Heat Stored in the Oceans
Here is an interesting chart, that I saw yesterday at the IPCC session at EGU.
It shows the energy stored in different compartments. There is more heat stored in water than say in the air, due to the larger heat capacity of water. The exchange of heat, I think, must occur via temperature. So this must have an affect on the oceans, the living beings within the oceans, and on climate.
As Steve Easterbrook points out at azimuth:
The oceans act as a huge storage heater, and will continue to warm up the lower atmosphere (no matter what changes we make to the atmosphere in the future).
Description of this figure from IPCC
(Box 3.1 Fig 1) Plot of energy accumulation in zettajoules within distinct components of Earth’s climate system relative to 1971 and from 1971–2010 unless otherwise indicated. Ocean warming (heat content change) dominates, with the upper ocean (light blue, above 700 m) contributing more than the deep ocean (dark blue, below 700 m; including below 2000 m estimates starting from 1992). Ice melt (light grey; for glaciers and ice caps, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet estimates starting from 1992, and Arctic sea ice estimate from 1979–2008); continental (land) warming (orange); and atmospheric warming (purple; estimate starting from 1979) make smaller contributions. Uncertainty in the ocean estimate also dominates the total uncertainty (dot-dashed lines about the error from all five components at 90% confidence intervals).
A good discussion about this topic, also related to the uncertainties in the predictions related to stored heat can be found at Climate Etc.
According to Wikipedia the atmosphere has a mass of 5.15×E18 kg All the earth’s water is about 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometers (according to here http://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html) which would be 1.338E24 kg. With water having a heat capacity roughly 4 times higher than that of air (at sea level pressure and room temperature, which is of course a strong simplification), you can put roughly 1 million times more energy into the global water body to get the same increase in temperature.
So, does that mean that it is indeed irrelevant what we do to the atmosphere?
Dommy
10 May 14 at 10:19 pm
Dommy, thanks for your comments. I think I fully understand your argumentation. This also occupies my mind a bit. Here are a few further comments:
I am wondering, why the uncertainty about the amount of energy stored over all decreases with time.
This is directly from the IPCC report and might help
Claus
12 May 14 at 8:31 am