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How much energy would it take to increase the temperature of the Earth's oceans one degree centigrade?
I believe, based on Googling, that the mass of the Earth's oceans are about 1.37 x 10 to the 21st kilograms. What I am getting at is the question of how much the amount of energy resulting from the greenhouse effect relates to the amount of energy needed to effect a significant rise in ocean temperature. How the ocean temperatures would be affected by circulation from depth to the surface are also involved, but for this purpose assume the entire ocean might rise in temperature uniformly.
1 Answer
- Wage SlaveLv 78 years agoFavorite Answer
Approximately 5,496,230,880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. This is approximately 5.209*10^39 BTUs. I used 3.982776 j/g*C as the specific heat of water to get BTUs/degree centigrade.
For a reference, the annual amount of energy that reaches earth from the sun each year is approximately 10^27 BTUs. In other words, a lot of energy is required to heat the entire ocean by 1 degree centigrade.
