John Abraham, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, recently spoke with the Daily Mail about the amount of energy being added to the world’s oceans as a result of burning fossil fuels, and how that added heat is contributing to regularly occurring mega-storms.
From the story:
With Hurricane Helene wreaking havoc and causing misery for millions, a new book warns that such terrifying storms are only the beginning.
Warming seas will bring “near-constant natural disaster to North America” in coming decades and into the next century, according to its author – a journalist and lifetime sailor who spoke to oceanographers, meteorologists and disaster relief crews.
But the data speaks for itself: weather-related natural disasters now plague Earth at five times the frequency that such “freak storms” once did back in the 1970s.
And an international team of over 60 scientists calculated last year that the burning of fossil fuels has poured the equivalent energy of 25 billion nuclear bomb blasts into the Earth’s systems, heralding a dark new era of “mega-hurricanes.” ...
“A zettajoule,” according to Dr John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas, “is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules.”
“The amount of heat we are putting into the oceans,” he explained, “is equivalent to about five Hiroshima atom bombs of energy every second.” ...
