Living in Bomb Time — 19 : Consider the Earth’s Oceans, that’s where all the heat goes

Global Warming is Actually “Ocean Warming”

That’s why they’re dying

One joule is equal to the work it takes to make a watt of power for a second, a zeta joule is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules

What do you see when you look at this chart?

What you should see is that the amount of heat energy in the oceans has increased by roughly 350 Zeta Joules since the oceans started rapidly warming in 1990. This is a staggeringly large amount of energy, but it is difficult to comprehend, to visualize. So, here’s an easier way to think about it.

Starting around 1990, the oceans have been accumulating the equivalent of five Hiroshima class atomic bombs worth of heat energy PER SECOND.

There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, which means about 157,680,000 Hiro’s worth of energy is getting pumped into the oceans each year. That steadily increasing rise in the amount of Zeta Joules worth of heat accumulating in the ocean, that’s what 158 million atomic bombs per year’s worth of energy looks like.

But even that can be hard to grasp other than intellectually. One hundred and fifty-eight million is just too big a number to relate to in visceral terms.

So, here’s an even easier way to visualize it.