{"id":102671,"date":"2026-08-26T01:00:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T05:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=102671"},"modified":"2026-08-25T10:40:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:40:52","slug":"qotd-putting-us-power-generation-in-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-putting-us-power-generation-in-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Putting US power generation in perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A critical assumption of climate alarmism is that the ecosystem is fragile and we naughty, mighty humans can easily overwhelm it. So we were surprised to hear, at the recent Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate Change, that one single hurricane contains more energy than the US generates in a year. And not just surprised, we were skeptical. So we checked, and, by golly, it’s true and then some. As one website gushed<\/a>, “any way you slice it, hurricanes release a phenomenal amount of energy. If we start by looking at just the energy generated by the winds, we find that for a typical mature hurricane, we get numbers in the range of 1.5 x 10^12 Watts or 1.3 x 10^17 Joules\/day (this is according to the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.) This is equivalent to about half of the total electrical generating capacity on the planet! For a single hurricane! But that’s not all, we’re just getting started. A hurricane also releases energy through the formation of clouds and rain (it takes energy to evaporate all that water). If we crunch the numbers for an average hurricane (1.5 cm\/day of rain, circle radius of 665 km), we get a gigantic amount of energy: 6.0 x 10^14 Watts or 5.2 x 10^19 Joules\/day! This is equivalent to about 200 times the total electrical generating capacity on the planet! NASA says that ‘during its life cycle a hurricane can expend as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs!’ And we’re just talking about average hurricanes here, not Katrina.” But sure, a few puffs from a human chimney and all those hurricanes are dancing to our Promethean tune.<\/p>\n

John Robson, “Tidbits”, Robson on Climate Nonsense<\/em><\/a>, 2026-05-24.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A critical assumption of climate alarmism is that the ecosystem is fragile and we naughty, mighty humans can easily overwhelm it. So we were surprised to hear, at the recent Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate Change, that one single hurricane contains more energy than the US generates in a year. And not just surprised, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[65,41,13],"tags":[245,497,206,290],"class_list":["post-102671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-climatechange","tag-electricity","tag-severeweather","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qHZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102671"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104414,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102671\/revisions\/104414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}