How much stronger is RSA-2048 compared to RSA-1024? How much stronger is RSA-2048 compared to RSA-1024? It is hard to imagine very big numbers. So what would be your way to explain the difference to someone who doesn't know much about cryptography?
You can use the complexity of the GNFS, the fastest known general-purpose factoring algorithm, to estimate the strength (in bits) of an RSA key size.

Referencing the table linked above, a 1024-bit key has approximately 80 bits of strength, while a 2048-bit key has approximately 112 bits. Thus, it takes approximately 2112/280 = 232 times as long to factor a 2048-bit key. In other words, it takes around four billion times longer to factor a 2048-bit key.

Thus, if you were able to magically factor a 1024-bit key in 10 seconds (which is totally unrealistic in every way possible, I may add), then it would take around 1,200 years to factor a 2048-bit key (note: this is not adjusted for Moore's law). Of course, it took around two years and a massive collaborative effort just to factor a 768-bit key, so factoring a 1024-bit key takes far, far longer than 10 seconds. But this is just to demonstrate the point: 2048-bit keys are much more secure.

If you do want to adjust for Moore's law and the ever-faster pace of computing, you can use this approximation by fgrieu. If you solve the equation for when a 2048-bit key is expected to be factored (keeping in mind that this is a rough approximation), you arrive at the year... 2048. So somewhere around 2040-2050, if that linear approximation holds true, we expect 2048-bit keys to be feasibly factored. In comparison, you can see that the 1024-bit key is expected to be factorable sometime around 2015-2020.