To heat all the water in all the Earth's oceans by 1 degree Celsius it would require the energy equivalent of the detonation of roughly 87 billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
This is a dishonest comparison. The atmosphere warming has a much more immediate impact and the ocean isn't a perfect heat sink.
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.
and yet the ocean surface is already at roughly +1 degree Celsius.
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.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, the planet is fine… the people are fucked! Compared to the people, the planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away!
The planet has not been through anything, it doesn't experience things or has memories. It literally cannot care if we survive or go extinct. This is why environmentalism focusig on "mother earth" or "the earth is suffering" is so annoying. Focus on humans and what we will face in the future, what our kids will face. Environmentalism should be a humanism and focus on them instead of having broad goals like fixing the whole planet.
That argument can lead to the assumption that it's ok if we completely wiped out life on earth as long as humanity survives by leaving for the stars.
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.
The aspect that's depressing to me is that we've shown many times that we can throw huge amounts of resources at various projects, numbers quantifying them so large most people don't have the context for the scale, but not for projects that preserve our environment. If anything it seems like doing so would give us a greater time span to do things like colonize the nearest chunk of rock in space (which is a figurative paddle off the coast compared to reaching other habitats) and terraforming our own world first might teach us things we need to know for greater projects.
Environmentalism is this way on purpose. It's a lot easier to get people riled up about the plights of majestic creatures than about some abstract metrics. Also, the movement has strong anti-capitalism / "degrowth" roots, and you need this kind of stuff to stay in the headlines. Movements that don't take controversial positions and don't attract radical activists tend to fade from view.
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.
Selfish in what sense? Like how every other animal is?
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.
The planet / Mother Earth is just a way to talk about connected ecosystems of this big rock we live on. Yes the rock is not alive, but life is important, even if your only concern is as a proxy for our own support systems. How much value you place on different lives - your own, other people, whales, monkeys, deer, bugs… you are free to value them differently, but I’d hope you would not gleefully accept that we should just tolerate the wholesale destruction of habits on earth simply because it does not appear to affect human survival on the surface.
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.
Why do you consider it tragic that many wonders of this planet are going away and never coming back? Coming back for whom? Who decided that its a wonder? If there are no humans, there are no wonders of the world.
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
> If there are no humans, there are no wonders of the world.
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.
I understand that the party line in the US is that the quality of life engendered by the ecocide of the earth makes up for the mass death that anthropogeenic climate change entails.
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."
It feel like the earths oceans are at a tipping point and can no longer continue to absorb this amount of heat and acidification from the carbonic acid levels increasing when CO2 breaks down.
Honestly burning natural gas is much better than producing electricity with coal, and we can retrofit existing coal generation plants with natural gas and be like 85% cleaner. I'm kind of fed up with the absolutist takes of "don't use any fossil fuels," since that's just completely unreasonable in the next 10-20 years. Setting up power plants takes massive investment, and excluding AI-driven demand, there's not much money in power generation.
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.
Gas produces about 40-50% less CO2 per unit of electricity produced, than coal. Not 85%.
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.
Economic viability is how we support human civilization, no? Economics is literally observing how humans interact and prioritize scarce resources like time and materials. So being not economically viable means it not happening.
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.
The problem is if you spend the next 5 years building new fossil fuel capabilities, the economic payoff won't be for at least 10 to 15 years more years. We absolutely should not be burning natural gas at that point. Not only would it cause continued havoc on our environment, zero emissions alternatives are already extremely cost competitive in most parts of the world. We should spend the next 5 years, instead, building for the future, not sinking our money into assets that will only cause further harm without providing any real cost savings.
Large scale battery storage, by the way, is already a mostly solved problem, and possible to do at a cost competitive price.
The only reason fossil fuels are "economically viable" is because we're ignoring the cost of the destruction they will bring in the future, and are already causing today. Nuclear is economically viable. We already have lots of nuclear power. Maybe it's a bit less profitable than fossil, maybe if we invested more into it it would be more profitable. Either way it seems entirely viable to me, except of course for all the trillions of dollars being made by extracting and selling fossil fuels to the detriment of all our futures. The only reason alternatives aren't "viable" is because they're priced out by fossil fuels. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and lots of new things become viable.
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.
Excess atmospheric CO2 levels in and of itself are a health concern. Geoengineering will not help with the human toll of increasing CO2 and decreasing O2 levels
Yes, your proposal would have been an acceptable approach in 1990. Instead, we have been happily increasing our CO₂ emissions year over year every year since then*. No, we no longer want diversity in the power grid; "reasonable" solutions don't move the needle. Even if the entire world would go carbon zero overnight, the global temperature would continue to rise for decades before settling in a new steady state. It's not a matter of holding out a bit longer for tomorrow's magical solution: every piece of fossil fuel burned today makes the planet more unlivable tomorrow.
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.
* 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
I mean, if two volcanoes erupted every second, or we were getting hit by a solar flare every two seconds, those would be pretty significant events also.
With that said, this measurement system is very stupid. But do you know what is even stupider? Climate denialism.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.5 ms ] threadAir 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 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.
> you follow up suggesting I'm the one being egotistical?
You're literally playing God, and you think that's not egotistical?
And again, why is it tragic if you don't even know? How can it be tragic? It's a hypothetical.
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."
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.
https://minimallysustained.com/blog/2026-01-11
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.
Pretty schmick to look at, to be honest, but ultimately bad news and best avoided.
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.
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...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST49jDo4d-Q