I know the intended purpose of this sentence is that it shocks, but I'm not sure I'm in a position to evaluate "5 Hiroshima bombs" any more clearly than if it were presented as a metric (joules in this case) I seldom use. Would it be wrong to call it click-baity? "2019 - Yet Another Year of Record-Setting Ocean Warming" would be equally alarming to me, but I'd also understand what it means.
In this era it is important that messages with political intent not be presented as one argument, but be presented in every way possible. In regards to climate change specifically; we need the articles with reasonable headlines, we need the articles with headlines dripping in hyperbole, we need the headlines saying it’s catastrophic, we need the headlines saying it’s sensible and the right calm choice to make these changes now. Everyone’s participation is needed to deal with this threat, and so every possible approach and argument can be deployed in the effort without diminishing any other.
> Everyone’s participation is needed to deal with this threat, and so every possible approach and argument can be deployed in the effort without diminishing any other.
Well, unless some of the people notice the messages intended for the other people.
"It's important to tell everyone exactly the lies that will make them do what I want" is a really uncompelling pitch.
Somehow it seems unlikely that what we all need is a total collapse of journalistic integrity. The smart answer to hyperbole and alarmism is distrust, if you advocate a dishonest approach then people are right to doubt your cause.
The planet has naturally fluctuated in temperatures throughout its entire existence the rocks show us this. there's been several Extinction events due to temperature fluctuations even if humans are increasing the temperature it was going to happen without us anyways.
Neither the hiroshima bombs nor the joules would be match telling for me. Calories might give me a small idea for non salted water at best. I'm not used to this scale and magnitude.
Every HN submission from a real news source (newspaper, CNN, whatever) will always have at least one commenter complaining about the link title being click-baity, as if they've never before seen or heard of what is known as a "headline."
Given an engine running at 50,000kW (roughly cruising power for a post-Panamax vessel) for a week (a very rough “average” shipping), you’d be looking at ~3x10^13 J. The Hiroshima bomb was 6.3x10^13 J. So, an average shipping is about half a Bomb in direct heat - add in the emissions from burning the diesel/bunker oil, and their warming effect, and you’re probably at a full Bomb per shipping.
I did a very quick and dirty back of the envelope guesstimate independently and came up with a vessel producing about 1/6th of a bomb a day. So around about the same as yours.
With 1.83 billion metric tons shipped annually (2017), and assuming all ships are loaded full with 120'000 metric tons (post-Panamax limit), there are around 15'000 such shipments yearly. Which begs the question, why isn't the impact higher?
Aldrin gets mentioned in the same breath as Armstrong often enough I bet quite a few people could pull that one out. You'd lose a bunch with "who's the guy who stayed in orbit?" and almost everyone with "name any Apollo 12 astronaut" or even the more-generous "name any Apollo astronaut who at least reached Lunar orbit and wasn't on 11 or 13". Most of the people who get that second one would probably just luckily guess Alan Shepard without actually knowing for sure he was on an Apollo mission, just the first famous space-program-guy who came to mind who wasn't Armstrong or Aldrin (and in fact the Apollo part of the career is not why they know his name).
