One persons solution to climate change...

[kristopher]

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

Earth’s Rate Of Global Warming Is 400,000 Hiroshima Bombs A Day
BY JOE ROMM ON DECEMBER 22, 2013 AT 11:21 AM

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.

The deniers don’t like the metaphor because, they assert, it is inexact and sensationalistic. But the deniers don’t like the literal facts because they think those are inexact and sensationalistic, too, so we can safely ignore them....

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

Originally posted on DU at http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=edit&forum=1127&thread=60681