Every time a journalist writes about energy and power, and confuses the units of each, or leaves their story unclear by perhaps omitting "a year" from it, they should be plugged into a 240V socket. For 5 seconds.
Crap even NOAA seems unable to phrase this unambiguously:
The upper layer of the world’s ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal, according to a new study. The energy stored is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs per each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100519_ocean.html"The energy stored" is ambiguous. Do they mean "the energy being stored", in which case this would be the rate of energy storage, and that rate is the same as the power for the light bulbs; or "the energy that has been stored", in which case it's the accumulated energy since 1993, and you would need to say how long the light bulbs are to be run. Reuters makes it worse by changing the wording to "the heat content of the ocean has increased over the last 16 years and the energy stored is
now enough...". That really makes it sound like the accumulated energy.
OK, so I have to assume they mean the current rate of energy storage in the oceans is enough to power nearly 500*6.7 billion 100-watt light bulbs, ie 335 trillion watts. They say that's in the top 2,000 ft, which I think means 2.2e17 cubic metres. So that's an average rate of temperature increase of 3.35e14/(2.2e17*1000*4200)=3.7e-10 K/s. I think. Or 1 degree Centigrade every 86 years. Which is believable. :shrug: I have probably made a mistake somewhere, but I shouldn't have to do calculations just to figure out what their English means.
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