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  • can someone try and work out the amount of heat released during a nuclear explosion of say 50MT

    does this sound right ?

    The "yield" of a nuclear weapon is a measure of the amount of explosive energy it can produce. The yield is given in terms of the quantity of TNT that would generate the same amount of energy when it explodes. Thus, a 1 kiloton nuclear weapon is one which produces the same amount of energy in an explosion as does 1 kiloton (1,000 tons) of TNT. Similarly, a 1 megaton weapon would have the energy equivalent of 1 million tons of TNT. One megaton is equivalent to 4.18 x 10*15 joules.

    so that means 419,000,000,000,000,000 W / s for a mega tonne 419 quadrillion watts

    how much would that raise the temperature of say a cubic kilometre of air

    i am just trying to work out if nuclear weapons have caused global warming

    thats quite a bit of heat released when the bomb goes off

  • Cold dry air at sea level has a heat capacity of about 1 joule per gram per degree Kelvin.

  • i am just trying to work out if nuclear weapons have caused global warming

    Not a chance.

    here,

    https://scholarsandrogues.com/2013/05/09/csfe-heat-capacity-air-ocean/

    quotes heat capacity of the Earth's atmosphere at 10^21 J/K, so unless you're releasing close to a million 1 MT at about the same time you won't even scratch the surface.

  • Quite a bit but you’d have to compare to average solar energy hitting earth, which a quick google puts at 139,000,000,000,000,000 W
    Edit: that’s at the surface, it’s obviously higher at altitude.

  • thats quite a bit of heat released when the bomb goes off

    For comparison, annual coal consumption is about 4×109 tonnes oil equivalent, and one TOE is 4×1010J, so coal burning releases about 1.6×1020J every year, which is somewhere in the region of 100 times the total energy released by all nuclear explosions ever detonated.

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