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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
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.
The surface area of the world’s oceans is roughly 139 million square miles. Which means that since about 1990:
The world’s oceans have absorbed the equivalent of 1.15 Hiro’s per square mile, every year.
For the last 30 years.
It’s as if we kept bombing Hiroshima, year after year, for the last 30 years. With a “bonus” bomb every tenth year.
Thirty-three bombs in total, for every square mile of the ocean.
That’s what 350 Zeta Joules translates into. That’s how to think about it so that you can viscerally feel what that amount of energy means. So that you can wrap your head around it and understand it.
Now, is there anyone who thinks you can dump a thermal pulse of that magnitude into the Earth’s oceans without there being serious…
