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Comment by haizhung | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if my math is correct, but seems like compared to before global warming started, the oceans now hold an excess of energy that is equivalent to running a nuclear power plant for 3 million years. This is now excess energy in our system.

I just wanted to share that since I couldn’t really relate to the 10^22 joules number in the article.

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The number appears to me as ~20 x 10^22 J

I tried to replicate your maths using 1Bn W for a power plant and I get ~6.3M years. Did you use a different W?

I chose 1Bn from reading https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-how-much-powe...

I'm glad your comment triggered me to do this exercise!

Boggling numbers all the same, and this is only the top half-mile of ocean

Venus any% glitchless speedrun.

Short of launching all the nukes, it's actually really hard to imagine a faster way to make Earth uninhabitable than humanity's GHG emissions project. (3.68×10^13 kg of CO2 in 2022 alone! Impressive!)

If we could terraform planets as quickly as we're de-terraforming Earth, Mars would be prime real estate in no time. Alas.

> hard to imagine a faster way to make Earth uninhabitable

Manufacturing lots of SF6 (sulphur hexafluoride) might do the trick. 22800x more greenhouse potential than CO2 per unit mass.

It's way more dense[0] than air, though, so not a lot of it reaches the upper atmosphere. I don't think it's 22800x more effective when produced at ground level.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u19QfJWI1oQ

That's why we're aiming for in-orbit manufacturing, isn't it?

Great. We just need to find a way to vent that extra heat off into outer space. Problem solved. /s

I hear the sarcasm in your voice, but truly this is a thing. There are bands of radiation that are very transparent to our atmosphere and there is work being done with meta materials to try to shift waste energy into these bands to bleed it into space. I do conceed that the scale is impossibly large for the numbers we’re talking about, but I do find the science fascinating.

This is exactly what hurricanes do, and a lesser extent cumulonimbus clouds, starting from an atmospheric imbalance to eventually venting tropospheric heat to the upper atmosphere.

Which article are you referring to? I didn't see it in the parent.

Chart for Ocean Heat Content under trends.

Source is @ https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Given that the excess energy did come from nuclear power plant (the sun) over millions of years I think that is a really apt way to look at things.

Interesting coincidence that you ended up with 3 million years, given life appeared on earth about 3.7 million years ago.

> given life appeared on earth about 3.7 million years ago.

Add 1000X -- 3.7 billion years ago!

oops

The increase in temperature is since 1990 though.

As a useful milestone, dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. Long time. First hominids, 2 Mya?

First evidence of hominids goes back almost six millions years [1] and first tools over three millions years ago [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardipithecus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan

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