Global warming is accumulating in the Earth's climate system at a rate equivalent to about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations, 2 Hurricane Sandys, or 4 magnitude 6.0 earthquakes per second.

The amount of energy building up on Earth due to human-caused global warming can be difficult to picture. 250 trillion Joules per second sounds like a lot, but what does that mean in terms people can more easily visualize? This widget, created by Bob Lacatena at Skeptical Science, tries to do just that.

Screenshot of the global warming widget

The widget can be installed on most blogs and is customizable, allowing users to choose the color, size, button style, and starting year. For example, since 1998, the Earth's climate has accumulated over 2 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs worth of energy.

The widget was conceived as an effort to debunk the pervasive myth that global warming has somehow magically stopped our paused. An important paper published by two other Skeptical Science contributors last week showed that the perceived pause in global surface temperature warming is largely due to temperature measurements missing the rapid warming in the Arctic.

But the myth is much more misguided still. The warming of air temperatures represents just 2 percent of overall global warming, with more than 90 percent going into the oceans. In a paper I published last year along with several Skeptical Science colleagues and oceanography expert John Church (who edited a new book that John Abraham reviewed last week), we examined the warming of the entire global climate (oceans, atmosphere, land, and ice). We found that the Earth continues to warm at a rate equivalent to 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second.

The numbers displayed by the widget counter are explained at the accompanying website, http://4hiroshimas.com/, and are based on that paper. There's also a Facebook app and an iPhone/iPad web app.

iPhone/iPad widget app

Instructions for installing the widget and associated apps are provided in the links on the widget website.

With all these resources available to illustrate the rapid warming of the Earth's climate, hopefully we can once and for all put an end to the widespread misconceptions about the continued global warming. After all, we can't solve the problem until we stop denying that it exists.