Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThe Ocean Is Warming At A Rate of 5 Atom Bombs Per Second, Scientists Warn
'The Ocean Is Warming at a Rate of 5 Atom Bombs Per Second, Scientists Warn.' Science Alert, Jan. 14, 2020. Kristin Houser, Futurism.
After analyzing data from the 1950s through 2019, an international team of scientists determined that the average temperature of the world's oceans in 2019 was 0.075 degrees Celsius (0.135 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 19812010 average. That might not seem like a significant amount of warming, but given the massive volume of the oceans, an increase even that small would require a staggering influx of heat - 228 sextillion Joules' worth, according to the scientists' study, which was published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on Monday.
That's a hard number to contextualize, so one of the scientists behind the study did the math to put it into an explosive frame of reference - by comparing it to the amount of energy released by the atomic bomb the United States military dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. "The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules," author Lijing Cheng from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a press release.
"The amount of heat we have put in the world's oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions."
That averages out to four Hiroshima bombs' worth of energy entering the oceans every second for the past 25 years.
But even more troubling, the rate isn't holding steady at that alarming figure - it's increasing. In 2019, ocean warming was equivalent to "about five Hiroshima bombs of heat, every second, day and night, 365 days a year," study author John Abraham, from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told Vice. And in case atomic bombs are still too abstract of a comparative unit, the 2019 rate is equivalent to every person on Earth constantly pointing 100 hair dryers at the oceans, Abraham told Vice.
Ice is melting faster, causing sea levels to rise. Dolphins and other marine life are dying because they can't adapt quickly enough. Even the increase in the amount of water evaporating into the atmosphere due to the heat is negatively impacting on our planet.
"It makes hurricanes and typhoons more powerful, and it makes rainfall more intense," Abraham told Vice. "It puts our weather on steroids." And remember, the rate is increasing - meaning that every moment we delay taking action to slow or reverse the warming, the situation is only going to get worse.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-ocean-is-warming-at-a-rate-of-5-atom-bombs-per-second-says-study
Newest Reality
(12,712 posts)When you put it that way, the atom bomb simile really presents an extremely potent image about the amount of energy involved.
Whew! Well, that's that then. Enjoy what is, don't regret what was and let whatever will be, be.
localroger
(3,634 posts)We can write the number of joules put out by an atomic bomb as 62e12 -- the number 62 followed by 12 zeroes. (That's not "normalized," it should be 6.3e13, but just bear with me.) Let's compare that to another enormous number, 1.33e12. That's one followed by 12 digits, including those two threes and ten zeroes. That's the total volume of the Earth's oceans, in cubic kilometers.
So that means an atomic bomb adds an average of 62 / 1.3 = about 48 joules per cubic kilometer. And the joule is not a large unit of energy; a small-c calorie, enough heat to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree C, is 4.1 joules. And there are 1e15 grams of water in a cubic kilometer, meaning that atomic bomb will raise the average temperature of Earth's oceans a whopping 4e-14 degrees. That's 0.000000000000004 degrees.
It's not good that we are doing that 5 times a second 24/7/365 of course, but putting it this way makes it sound like we're about to blow up the planet and we're not. It's very sensationalistic and alarmist to no good purpose, as it is easily discredited. to make our more realistic worries look similarly foolish.
localroger
(3,634 posts)The total solar energy hitting the Earth is about 1.2E17 joules per second, so those 5 atomic bombs represent about 0.2 percent of what we get from the Sun. Basically everything depends on the atmosphere; if it keeps too much of that solar energy we fry, and if it reflects too much back into space we freeze. Atomic bombs are almost a rounding error on the magnitude of that transaction.