In this article is the first time I've seen a graph with units "Hiroshimas per Seconds". https://climatecasino.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Ocean_H...
1 Hiroshima ~= 15.5 kiloton TNT ~= 18 GWh.
A large powerplant generates roughly 1 GW of electricity, so running for 18 hours is the equivalent of 1 Hiroshima.
(GNU units ... seems to have this predefined, along with 'davycrocket", "nagasaki", "fatman", "littleboy", "ivyking", "castlebravo", "tsarbomba", "b53bomb", "trinity", and "gadget".)
This also makes clear that it's not merely the amount of energy released, but the rate which matters. A powerplant running for three quarters of a day isn't tremendously destructive. A Little Boy type fission bomb exploding in a few microseconds ... is. Slowing your car from 100 kph to 0 over 10 seconds is a strong stop, doing that in 0.1 seconds is a fatal accident.
Typically, a 10x increase or decrease in scale or magnitude is transformative. By very rough averages, a human walks at ~5 kph, an automobile travels at 50 kph, a commercial airliner at 500 kph, a fighter aircraft at 5,000 kph, and a spacecraft at 50,000 kph.
A Tsar bomb or a long number with an unit attached won't be as graphically understood as this one. Scientists may grasp those numbers, but they already know how bad this is, you must reach everyone else.
Derivation: Hiroshima: 129,000–226,000 deaths. E(death_Hiroshima) ~= 180k. 9/11/2011, NYC: 2,753 people died. 180k/2753 ~= 65.
> As of March, 2023, on an annualized basis, the EEI was 1.61 Watts per square meter. That might not sound like a lot, but on a global basis it is about equal to the energy released from 13 Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs exploding every second.
That "1.61 Watts per square meter" figure does sound low to someone who thinks in terms of 60 Watt light bulbs. Thinking of it on the scale of nuclear bombs being dropped may give people pause to reflect on the magnitude of the rate of energy being absorbed.
If the WTC towers were somehow successfully evacuated before collapse, and only 200 people died instead of 3000 (or however there were on the 2 planes), the cultural effect on the country would've been the same.