With much fanfare from the faithful (a grand total of 15 comments as of this writing), SkepticalScience recently released their 4-Hiroshima-Bombs-per-second widget. Their claimed intent is to “raise the awareness of global warming”.
Nonsense.
Their intent is to scare people—children and adults—into believing that something must be done about global warming. It’s nothing but propaganda—plain and simple. It’s based on estimates of the radiative imbalance caused by human-induced global warming.
Without thought—nothing new there—SkepticalScience has now opened the door for people to illustrate (1) the diminutive size of the radiative imbalance in relation to the amount of sunlight and infrared radiation that warms the planet every day, and (2) the massive uncertainties behind the imbalance.
So that’s the foundation for the first of a series of YouTube videos titled “Comments on Human-Induced Global Warming”. Episode 1 is “The Hiroshima Bomb Metric”.
SkepticalScience has used spambots in the past. I wonder whether they’ll use them again for this offensive widget. So, if you see links to that widget around the blogosphere, please feel free to leave a link to this video:
As you’ll note, the video is about 6 minutes long. My goal is to limit the lengths of all of the videos in this series to 5 to 6 minutes.
The paper referenced in the video is Stephens et al. (2012) An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations.
Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations 
An early Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating tomorrow.
Greetings from across the Pond, Bob.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and keep up the good work!
Thanks, catweazle666.
Cheers
Bob, This is a great video. IMO, the point about the uncertainty nails it. I really appreciate what you do. Happy Thanksgiving!
Concise, precise and absolutely to the point. Thanks Bob!
Well done, Bob!
James Hansen wears a nice hat. I think that’s the only nice thing you can say about him.
Greetings from Germany ( respectivly Phuket at the moment)
Hi Bob, great video.
In regards to this post about the SkS widget I though you might find this interesting. I’ve modified their widget in one simple way. Instead of showing Hiroshima’s for the energy imbalance, I’ve got it showing Hiroshima’s for the total solar energy hitting the Earth (1950 Hiroshima’s per second for those playing along at home).
It really does put the whole “4 Hiroshima bombs of energy per second” into a new perspective. 🙂
Check out the two Hiroshima metrics next to each other: http://www.brrgames.com/hiroshimas/index.html
Dale
Dale, thanks for the link. I’ll prepare a post about your widget for tomorrow.
Thanks again.
So the sun is sending us ~3600 atom bombs per second?? Brrr!! Hanson seems like a second hand “Isaac Asimov” popular science pamphlet. Nice compared!
From Belgium: great video