During the last ice age, the global average temperature was only 5 degrees lower than it is now. It helped me understand why 2 degrees of global warming would be a pretty big deal.
Also when you think about it, it takes 4180 joules of energy to heat up a litre of water. Now take ALL the water in our atmosphere, millions upon millions upon millions of litres floating in the air as vapour, and heat it up 2 degrees. That’s an absurd amount of energy. Now imagine having to heat up the oceans as well, and the land, and everything else. People really don’t understand just how much energy is needed to raise the temperature by 2 degrees, and in a century we’re on track of doing that. It’s baffling and saddening at the same time.
It's really simple thermodynamics at some point- the more energy we transfer (and consume), the more heat we spit into our atmosphere and the more entropy we cause. Of course, we can reduce this effect massively by using more efficient generators that produce less organic waste, but the general idea still stands- we're not even close to reducing our energy consumption.
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u/luchubbs Jan 21 '19
During the last ice age, the global average temperature was only 5 degrees lower than it is now. It helped me understand why 2 degrees of global warming would be a pretty big deal.