What does the current rate of global warming mean?
When you hear the temperature is rising a degree or two over the course of decades it doesn’t sound like much.
I came across a quote to put it in context. Because the atmosphere is so big, even little temperature increases like that get multiplied over a huge volume compared to usual human scale.
Climatologist James Hanson, of my alma mater, Columbia University, describe the current rate of increase in global warming in terms we could understand more graphically:
“(it’s) equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year. That’s how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day.â€
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