4B, wouldn't we have evaporated 5% of the worlds oceans already?
  1. rozal · 1790692561 · focus · HN ↗
    he said - raise it by one degree, not evaporate
  2. mikestew · 1790692588 · focus · HN ↗
    “Evaporated“? I think you need to reread parent comment.
6. isthatafact · 1790713161 · focus · HN ↗
  and yet the ocean surface is already at roughly +1 degree Celsius.
  As long as we are doing absolutely useless comparisons of enormous numbers that could potentially be used as disinformation to vastly understate the impact of global warming: To heat the entire planet Earth down to the core by 1 degree Celsius would require the energy equivalent of (~order of magnitude) 1 quadrillion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.

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