Climate is accumulating 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of heat per second
4hiroshimas.info
4hiroshimas.info
Funny thing about the atmosphere though is that it requires ~1300x less energy to heat up by 1 degree, so if you dump all that energy into the atmosphere, the temperature would go up by ~2 degrees per year.
The reality is that global warming warms up both the oceans and the atmosphere to varying degrees (and the earth's crust, to much lesser degree), with the ocean absorbing most of that. The atmosphere only absorbs about 23% of that, and a significant amount of the of the excesses radiate back into space.
But even with a conservative estimate that only 1% of this heat is being stored in the atmosphere, that would still lead to a global atmospheric temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius every 50 years. The worst-case scenarios estimate 2% of this heat is retained, dropping that down to 25 years.
I'm going to go ahead and guess that waiting 2.5M years isn't the answer. That's geological time scales anyway, Humans could have gone extinct and been replaced with new intelligent life in that kind of time. Whatever math you did to reach that figure, it's completely wrong.
> What would be ideal situation according to your subjective opinion? More cold areas? More ice? More humidity? Do you actually belive that we should and can change weather? Isn't that against nature?
Ideal situation is to stop artificially increasing the concentration of CO2 to allow nature to vary this concentration on much longer natural cycles as it's been, which allow not only humans but other lifeforms to adapt to it without causing mass death.
What do you mean "actually believe that we should and can change weather"? Do you understand what climate is, and its relationship to weather patterns? Do you understand how humans have changed the climate through burning fossil fuels? Do you understand the magnitude of increased energy being trapped in the atmosphere from those human actions?
Or wait, are you one of those who do not believe the evidence of climate science at all?
The major issues about climate change are not about the comfort of ambient temperature to humans, far from it.
(And yes, I did take a cursory look at all the links)
Air has a specific heat (~1) less than a quarter per unit mass than water (~4.1). The atmosphere has a mass of ~5 billion kgs and the ocean has a mass of ~1.4*10^21 kgs.
It requires a lot less trapped energy to warm the atmosphere by 1 C than the ocean. We're well on track for 2.5 C increase since preindustrial levels.
As long as we are doing absolutely useless comparisons of enormous numbers that could potentially be used as disinformation to vastly understate the impact of global warming: To heat the entire planet Earth down to the core by 1 degree Celsius would require the energy equivalent of (~order of magnitude) 1 quadrillion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
The death toll from Hiroshima was between 90-160 thousand people. The amount of excess deaths due to heat waves in 2023 was around 178,000. There are projections that the El Nino related heat waves could cause up to half a million, and longer term projections grow to 300,000 a year just from heat in the next few years. Just from heat.
Add in crop failure, ecosystem collapses, and other unexpected disasters, and it's easy to see why.
It might be crass, but it's mostly poor people and poor countries that are going to be affected.
The comment I responded to was tone policing for crassness instead of actually contributing to the discussion.
Would it have been better to point out there has been a Russo-Ukraine wars worth of deaths from heat waves each year since 2022?
Or a Rwandan Civil Wars worth of deaths projected in the next year?
Or a Holocaust worth of deaths over the next decade?
What does it take to get people to listen and take it seriously?
Not for nothing but I am growing lemons and coffee beans in Vancouver, BC, and I only need to bring them in for about 2 months a year. What that actually means is that people are already evaluating how we will relocate crops (luxury and essential) to other climates.
What about when major crops like wheat, corn, rice, and beans fail around the world?
Scary.
On a related note, annual deaths from extreme cold are estimated at over 4 million per year.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
(Note: I picked this article specifically because it’s written by people who are desperately trying to find a way to make the heat story sound worse, but still have to admit that the facts are the facts.)
When the facts don’t support your story, make up a wild new prediction of the future that can’t be falsified.
[1] ...even though 99% of the world's population lives between -50 and +60 degrees latitude.
Making long-term predictions of deaths due to inherently contradictory outcomes of long-term fluctuations in those “more chaotic” systems. That’s obviously objective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_Maggiore
And read what happened many times in history.
Not a “thesis”, just a fact.
You had made a remark in another post somewhere that there was an unfalsifiable claim in asserting that people will die from both extreme cold and extreme heat, and that claim is one I don't really find all that interesting. Mathematically, it's verging on vacuously true, very firmly in "Yeah, so what?" territory.
I'm more curious if there's some (minimally associative but preferably causal) relationship between those extremes that you might know about; e.g., for every linear step increase in heat deaths, we realize some exponential step increase in cold deaths.
Your feels are not proof.
Starting from a situation where nine times more people die from cold than heat each year, then asserting that not only will those numbers somehow flip, but that actually, they’ll also both go up? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The “mathematically uninteresting” claim would be the parsimonious one: as low temperatures go up, cold deaths will decrease, for a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.
No, but it's how I formulate hypotheses for testing. It's why that claim I labeled as verging on vacuously true is uninteresting: how the fuck do I even go about testing that?
> The “mathematically uninteresting” claim would be the parsimonious one: as low temperatures go up, cold deaths will decrease, for a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.
I fear I may be misunderstanding what you mean by parsimonious here. There's a scientific sense wherein there's an explanation that requires fewer assumptions, and in this sense, I'm still not understanding the argument you're proposing. Simplest hypothesis under what model? I think is the question I want to ask here???
The unfortunate part is that it's prima facie unclear that the climate system would be conservative in this way. I'll admit that's due to some ignorance on my part about how climate systems work, but it's also that ignorance that fuels an understanding that there are variables that I can't account for, let alone control for, which limits the kind of modeling that I can undertake to understand this problem (and, as a consequence, your argument, whatever that happens to be).
Forgive me if it seems like I'm asking stupid questions, but I'm legitimately trying to understand your contributions as positively contributory. I have no real priors for this that I'm trying to validate or invalidate.
If I am wrong, I apologize, but politeness and tone policing to shut down discussion of crises is a recurring problem in society.
You cracked the code, let's just try to equate climate change to Hiroshima! That'll convince people!
"Due to data limitations, adaptation indicators such as access to air conditioning and healthcare resources were not included, and GDP per capita was used as a proxy."
I'm sure this analysis is directionally right, but it's not defensible to use the 178,000 number. Moreover extrapolating out into the future based on such an analysis seem fraught at best.
Sure. There are weaknesses in the study, it doesn't change the fact that there was a significant increase in the number of deaths.
Hiding behind the claims that studies of complex systems are not completely valid because of a lack of rigor in the process or a weakness in the data are easy to overlook when governments around the world (including mine in Canada) are routinely fudging the numbers to achieve political goals.
People are dying from climate change in record numbers, and it's going to get a lot worse, and criticizing the quality of the studies does absolutely nothing helpful.
While it’s important it seems like a tractable problem in a lot of ways, and the study’s lack of data on AC use is a serious flaw.
To be completely blunt, fuck your bluntness. You clearly don't care about climate change all that much if you aren't willing to even attempt effective messaging. Go do your revolutionary cosplay with some lesser topic
You can act as upset as you want, I am more concerned about the impact to the world around us than I am about hurt feelings on a tech discussion forum.
I'm not entirely sure why you are so upset with me, but I assure you, it's not cosplay. My family lives on the west coast, and are going to be significantly impacted by climate change. My family back east lives in rural Manitoba (southern and northern), and their farms have been impacted by poor harvests due to weather and climate issues. My friends and family in northern Manitoba were evacuated due to forest fires last summer, and other friends in the BC interior were as well.
It's not performative concern and it's not revolutionary, it's just exhaustion from watching people deny and tone police discussions about something having real, human impacts. People will starve to death because of crop failures happening today, and its going to get worse :(
At the same time, I have a hard time thinking that the destruction of the environment is either necessary or natural. So the death caused by climate change also seems like a particular kind of massacre.
Where I was raised, it was a commonplace to think of the firebombings and nuclear incineration of vast amounts of civilian populations as regrettable but necessary and perhaps even a natural outcome of technological growth.
I hadn't really considered that position until your comment, but my rejoinder would be "perhaps the comparison is unfortunately apt and it is crass to ignore the death caused by climate change."
If you burn liquid sodium in steam, you end up with sodium bicarbonate particulate of just about the right size to offset global warming.[2]
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250000498/downloads/Re...
Pretty schmick to look at, to be honest, but ultimately bad news and best avoided.
The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away!
The earth is the only place in the universe right now where humans can survive at our current technology level, and we are destroying that ecosystem at an alarming rate. We depend on the entire planets ecosystem for our survival, and even if technology somehow could let us survive ecological collapse, a humanist approach to the environment is tantamount to burning the boat we are sailing on to keep warm.
If you want an example from our field: AI doomers and AI maximalists get a lot more air time on the mainstream media and on HN than those who think it's a normal technology with some benefits and some downsides.
This attitude of humanity first is exactly what got us here and what will wipe us off the planet.
Yes I am humanity first. That is not selfish to me (in the sense we use the word). It is not humanity at all costs but it is always humanity first obviously. If you disagree you should go live with animals for a few days and see how they interact. The only thing is that you can't tell a chimp he's being selfish while they rip your arm off. Nor would he care.
In case you have not noticed, we are currently in the sixth great extinction of this planet, which is driven by human activity. I consider it beyond tragic and existential to know that many of the wonders of this planet are going away and never coming back. Humans can live with air conditioning or under ground, but that doesn’t help other animals. You can still view this under a human lens if you wish, but for many of us, those other kinds of life are worth something, and bundling up that value by saying “we must protect the Earth” seems quite natural and defendable to me.
We are extremely lucky we are born in this planet. But to think it is the only one with intelligent life is laughable. It literally doesn't matter to anyone than other humans what wonders of the world remain or are lost. It is egostictical to imagine a planet in only your own view of what it should be. Maybe Mars is the ideal planet, barren and no life. Why can't that be the case? You're looking at this from a completely humanistic view and arguing that we should not see the world from a humanistic view which is a contradiction imom
I don't agree with this at all. I can't even figure out what your position is though - you follow up suggesting I'm the one being egotistical? That's deeply ironic... it feels like you may have missed the point I was making. I don't support going around the universe and blowing up barren planets like Mars either, although I would be in favor of bringing new life to barren worlds. I can easily conceive there are other kinds of intelligent life, both on our planet and off of it; and whether or not humans will ever even meet or know of those species, it is still tragic for them to die off.
https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-co...
This year it feels like the ocean is losing its ability to breathe in a sense https://scienceblog.com/the-ocean-stopped-breathing-off-pana...
When do we get to full stop on the combustion of fossil fuels to protect humanity’s future?
The most likely answer seems to be "when the last human dies".
Solar has been making incredible progress, and works in sunny locations, but it's not a general purpose solution. Nuclear is getting there, but it's still too expensive and over regulated. I can't say much about wind as I haven't looked into it enough to say. Both thermal and hydro are location dependent, so good when it works but not a general purpose solution.
So that leaves coal and natural gas. We have a lot of both, but switching over to natural gas to coal by retrofitting existing power generation would make a massive difference imo.
At the end of the day, we want diversity in the power grid, not just one thing for every place, since every place is different/has its own history.
As far as I'm concerned, a planet that is able to support human civilization ranks just a bit higher on the priority list than a diverse power grid and economic viability.
Is your goal to reduce global temperatures? If so, it needs to be a sustainable effort. You don't get sustainable effort without economic viability.
If your goal is to dramatically reduce temperatures in the next 5 years, why not dump SiO2 in the atmosphere? That would bring the temperature down pretty fast by reflecting out sunlight in the upper atmosphere.
But if your goal is long-term change, we need an approach that works long-term.
Edit: sorry I forgot to mention your point on coal vs natural gas efficiency, I didn't realize it was not that much gain. I still think it's worth it though, since it's still making progress.
Large scale battery storage, by the way, is already a mostly solved problem, and possible to do at a cost competitive price.
How is dumping SiO2 into the atmosphere economically viable? How do you make money doing that? If you're thinking that governments should pay private companies to do it, why can't governments simply pay private companies to produce clean power instead? Without having done any actual research on this topic, I suspect you might find that this would be far more "economically viable" than paying for the experimental climate engineering that might not even work, and might have devastating unintended consequences. For example I imagine shitloads of fine sand in the atmosphere would be a problem for aviation, and that's probably far from the only issue with it.
We are currently on track to reach the "climate-compatible" scenario of the Paris accords (+1.5°C climate increase by 2100) in 2030. We will exceed the "minor change" scenario (+2°C) in 2050. Those targets are already locked in, they are unavoidable because of the delay between CO₂ emissions and their full effect. Maintaining our current levels of emissions gets us to 3.5°C above historic averages in 2100, which is the lower end of the disaster scenario in the Paris accords.
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-cha...
* except for a short drop in 2020 due to Covid. You may not like it, but that is what full climate change mitigation looks like today because we didn't act sooner.
Why not two volcano eruptions? Or half a solar flare? Oh I see, fear is the point. What do we need to vote for now? Who should we hate? What tax are you going to ram down our throats? Sheez
With that said, this measurement system is very stupid. But do you know what is even stupider? Climate denialism.