Imagine the following scene: alien spaceships in orbit around earth, dropping nuclear bombs into our atmosphere at the rate of 1 bomb per second with the goal of overheating earth and destroying all life on it.
It is obvious what we would be doing. We would drop absolutely everything else and mobilize all of our resources to defeat the aliens. There are of course plenty of movie versions of that kind of scenario, such as Independence Day.
So why are we complacent instead? Because (a) it’s not aliens in spaceships, it is us here on earth and (b) the heat absorption is happening via invisible greenhouse gases. But the energy addition is exactly the same: 1 Hiroshima sized nuclear bomb per second worth of additional energy. All day, every day.
One way I have started to try to get people to wrap their head around the enormity of the situation is that I don’t present them with this as a fact. I ask them for an estimate instead on a per day basis. Most people come up with numbers somewhere between a few per day to a few hundred per day at the high end. The actual number is closer to 100,000!
Once people hear the real number I then give them the image of aliens doing this to us. This does seem to get a lot of people who previously said they were not really all that concerned about climate change to want to learn more and become active.
