Boiling Oceans

Tekniikan Maailma - The World of Tech - is the biggest publication in Finland focusing on technology, cars, science etc. It's also a complete political hack.

Today they published an alarmist article about the warming oceans based on this article that's behind a pay wall. They begin by saying that last year there was an increase in the oceans heat balance 700 times greater than the total energy production of China. Apparently 90 percent of the "global warming" is absorbed by the seas - which is a convenient way of avoiding inconvenient questions. And because of this warming sea water all the usual stuff: frogs, lice and locusts, or in their words floods, sea weeds,  storms etc. However they are not telling how much is sea water warming. I had to do a bit of digging to find that information.

Here is a graph showing the accumulated heat balance with respect to the average between 1980 and 2010.

Seems that last year the heat anomaly was about 18 * 10^22 J above the average. That's a lot of joules. But what does that mean in degrees? Well, let's see how much water there is in the oceans.

The NOAA tells us there is 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water, almost all of it in the sea.  That equals some 1.335* 10^21 liters and the same in kilograms. So there heat content anomaly is 135 J/kg. Now, how much is that in degrees. The heat capacity of water is 4185.5 J/(kg⋅K). That means, that this scary anomaly in degrees is just over 0.03 °C, or less than 0.06 °F. 

So because of all this excess heat getting absorbed in the sea, the sea water is now on average 0.03 °C warmer than the average of the last three decades. Global warming indeed! No wonder this was left out of the article.

Even if you assume that only the "upper level" - 0 - 2000 m mentioned in the graph - is heating, the numbers don't look much different. The average ocean depth is almost 3700 m, so the "upper level" holds more than half of the total water giving a temperature anomaly of 0.06 degrees Celsius.