Showerthought: I saw a chart showing how much heat the ocean took in last year

I was reading a report from the NOAA website and it said the ocean absorbed heat equal to about 7 billion Hiroshima bombs in 2023. That number is so big I can't even picture it. How do we even start to fix something that huge?

3 comments

3 Comments

faiths122mo ago

Man, numbers like that just shut my brain down. I try to picture one bomb and then multiply it, and I just go blank. It feels like we're wired to fail at understanding that scale.

rowanf642mo ago

Read that same stat and it made my brain hurt.

noah_palmer421mo ago

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they built the uranium for the first bombs, had 75,000 people working there and most of them had no idea what they were actually making. That's the part that gets me, @faiths12, because the scale isn't just about the bombs themselves. It's about how many human lives got poured into building just two of them, and how we still can't wrap our heads around what that really means. You got entire cities that didn't know they were making pieces of hell.