the heat wave was definitly the inspiration for me, i'm glad it resonates with people as global warming is pretty important :)
yeah, number go down is kinda fun :)
i'm pretty sure 99999J converts to 52°C but i know my farenheit calculations were wrong
but yeah it's for sure hard to be precise with science stuff unfortunately
i tried to get the fact as closest as i could research in the dev period but it was pretty short as it was the last feature i added
That's not really how unit conversions work. Joule is a unit for energy and measures an absolute value. °C is a temperature unit that is, in lack of a better word, somewhat local to the system. If you put energy into a system, it heats up, but the amount by which it heats up also depends on the mass of the system and its specific heat capacity. There are certainly specific masses of specific materials for which the two values are "equivalent", but you can't just generally convert one of them into the other.
There's actually a different energy unit the shows the connection between energy and temperature a lot better: The calorie (cal) is defined as the amount of energy needed to heat 1 g (!) of water by 1 °C. In everyday speech, when we say calorie, we actually mean a kilocalorie (kcal) which is the amount of energy needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1 °C. 1 kcal is the same amount of energy as ~ 4200 J. 99999 J are approximately 23.8 kcal, so roughly enough to heat up 1 kg of water by 23.8 °C. If you have 333 g of water, 99999 J would heat them up by ~ 71.4 °C -- so in other words, it's roughly enough energy to boil a cup of tea.
Air does have a much lower heat capacity than water of only about 1 J / (g * K), so if you only had 1 kg of air, 99999 J would be enough to heat it up by almost 100 °C. However, the entire earth's atmosphere has a mass of about 5.5 * 10^18 kg, so 99999 J would heat up the entire atmosphere by a measly 0.0000000000000002 °C -- and that doesn't even account for the earth itself and the oceans and stuff.
Another comparison to put the 99999 J into perspective: Our global energy consumption in the year 2023 was apparently around 620 exajoules, which are 620.000.000.000.000.000.000 J.
Sorry for being a bit lecture-y. I used to be a physical chemist and bad unit conversions are a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I also think when talking about something as important as climate change, we should be aware of just how ridiculously large the numbers are that are in play. As beautiful as the idea is to just cool down the earth by spinning the fan a bit (or, in other words, by changing our individual consumption behavior -- which we absolutely should, don't get me wrong), the reality is that we need a concerted global effort immediately that severly restricts energy consumption and CO2 emissions especially for the industry, without whining "but the economy blah blah". And for that, we'd need some more competent people in charge than there currently are.
Sorry for the rant, this has gotten a bit off the rails. Your game does of course not have to have the accuracy of a scientific paper. The important thing is to keep people thinking about climate change and what we can do about it. Which, as you can see from my wall of text, certainly succeeded for me :D
