"Offbreed" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

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.

Back a long time ago in one of the gun mags, someone claimed that a
Volkswagen at some low speed had as much kinetic energy as an elephant
gun, but using one to hunt elephants was not to be recommended.

So, point taken.

However, the original context was that the energy be released on the
planet Earth, to "kill the entire world". In that event, the energy is
sufficiently concentrated to be relevant even as you describe.

Well, there's destructive energy and constructive energy. For perspective's
sake, the 13 kilotons of TNT equivalent or so of energy released by the
Hiroshima bomb killed, what, 150,000 people? Last year's hurricanes in the
US killed...ah, a few dozen? So, to relate hurricanes to nuclear bombs, if
you're going to compare them in terms of total energy released in the
context of this thread, you probably should look also at some relative
measure of destructive effect -- the *destructive* energy, in other words.
You could do a complicated analysis of property damage but the thing most
people care about is how many people wind up dead. And, by that measure, how
many zeroes are behind the multiple of nuclear bombs versus hurricanes? My
calculator that does scientific notation is downstairs in my briefcase, or
I'd give it a shot.


Even if the energy released is overstated. Still, hurricanes last long
enough to release as much energy as the entire collection of nukes.

That's true. How does it stack up against the energy represented by the
total insolation received by the Earth each day from the sun? I'm told it's
55.6 x 10^23 joules/year. I'm also told that the energy released by an
exploding megaton of TNT is 4.184 x 10^15 joules.

Which makes a nuclear bomb trivial, except when it kills a few million
people in a couple of seconds, rather than making plants grow or heating the
Earth to a comfortable temperature that warms your bones, rather than one
that instantly turns your bones into quicklime.


Resulting pollution being a somewhat different matter, but the pollution
from the dino killing meteor was enormously greater than the worst case
nuclear war is likely to be, as far as I can see.

It appears so. And your point about pollution is a good one, because, as the
examples above show, you can't relate the "pollution" from energy released
to the two different kinds of energy sources. Whoever may have tried to make
some equation there was on a non-productive track.

The reason I jumped in was that the dramatic figures for energy released
from a hurricane have nothing to do with anything much, especially when
comparing them to nuclear bombs. The percentage of that energy that is
*destructive* is astronomically different in the two cases.

--
Ed Huntress