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Hello SPR

If it had not been an act of sabotage, the methane emissions discussed in

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-022-2305-x

Would indeed have caused negligible warming of the Earth's atmosphere. The figure in the paper is some 1.5 * 10^-5 degree C which indeed barely pushes
us along our trajectory towards planetary destruction from CO2 in methane emissions and the global warming they cause.

That said and because my father was the nuclear test site director for one
of the shots in Nevada I came to be thinking about how much energy it would take to warm the Earth's atmosphere 1.5 * 10^-5 degree C.

Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the mass of Earth's atmosphere is
about 5.5 quadrillion tons and those I don't think are metric tons I think those are English tons 2000 pounds each but the two are essentially
equivalent because 2.2 lb is a kilogram, roughly 5.5 quintillion kilograms
or 5x 10^15kg.

[[Mod. note --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
states that the atmosphere has a mass of about 5.15e18 kg,

It's easy to estimate the atomspheric mass ourselves: air pressure is
"just" the weight of the atmosphere. Sea-level air pressure is just
over 1e5 pascals (= newton/m^2), and since (near the Earth's surface)
one newton is the weight of about 100 grams, that corresponds to an air
mass of about 1e4 kg per square meter of Earth-surface-area.

[Sanity-check: converting to imperial units,
1e4 kg / m^2 = 2.2e4 lbs / (39 in^2) = 14.5 lb/in^2,
which matches-to-2-significant-figures the canonical
imperial-units air pressure of 14.7 lb/in^2.]

The radius of the Earth is around 6400 km = 6.4e6 m, so 4*pi*r^2 = 5e14
square meters, for an air mass of 5e18 kg.

So both Wikipedia and my quick-n-dirty calculation give a mass about
a factor of 1000 larger than yours.
-- jt]]

A reference source at

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/1005#:~:text=Air%20has%20a%20heat%20capacity,energy%20stored%20in%20the%20water


Tells us that the heat capacity of Earth's atmosphere is

"About 700 joules per kilogram per degree Kelvin "....

So that is
3.5 x 10^18kg-joules per K times
1.5x10^-5 deg C or K which is about
4x10^13 joules or 4 PJ.

[[Mod. note --
The reference you cited actually gives 1.8e-5 degree warming,
which when combined with the factor of 1000 in atmospheric mass
gives a change in atmospheric heat content of about 6.3e16 Joules.

BUT there is also a lot of heat stored in the Earth's oceans,
and presumably there is some ocean heating as well in this scenario.
So the actual thermal energy is a bit larger.
-- jt]]

Now the explosives used to rupture the pipe were sub tactical nuclear
levels of energy. A nuclear weapon is about a 5PJ.

The saboteur might have spent around 5 gigajoules of energy to rupture the
pipe a factor of 1,000 estimating. This is frankly a wild ass guess.

[[Mod. note --
Nuclear weapon yields are usually quoted in kilotons of TNT equivalent
(kt), where 1 kt = 4.2e12 Joules. Modern "Small" nuclear weapons are
often 3 to 10 kt, "large" ones are often 150 to 500 kt (and can be much larger).

I have seen suggestions that the Nord Stream pipeline sabatoge took
on the order of 100 kg of TNT-equivalent explosives, say 4e8 Joules
(with large error bars). That gives an "energy amplification" of a
bit over 100 million, again with large error bars.
-- jt]]

The question is why?

Only a scorched Earth policy with intent to terrorize the residents of the planet can explain this lunatic kind of behavior.

The terrorist who did this thing to us achieved a factor of a thousand amplification and perhaps a factor of a million amplification of energy released to rupture the pipeline as compared to the energy gained by the planets atmosphere over the many years of methanaceous heat capture.

Terrorists like force multipliers.

Frankly that scares the crap out of me

And I mean that metaphorically

I don't think it would cause my father to blink an eye but that's just how
he was. Happy veterans Day Dad.

Cheers just the same from Douglas

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Notes on scale and lethality

I have waited quite some time for my email copy of my post admitted to
spr with notes by moderator JT. I don't have it and I can't quote it
darn it.

I was comparing the amount of energy spent to fracture the pipeline in
the swedish sea carrying Russian methane to Europe with the amount of
energy gained by the planet as a result of global warming initiated by
this the world's largest release of methane.

I have nothing on that immediately just some notes on the overall scale.

A 1 lb Hammer falling in standard gravity without being pivoted at the
end for a distance of one foot clearly provides by definition one foot
pound of energy on impact and can clearly hurt a finger or a toe. This
one foot pound of energy is roughly very very roughly equal to one
joule. You certainly wouldn't want such a hammer strike on your skull.
Ouch.

A 10 lb Hammer falling 10 ft delivers 100 ft pounds. Close to a
centijoule. I sure hope I spelled that right. Centiouch LOL. Lethal.

[Moderator's note: The prefix for hundred is "hecto". The prefix
"centi" is for hundredth (e.g. centimeter). -P.H.]

Reference Wikipedia on muzzle energy for the estimation of a kilojoule
for the muzzle energy of many sidearms not rifles, and for an
interesting note there that the United States does not use muzzle energy
to classify firearms while other countries in the world do, at least
some of them.

For a megajoule I know that a hand grenade is about very roughly even
more roughly than the hammer example about a megajoule. It's about a
half a pound of TNT. Also a kilowatt hour is about 3 megajoules.

A 500 lb TNT bomb is pretty close to a gigajoule, reference Wikipedia.

Nuclear weapons are rated in kilotons of TNT making the next step up the
scale the gigajoule. I don't have an example. Maybe the largest
conventional bomb which is a fuel air explosive would qualify. It is
46GJ.

The Trinity test was pretty close to a 10th of a gigajoule and most
modern nuclear weapons are in the gigajoule range. The largest tested
bomb configuration, tsar Bomba, was 200 GJ according to charts I have
looked at.

I suppose an asteroid strike might range in the terajoules or
petajoules.

I hope I have everything right here. I remember kilo mega giga Terra and
Peta.

[Moderator's note: Should be "tera" not "Terra". Further prefixes are
exa, zeta, yotta, and the recently added ronna and quetta. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_prefix -P.H.]

Cheers just the same from Douglas
Replikon Research

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