this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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3.4 megajoules = 944 watt hours
Microwaves are typically rated at 1200-1500 watts, sometimes more. Do they actually use that much? I'm not sure, stuff typically uses less than the rated power on the label.
Thank you for the conversion. We have a common unit for electrical energy already, and megajoules is not it. Trying to make it sound like a bigger number by changing the unit only muddies the waters and honestly makes me slightly less sympathetic to the issue.
Seriously?
Joules are the SI unit for energy measurement. 1 Joule = 1 Watt second, so 3600 Joules = 1 Watt Hour
They teach this in middle school.
Ok, but when it comes to electrical energy nobody uses "watt seconds" in the real world. Devices use hundreds of watts, and run for minutes and hours. Dividing by 3.6 million isn't exactly easy mental math to get the unit (kWh) we all see on our electric bills.
Joules. They don’t say watt seconds because they say joules.
But they don't use that either in the context of real-world electricity usage. Maybe in the middle school classroom setting, when you can make up the numbers you work with, but when I'm trying to quantify how much energy something uses at home I multiply how many watts it uses by now many hours it's running. Divide that by 1000 for kilowatt-hours, and multiply by $.11 to know the cost to do it at home. If I need to do a multiplication/division of 3.6 million when nobody else is, something's not right.
Similarly, a meter is a standard unit for length, but we don't use it when measuring the distance to different galaxies because light-years are more practical at that scale. If you start using meters you'd get some funny looks, just as I'm feeling for joules instead of kilowatt-hours. But you know, "almost a kilowatt-hour" makes for a pretty boring headline.
Also, you'll notice that I specifically mentioned electrical energy. Electrical power is almost universally measured in watts, the product of voltage and current, not joules per second (even if that's the same thing). So going from instantaneous power measurements to energy accumulated over time, it's not crazy to use the term "watt second" the way one would use "kilowatt hour"... Even if that's also called a "Joule"
Yeah, that's true, but joules typically isn't used today. When people talk about energy consumption it's almost always in watts or watt-hours. I've seen/heard people use joules less than 5 times since college.
a human consumes about 8 MJ of chemical energy per day.
The way a headline was phrased makes you change your mind about objective truth...? This isn't a family feud where you're being asked to take sides. It's still climate change even if someone tries to trick you into thinking it's slightly worse than it actually is.
Not speaking for the sponge, but I know it gives me pause to consider what else they may be manipulating, and also why they're manipulating it
Would any manipulation at all justify caring less about climate change? We know from a million sources that ai takes a ton of electricity
@Cort@lemmy.world spoke for me perfectly. When you make things weird, I have to start by assuming malice or incompetence - both of which should be red flags.
No doubt AI is sucking a lot of electricity and that presents loads of problems to consider. But instead of (for example) 5 seconds being converted to an hour running a microwave (because who even does that?) how about 3 minutes being about as much as a typical American home uses in a day? Or something like that?
You specifically said you became less sympathetic to this cause though. Even if you exaggerated by many times this would still be an issue, which you just admitted.
I get thinking it's a bad idea for people first learning about this, but it's not changing my mind exaggerated or not.
I generally get skeptical when people go out of their way to use weird units. I don't disagree with the message, just the way it's conveyed whether it's this or giving the price in Zimbabwean dollars (outside of Zimbabwe, of course). If something is weird, one should ask why. And I wish this headline didn't make things weird leading people to ask why.