Hi Navjit,
A heat sink, in climatic terms, is essentially something that removes heat energy from the atmosphere. The oceans are by far the largest heat sink removing many times more energy than all other sources combined; the amount of energy absorbed by the land, biomass etc is tiny in comparison.
Heat will always flow from the warmer medium to the cooler one, thus when the atmosphere is warmer than the ocean below it, then heat flows into the ocean.
Because the oceans are so vast and because water is able to store far more heat than air can, it takes a vast amount of heat to warm up the oceans. They are therefore able to absorb a lot of heat from the atmosphere. If they didn’t do this then the atmosphere would be far hotter than it is now.
Very approximately, the atmosphere is 4 billion km3 and the oceans are about 400 million km3, so the atmosphere is ten times larger. However, the volumetric heat capacity of the oceans is about 2,000 times greater than that of the air. In other words, if all that heat stored in the oceans were to be transferred to the atmosphere, it would cause 200 times the amount of warming that occurs in the oceans. This would mean that the atmosphere would have a temperature in the region of 3,000°C – enough to melt rock.
So when you go swimming in the sea, although it might feel cold there’s actually a an incredible amount of heat energy there. And the oceans have the capacity to hold much more heat than they do at present.
In terms of global warming this means that as the atmosphere warms up, some of that heat is transferred into the oceans. It’s a slow process and if there were no other factors involved then it would take about 6,000 years for the air and oceans to reach the same temperature (equilibrium), however, most of the heat transfer would happen early on – in the first few centuries and then slow down with time.
Without heat sinks then global warming would be much, much more pronounced. In fact, in the last 15 years or so the temperature of the atmosphere has remained more or less unchanged and that’s because a lot of heat energy is flowing into the oceans.
See also this link: http://www.icsusa.org/pages/articles/201...
A heat sink would slow the rate of warming and also, I think, result in a lower maximum temperature, though the warming would last for much longer.
A good analogy would be a domestic electric kettle. Switch it on for 2 minutes when empty and it would rapidly overheat and burn out. Switch it on for 2 minutes when it is full and it would warm much more slowly as the heat from the element is conducted away into the water, which acts as the heat sink.
This is like what happens in the environment. The heat from global warming goes into the oceans which are the heat sinks.
Going back to the empty kettle, when it is turned off, the element cools fairly quickly back to room temperature. But when the full kettle is turned off, the water now is a source of heat, keeping the element warmer for longer.
So eventually, the oceans would warm and become less good as heat sinks. If CO2 levels were then reduced (the same as switching off the electricity in the kettle senario) the oceans would then be a heat source and would keep the environment warmer.
Hope that makes some sort of sense.
Ice is a perfect heat sink. Put your warm beer in a ice filled cooler and as the beer cools the ice melts. In this case as the atmosphere cools the ice in the artic melts. The wheeze that the 'atmosphere hasn't warmed in X number of years' is actually true, but the ice at the top of the world is many feet thinner than it was in the 1950's when the first nuclear submarines first began to operate under the ice. The US Navy is well aware of what's going on and why...you can type in US Navy and climate change and see for yourself.
I commend Trevor's answer but I would just point out that the warming of the heat sinks is part of global warming. It is true that in the early years of warming the oceans and other heat sinks take heat out of the air quite quickly and so help to keep air temperatures down. But the heat is still there, in the oceans, and it still impacts on the weather by increasing the number of severe weather events.
Total effect of heat sink will be zero. Just to take heat from one place and sink it somewhere else doesn't make it go away. It may well affect local conditions but not global.
It can slow down the action or increase the time between stimulus and response time locally. It will have no effect on global warming since a heat sink will be part of 'global'. You will always have 'X' amount of heat. How that 'X' is divided up, whether it be in the heat sink or in the atmosphere or any place else it still globally will amount to 'X'.
It provides a convenient excuse for alarmists to pretend to know that their failed prediction weren't really wrong after all and that the heat didn't go into the atmosphere but magically went into the ocean depths where no one can see it. Yeah that's it. That's the ticket. You would have to be an idiot to fall for a parlor trick like that.
Note, just to reiterate, what alarmists are claiming is that the ocean is absorbing the heat even though the atmosphere hasn't warmed in 18 years. That is why I call it magic. Their predictions failed and they are flailing around making excuses. You would think some would have the integrity to admit they were wrong or miscalculated or whatever but they aren't really concerned with that. They are concerned about the cause which includes an attack on energy production and free markets. Look at their proposed solutions if you don't believe me.
Global Warming ended in 2012, confirmed by our Satelite reports 11/28/2012. Mike
grade 10 science, climate change
