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Comment by MattPalmer1086 | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem in how warming is reported in my opinion. Saying it's just 2 or 3 degrees doesn't sound like a lot. But that is warming the whole planet on average by that amount. This is a lot of energy being injected into the climate, and regional variations and extreme weather will be much more severe.

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Meh I dunno, there's that website that reports how many hiroshimas of energy we're releasing into our planet per second, the skeptics/denialists don't seem to care much for that metric, either.

I don't think the problem is how it's being reported, I think it's just that this is the kind of news some people will do anything but hear.

I hadn't heard of the Hiroshima's per second before. That sounds like the kind of metric that might change a few minds.

Denialists won't listen to anything anyway, but I think there's probably a lot of people who hear 1 or 2 degrees (globally) and just think meh, doesn't sound so bad.

I went looking for the website I was thinking of, but instead I found this article from The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/four-hiroshima-bombs-a-second-ho...

Dated 2013. 10 years ago we were already talking about how we're releasing 4 Hiroshimas into the atmosphere per second. Good thing that woke everyone up and enacted a decisive response to the existential thr---- oh.

Well, I think that's the point of that article. It says that we need to communicate in terms people can relate to better (than just some average temperature over the whole planet).

So no, we weren't talking like that 10 years ago, but we had identified that we needed better messaging. But we did nothing about that.

Just try to imagine the ludicrous amount of energy required to heat up the whole surface - and probably a good part of the ocean - by 2°C.

I think it is in the order of 10^17 joules or so.

But that is distributed over a ludicrous amount of volume. These numbers are so large that I can visualize neither. How is this information supposed to help me?

First I would check the number that I gave you and make sure it is correct. Then you put it into perspective; e.g. how many millennia would it take for a couple of hundred nuclear reactors to produce that much of energy.

Play with the numbers and see what you can learn about them.

Not sure you need to consider that much of a volume; we're talking about surface temperature, so you can just take an approximation of heat capacity of the surface of Earth.

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