"Offbreed" wrote in message
...
Todd Rich wrote:
Average hurricane 5000 megatons PER DAY!!!

Sorry to jump in, I thought the hurricane statisic was a good one to
add.

An excellent one. Two days equals all the nukes in the world.

Actually, not, except in terms of total heat produced. The energy in a
hurricane is so dispersed in both time and space that there is little
comparison with the consequences of a nuclear explosion.

The 5000 megaton-per-day figure seems to have acquired a pass-along status;
it's interesting that hurricane experts at the University of California say
that the total accumulated energy acquired by a typical Atlantic hurricane
is 1/5 of that amount, and that its energy is released over the entire path
of the hurricane, over the course of days.

Regardless, the key point is to be careful about getting worked up over
these comparisons. If you dispersed the energy of a bomb over tens of
thousands of square miles, and stretched the time domain from milliseconds
to days, you'd have something useful to think about. If not, not.

--
Ed Huntress