Earth’s Rate Of Global Warming Is 400,000 Hiroshima Bombs A Day

Global warming is already killing many directly thru floods & droughts. Indirectly thru food shortages that fuel social unrest.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/22/3089711/global-warming-hiroshima-bombs/

By Joe Romm on December 22, 2013

Conveying abstract or hard-to-visualize ideas is always a challenge. That’s a core reason why the best communicators have always used metaphors.

As Aristotle wrote in his classic work Poetics, “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.”

How can one convey the Earth’s staggering rate of heat build up from human-caused global warming — 250 trillion Watts (Joules per second)? The analogy to the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb has been used in recent years by a number of scientists, such as NOAA oceanographer John Lyman, and Mike Sandiford, Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute. In his TED talk Climatologist James Hansen explained the current rate of increase in global warming is:

“… equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year. That’s how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day.”

That comes out to more than four Hiroshima bombs a second, which is a metric Skeptical Science has turned into a widget. I prefer the 400,000 Hiroshimas per day metric simply because the heat imbalance is occurring over a very large area, which four Hiroshimas don’t do justice to.

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while global warming doesn’t kill tens of thousands of people in a flash, it is on track to reduce the carrying capacity of the planet post-2050 far below the 9 billion people that we are projected to have. Again, where we are headed, I doubt future generations will think this aspect of the metaphor was somehow morally inappropriate. It’ll be our inaction — and everyone and everything that fed our inaction — that will be seen as morally inappropriate.

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Last week, Skeptical Science reported that “Previous estimates put the amount of heat accumulated by the world’s oceans over the past decade equivalent to about four Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second, on average, but [Dr. Kevin] Trenberth’s research puts the estimate equivalent to more than six detonations per second.”

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