Yet another Hacker News

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

29 points blondie9x 1 hour ago 19 comments

MadrasTh0rn 32 minutes ago | parent

I don't know about you guys but I'm feeling it

meisel 30 minutes ago | parent

What is the conversion to Nagasakis

swader999 28 minutes ago | parent

About 3/s

voxic11 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

iamgopal 21 minutes ago | parent

Just ~250000 years ( in atmospheric absorption rate )

altcognito 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

treyd 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

HelloUsername 19 minutes ago | parent

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, the planet is fine… the people are fucked! Compared to the people, the planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years, and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?

The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away!

altmanaltman 13 minutes ago | parent

The planet has not been through anything, it doesn't experience things or has memories. It literally cannot care if we survive or go extinct. This is why environmentalism focusig on "mother earth" or "the earth is suffering" is so annoying. Focus on humans and what we will face in the future, what our kids will face. Environmentalism should be a humanism and focus on them instead of having broad goals like fixing the whole planet.

TazeTSchnitzel 16 minutes ago | parent

I guess that demonstrates the concept of “a drop in the ocean”, but turning a massacre of civilians into a unit of energy feels crass at best.

ygjb 7 minutes ago | parent

To be completely blunt, the humanitarian crisis being caused by runaway fossil fuel use is tantamount to massacre of civilians.

The death toll from Hiroshima was between 90-160 thousand people. The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.

Add in crop failure, ecosystem collapses, and other unexpected disasters, and it's easy to see why.

It might be crass, but it's mostly poor people and poor countries that are going to be affected.

blondie9x 13 minutes ago | parent

It feel like the earths oceans are at a tipping point and can no longer continue to absorb this amount of heat and acidification from the carbonic acid levels increasing when CO2 breaks down.

https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...

This year it feels like the ocean is losing its ability to breathe in a sense https://scienceblog.com/the-ocean-stopped-breathing-off-pana...

When do we get to full stop on the combustion of fossil fuels to protect humanity’s future?

boplicity 8 minutes ago | parent

Politically, fossil fuels are in vogue. New pipelines, new capacity, lower prices -- all of these are being accelerated right now. There's no #$#$% hope that we'll stop extracting carbon from the ground. It's just not going to happen.

slackfan 12 minutes ago | parent

No I don't get it, can you please provide the measurement in either beaver pelts or football fields.

Kuyawa 6 minutes ago | parent

Oh no, atomic bombs, we all gonna diiiie!

Why not two volcano eruptions? Or half a solar flare? Oh I see, fear is the point. What do we need to vote for now? Who should we hate? What tax are you going to ram down our throats? Sheez