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Discussion regarding the potential collapse of global civilization, defined as a significant decrease in human population

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How Many Hiroshima Bombs per Second? (climatecasino.net)
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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."

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[–] glimse 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 2 points 1 year ago

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!

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