noooooooo http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/06/07/a-modest-proposal/ …https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1064103648643424256 …
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I am going to defend it a bit; they do say heat-equivalent, and I think it interesting as a scaling measure. But yes, it's easy to mock this kind of thing and your proposal of Hiroshima-equivalent was worth the laughs. :-)
The average person does not have any intuitive sense of the difference between 40 thousand, 400 thousand, or 4 million Hiroshima equivalents... for that reason, it does not give any real information a a scaling measure, in my opinion.
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I'd be curious what you would use, then to give an idea of the energy output and heat-trapping. I mean, I might try to relate it to leaving space heaters on or light bulbs or something (Hiroshima wouldn't be my go-to, personally, but that's me).
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I mean, for most people calories don't translate to heat well, bc of the association with food. Watts is a bit better because most folks have had experience with a 100-watt light bulb. But for a lot of people "proper" units might as well be in Aramaic.
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Assuming one feels the need to try and convey the number (the article works fine without it), I'd use something that conveyed the heat in a non-explosive fashion. E.g., the amount trapped per day is about the equivalent of the amount of energy produced by the USA per day.
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That's a good one. I only ask because conveying such things is not easy and I have discovered that *many* people don't have an intuitive sense of it (and why should they?)
End of conversation
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This remains the most inappropriate unit measure, I feel.pic.twitter.com/vvJcTfUZmU
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