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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (40320)	5/31/2013 2:53:57 AM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86356

<Result is that the heat capacity of a pound of ocean is around 2.5x the heat capacity of a pound of air.> It's not quite as simple as you described. It's 40 years since I did deep delving into thermodynamics but I did remember it as a nightmare of complexity. A quick quiz of Google and hey presto, Wikipedia confirmed my memory. Without wading through it all, it's a complex business. en.wikipedia.org But the point is that kilometres of salt water stores stupendously vast amounts of heat compared with the 32 feet of water represented by the atmosphere [the weight of air being equal to the weight of 32 feet of water, or 10 metres, near enough]. 5000 metres of water versus 10 metres of air equivalent = 500 times as much energy can go into the ocean as into the air. [Ignoring details like land masses]. Or, allowing for water having a high specific heat, maybe 1000 times as much energy into the oceans as in air. The mathematically inclined physicists could calculate it more accurately. But that's near enough for government work, such as spending opm on CO2 production reduction. Mqurice