Ice bergs are melting and getting less of them. I've seen on discovery channel the narrator said that we will have global flood if the situation go on like this.
How can we stop this? Global warming becomes one big major problem. However my question here is can we create ice bergs to prevent us from global flood? Are there anyway we can do this?
Last edited by nappa on Mon May 07, 2007 9:26 pm; edited 1 time in total
We cannot stop Global Warming. It's been there and will always be there. Many said that Global Warming was caused by humans through the burning of fossil fuels. But researchers are skeptical about that and actually think that Global Warming is a natural phenomenon. That can be partially explained by the Ice ages that the Earth has had.
Anyway, in regards to your question, obviously and theoretically, we can make ice bergs. Ice bergs are nothing more than very huge pieces of frozen water. Think of them as really really huge ice cubes. Well, if we can make ice cubes, then we can make ice bergs. You just need to scale the "ingredients" for that to happen, like for example, using a really really really big cooling machine (freezer) to freeze a ridiculous amount of water over some period of time.
However, if ever the making of ice bergs is feasible, it will not solve the problem because the ice bergs will just melt away. The real problem here is that the Earth's temperature is rising... and rising steadily. Unless you can find a way to "strip off" the Greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, then you can really do nothing about it.
Global warming this is a fact was around before the combustion engine.. which thats a proven fact..
When we breath release co2 so... i guess hold your breath.
As per the icebergs.
Look under the water they are huge! they dont show you those pictures... the icebergs aren't going anywhere they are huge underwater if you see the size..
| djclue917 wrote: |
| We cannot stop Global Warming. |
Not true, we have both the knowlege and the ability to put a complete stop to global warming and are lacking in nothing but initiative.
| djclue917 wrote: |
| But researchers are skeptical about that and actually think that Global Warming is a natural phenomenon. That can be partially explained by the Ice ages that the Earth has had. |
This is also untrue; the concensus of experts is that the climate change we are experiencing today is almost completely anthropogenic.
| et-configs wrote: |
| Global warming this is a fact was around before the combustion engine.. which thats a proven fact.. |
The global climate has fluctuated since the world was formed, but climate changes of this degree and rapidity are unprecedented, and the chief cause of our current climate change, being anthropogenic, has mostly been in effect since after the invention of the internal combustion engine (most of that work done in the 19th century). The largest warming periods have been about 1925-1945 and 1980-present. The cause of this first trend seems to be a mixture of anthropogenic effects and natural variation. The cause of the second trend is very likely due to increased atmospheric carbon, which is primarily anthropogenic.
The icebergs are definitely melting. The arctic sea ice may actually be gone by the middle of this century, and Antarctic sea ice is retreating rapidly. The ice breaks into icebergs, which migrate towards the equator and rapidly melt once they hit warm waters.Would be very costly, and not to mention probably not as stable. There's a difference between snow-packed ice and ice you make in your freezer, and I think it'd be too different to last as long as icebergs themselves last.
| nappa wrote: |
| However my question here is can we create ice bergs to prevent us from global flood? Are there anyway we can do this? |
No way that is even remotely practical today.
You are probably thinking that we could simply make a big ass freezer that we could use to freeze millions of kilos of seawater a year, and make icebergs that way. Nope, won't work. A heat pump (aka, big ass freezer) "sucks" the heat out of something (in the case of the common freezer, it sucks the heat out of the inside of the freezer) and dumps it into a reservoir (in the case of the common freezer, anywhere outside the freezer - feel the back of your fridge, it's pretty damn hot because that's where all the heat is being dumped). If you wanted to make a freezer to (ultimately) cool the Earth, you would need to dump the excess heat into a reservoir outside of the Earth... but space is a poor conductor, so we couldn't just dump the heat into space.nappa>...However my question here is can we create ice bergs to prevent us from global flood? Are there anyway we can do this?
The long history of ice cubes? http://www.newsday.com/features/food/ny-fdburn5110248feb28,0,5794743.column?coll=ny-foodday-toputility
So, if we totalled the amount of ice created by humans hitherto it weighs what? a few trillion kilogrammes? => a few billion cubic metres or an ice-berg ~ 1 kilometre on a side. Small stuff in comparison with nature. 
"B-15 measured 180 miles long and 25 miles wide – about the size of Jamaica and more than twice the size of Delaware." | et-configs wrote: |
Global warming this is a fact was around before the combustion engine.. which thats a proven fact..
When we breath release co2 so... i guess hold your breath.
As per the icebergs.
Look under the water they are huge! they dont show you those pictures... the icebergs aren't going anywhere they are huge underwater if you see the size.. |
Yeah, it just accelerated after the combustion engine. We release CO2, yes, but trees use CO2 pretty fast too. Too bad we made machines that pretty much tips the balance so much, huh?Not only CO2 that causing the problems, there are many kinds of chemical gas in the atmosphere. Many of them can't be cleaned or very hard to do so. And that causing global warming by reducing the ozone and producing green house effect.
Yeah you guys are right making ice bergs is not the thing to go, however I hope that doing so would slow down the time of flooding. It's gonna be global flood in a few hundred years ahead according to what I saw on discovery channel.
When I say making ice berg I'm NOT thinking about making a big freezer to make an ice berg. What I meant was put some kind of chemical element into the sea where we can make ice bergs.
In the other hand, we should find some ways to create ozone in the atmosphere and some ways to clean those toxic gas.
Somehow may be we can do that in the future, human can do anything that seems to be only fiction....that's the fact
^If you could find a chemical that would displace the salt in salt water while not making water harder to freeze, you could encourage the formation of ice bergs by spreading this chemical in northern oceans, and raising the temperature at which the water can freeze. (Salt water has a lower freezing temperature than pure water, or water with this theoretical chemical)
So, just making desalination plants at the poles could delay the flood somewhat.
I can't even imagine what it would take to desalinate the oceans. There are 3.5 * 10^20 gallons of water in the worlds oceans. To desalinate 1/100th of the ocean in 10 years would require 20 million desalination plants running at 50 million gallons per day (and what would we do with 500 trillion tons of salt?). Besides that, the gulf stream current is driven by high-salinity surface water accumulating at the poles and sinking. Desalinating the poles would speed up the loss of the gulf stream flow.
I think the simplest solution to combating polar ice loss is to decrease carbon emissions!
| Gagnar The Unruly wrote: |
I think the simplest solution to combating polar ice loss is to decrease carbon emissions! |
Well yes, that would be the easiest way. I was assuming we were already to the point where the flood was beginning though. By that time it would be a bit late to reduce carbon emissions (at least for many low lying areas), also there would be a lot of funding (from those low lying areas) for a way to stop the flood. | ocalhoun wrote: |
| Gagnar The Unruly wrote: |
I think the simplest solution to combating polar ice loss is to decrease carbon emissions! |
Well yes, that would be the easiest way. I was assuming we were already to the point where the flood was beginning though. By that time it would be a bit late to reduce carbon emissions (at least for many low lying areas), also there would be a lot of funding (from those low lying areas) for a way to stop the flood. |
If the polar caps have melted to the point that flooding is beginning, then it is already too late. The ice caps keep the global temperature down by reflecting a huge proportion of sunlight back into space. If they're gone or going, then the temperature will rise, which will cause them to melt more and you end up with a spiralling cycle.
Removing the salt from the water around the poles won't help either, because to extract the salt, you have to use energy - energy which from the point of the view of the water ultimately changes the intermolecular chemical potential of the water, which is why the freezing point changes. The second law makes it so that even if the process is 100% efficient (which is impossible), the amount of heat you will emit during the process will be the same as or greater than the change in the chemical potential energy. In reality, you will end up creating more heat by desalination than you will save by changing the freezing point. So unless you can find somewhere to dump that heat, you won't be accomplishing anything.
Of course, the system is non-linear. It may be that if you build a big-ass freezer or a big-ass desalination plant and create icebergs that way, the additional ice will reflect more heat from the sun. It might be possible to create just the right amount of ice so that the amount of heat it reflects is greater than the amount of heat you had to generate to create the ice... creating a net drop in temperature. i don't know if this is possible because i haven't crunched the numbers - but my instinct tells me no, because the amount of heat you will generate creating ice will probably be large, and the amount of heat you will reflect by more ice will probably be quite small.
Really, there's no way to reverse the process by brute force with our current level of technology. The only "good" way to stop it is to stop what's causing it - to put a limit on emissions - and then to wait... and wait... and wait for the system to restablize itself... and hope that it can.
And if the polar caps have already melted - that is, it's already too late - then plan B would be to fill the upper atmosphere with some kind of dust to reflect as much sunlight as possible, to bring the temperatures down and increase the polar cap size. But then we'd have to remove it... and in the meantime, it may cause a lot of damage to those elements of the ecosystem that rely on sunlight. | djclue917 wrote: |
We cannot stop Global Warming. It's been there and will always be there. Many said that Global Warming was caused by humans through the burning of fossil fuels. But researchers are skeptical about that and actually think that Global Warming is a natural phenomenon. That can be partially explained by the Ice ages that the Earth has had.
Anyway, in regards to your question, obviously and theoretically, we can make ice bergs. Ice bergs are nothing more than very huge pieces of frozen water. Think of them as really really huge ice cubes. Well, if we can make ice cubes, then we can make ice bergs. You just need to scale the "ingredients" for that to happen, like for example, using a really really really big cooling machine (freezer) to freeze a ridiculous amount of water over some period of time.
However, if ever the making of ice bergs is feasible, it will not solve the problem because the ice bergs will just melt away. The real problem here is that the Earth's temperature is rising... and rising steadily. Unless you can find a way to "strip off" the Greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, then you can really do nothing about it. |
I don't think there is too much we can really do, considering we're not a 100% sure its us causing it although all evidence seems to point to the fact that were are contributing to it. id have to say the only thing we can do is try and stop making it worse rather then correct the problem that has always been with us but just at a minimal level. | Indi wrote: |
| And if the polar caps have already melted - that is, it's already too late - then plan B would be to fill the upper atmosphere with some kind of dust to reflect as much sunlight as possible, to bring the temperatures down and increase the polar cap size. But then we'd have to remove it... and in the meantime, it may cause a lot of damage to those elements of the ecosystem that rely on sunlight. |
Anthropogenic solar dimming already happened (with a little help from nature), and the global temperature did cool somewhat. The dimming has lessened now, and some climate experts fear that further 'brightening' due partly to tighter emissions laws will cause global warming to proceed faster than current models predict. Some researchers have proposed intentional release of compounds into the air to cause global dimming, but these compounds are often pollutants, and it's kind of like jumping out of the frying pan...
I don't think dimming would have much of an effect on ecosystems; plants in most environments are not light-limited (almost as a rule). Lessened illuminance might benefit some plants slightly by reducing photoinhibition, but the greater concern for ecosystems (besides increased temperatures) is probably the presence of elevated CO2. Researchers still don't know what effect that will have on ecosystems worldwide, but it's hard to imagine it won't matter at all. Many plants are indirectly carbon-limited.If you radiate the heat produced on the hot part of the giant refrigerator to outer space, then maybe, the net caloric balance is negative to make an iceberg without melting the others. You could radiate this extra heat with a parabolic antenna pointed to the sky. I dont think that the fact that outer space is a poor conductor can be a problem, because it is a black body at 2.7K that's pretty cool, so we have a good cold bath where to pump all the heat on earth. Think of your car in the morning when it is outside, you will realize that it is cooler inside the car than outside it, the reason for that is that the heat radiated to the sky is grater than the heat radiated to your car from the surroundings. So in the same fashion we can think of a giant refrigerator.
| ptolomeo wrote: |
| Think of your car in the morning when it is outside, you will realize that it is cooler inside the car than outside it, the reason for that is that the heat radiated to the sky is grater than the heat radiated to your car from the surroundings. So in the same fashion we can think of a giant refrigerator. |
Then why isn't the Earth colder already? Because space exists in a state of almost perfect vacuum, it is incapable of conducting heat. Space isn't a cold bath surrounding the earth; it's a big bunch of nothing surrounding the earth. As Indi explained to me earlier, the "temperature" of the universe is not the average kinetic energy of empty space. Rather, the relative abundance of the different wavelengths of light in the universe match the emissions of a perfect black body at 3.7 K (hence saying the temperature of the uinverse is 3.7 K).
The only way I can think of for us to remove heat from Earth would be through radiation, or by hurling hot matter into space. I imagine that either is exceedingly impractical, and speculate that the former might be thermodynamically impossible.
Once again, the simplest and least expensive solution is probably to reduce atmospheric carbon emissions! | nappa wrote: |
Ice bergs are melting and getting less of them. I've seen on discovery channel the narrator said that we will have global flood if the situation go on like this.
How can we stop this? Global warming becomes one big major problem. However my question here is can we create ice bergs to prevent us from global flood? Are there anyway we can do this? |
I don't think the flood is the big issue. If the concept of global warming being caused by CO2 emission and retention of light from the sun is correct, than the big issue is the spiralling condition of the melting ice. The ice normally reflects the light that it would absorb as water. This results in a greater water temperature which leads to more melting ice ad infinitum.
I remain unconvinced of the whole phenomenon. A speaker came to my school and showed us a graph of global temperature of the past 250 million years. The graph looked like a sine graph that was hit with the ugly hammer. We are at a local maximum but in the past the temperature would then descend. The speaker, however, just continued the line as though it were some sort of polynomial graph. | dwinton wrote: |
| I remain unconvinced of the whole phenomenon. A speaker came to my school and showed us a graph of global temperature of the past 250 million years. The graph looked like a sine graph that was hit with the ugly hammer. We are at a local maximum but in the past the temperature would then descend. The speaker, however, just continued the line as though it were some sort of polynomial graph. |
There is no question that the global climate has fluctuated, and has been a lot warmer than it is today. The big issue is the very recent sudden upswing in global temperature. It might be easy to write this off as a natural phenomenon but for one fact: current models using only natural forcings are completely inadequate in explaining this change, and models that include anthropogenic forcings are much better at predicting the observed climate change.
So, don't worry to much about believing that there's anything special about the magnitude or even rapidity of the recent climate change. The fact is that it seems to be anthropogenic, and if we project our current most accurate models into the future, we see a very dramitic sudden increase in global temperature that will have important consequences. That's the reason why the speaker's graph kept going up at the end. | dwinton wrote: |
| I remain unconvinced of the whole phenomenon. A speaker came to my school and showed us a graph of global temperature of the past 250 million years. The graph looked like a sine graph that was hit with the ugly hammer. We are at a local maximum but in the past the temperature would then descend. The speaker, however, just continued the line as though it were some sort of polynomial graph. |
You mean like this (although it only goes back 400 kyears or so):
You are misunderstanding the problem, though. It's not that the Earth is hotter now than it has ever been in the past, it's that the rate of increase of temperature is greater than it has ever been in recorded history. Yes, the Earth has been hotter once or twice over the last few aeons or so, but it has never had such a drastically fast rate of change that we have been able to determine. You can see it in a close up of the last 2000 years:
See that huge spike at the end? That's a strangely large leap, an almost constant trend of increase for almost 100 years. Yes, it's been hotter in the past. But if the temperature continues to climb at that kind of rate, that won't be true for long.
Which brings up the question of why this is so. After all, maybe it is natural - anomalous but still natural - and maybe it will drop again like it has in the past. That's where this graph comes in:
The inset graph is a close-up on the tail. Now we can see why it jumps up, and we can predict what will happen in the future. And it turns out that every one of the best predictive models points to a continuing temperature rise. That, in essence, is the theory of global warming.
i know that there's a lot of misinformation out there about global warming. But within the scientific community, while it is debated (as virtually all things are debated - such is the nature of science), the consensus of scientists is nearly universal that the vast majority of this phenomenon is human-caused. Although this was not true just 10-15 years ago, it is true now. In fact, i noticed on one of the the Wikipedia pages i swiped those graphs from (or maybe it was one of the other pages i browsed looking for that graph you mentioned - unfortunately, i closed the windows) that every scientific association of every first-world country in the world that has made a statement on the topic has endorsed the idea of human-caused global warming except one. The holdout? The American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Go figure. (And they're apparently in the process of "reviewing" their opinion, too, because apparently most of their members think it's wrong.)
i think at this point, it's pretty safe to say that the question is no longer a matter of controversy within the scientific world. It's pretty much been determined, with almost no dissention, that human actions have caused a dramatic spike in global temperatures, and that if the trend continues we will have a global ecological crisis in the next century or so.
| Gagnar The Unruly wrote: |
| The only way I can think of for us to remove heat from Earth would be through radiation, or by hurling hot matter into space. I imagine that either is exceedingly impractical, and speculate that the former might be thermodynamically impossible. |
Well, for the second, you would have to figure whether the entropy you would have to generate in order to pump excess heat into the matter and accelerate it to escape velocity is less than the entropy decrease you would create by ejecting the hot matter.
For the first, it would probably work, but i question the efficiency. For the moment, assume ideal materials. So imagine we have a perfect conductor (a superduperconductor) and a perfect radiator (black body). What you could do is build a big, flat plate and place it in orbit on the night side of Earth, in an orbit that would always keep it away from the sun. Then you could hang a cord of superduperconducting wire down from that plate towards the equator. Now, night temperatures there are ~25℃, which is around ~298 K. Because the wire is a perfect conductor, that means that the temperature of the plate in orbit will also be ~298 K. So the plate will be radiating at 298 K and space will be radiating back at about 2.7 K, which means the net radiation flux will be around 295 K.
The total rate of heat dissipation will be σAT⁴, where σ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, A is the area of the plate and T is the temperature. Given T = 295 K and σ, that means the total rate of heat dissipation will be ~430A W. So a 1 km² plate will radiate ~430 MW of heat. Not bad.
Of course, that's with perfect materials. In reality, you probably won't even get a single megawatt out of this arrangement, because there's no practical way you can get a plate in space to be the same temperature as the surface of the Earth simply by hanging a wire from it (and if you can't get the plate in space, you're only radiating heat to the atmosphere).
A similar and more practical solution would be to hang a membrane in space on the day side of Earth to filter the sunlight a bit. Just a small change in the percentage of solar radiation coming to Earth should make a significant impact. If you wanted to be clever, you might try to use it to filter out the harmful wavelengths of UV radiation, so people wouldn't even have to use sunscreen at the beach, but that would probably not be a bright idea. A better plan might be to hang it such that it causes a significant decrease in light over the poles. That would hasten the creation of polar ice while affecting as few people as possible. Once more polar ice is created, it will assist in the reradiation of heat back into space.
Of course, you would need an enormous filter, although it could be modular and very, very light. That might even be practical. | Indi wrote: |
...
A similar and more practical solution would be to hang a membrane in space on the day side of Earth to filter the sunlight a bit. ... |
a la Monty Burns ? A brolly over the Solar system probably won't be enough when eta Carinae next goes pop. 
Gagnar, about what I said on the fact that temperature inside a car at night is less than the temperature outside, the truth is that I am not completely sure of that. What I am sure is of what I quote below, taken from http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/1999/12/10.html, because I have seen it happen in my car.
The reason why the earth is no cooling down is because it is in a stationary state radiating heat to outer space at night and absorbing heat from sun at day, with the rotation balancing everything. If earth stopped rotating, the dark side would freeze, of course, so that 2.7 is not a meaningless thing... it's very real.
Returning to the car problem, its true that the upper part lose more heat than the lateral parts, but i am not sure on the balancing inside the car. When it is cool in the morning I prefer to stay outside the car and wait for it to get some temperature because i feel cooler inside. But i know it is a too subjective statement, i should put a termometer inside and other outside and compare.
Cheers
| Quote: |
Hi, this is Rob Norton from Boscawen, NH and I think I have a real poser for your guys. Some mornings when the weather's changing, when fall is turning to winter, before it gets really, really cold at night, I'll go out in the morning, just like I did this morning, and have to scrape off the front window of my car and the back window, but the sides are not frozen.
Frost occurring on the front windshield. Notice the side windows are clear.
There's condensation on them, they're wet, but it's not frozen, even on the side away from the house. And I wonder if you guys can figure this one out and give me an answer as to why this is happening. It really does happen, no one believes me, I hope you guys do (laugh)."
Believe you? Of course I believe you because I've seen it myself. See, the front and back windows of a car are closer to being horizontal. That means they can lose heat straight up to space, there's nothing above them reflecting heat back down. So the heat radiates to space, that's called radiational cooling, so the front and back windows are able to cool down just a little bit more, so frost forms quicker. Quicker than the side windows which are up and down and they radiate sideways.
This means that there's not a lot of the window pointing towards space and so it doesn't cool as quickly because there are things in the environment like trees, the ground, and far away buildings that are actually radiating heat towards the sides and keep the condensation from freezing. So, I'll bet if the night was just a teeny bit longer, frost would actually form on the side windows too. |
| nappa wrote: |
Ice bergs are melting and getting less of them. I've seen on discovery channel the narrator said that we will have global flood if the situation go on like this.
How can we stop this? Global warming becomes one big major problem. However my question here is can we create ice bergs to prevent us from global flood? Are there anyway we can do this? |
hahahaha u are so funny...We could make as many icebergs as we want that wouldn't stop global warming.ice bergs are reeeaaallly large mountains of ice. the large chunk you see above water is just a teensy bit of the entire berg. therefore, making one would demand creation (via freezing) of trillions of kgs of ice (probably by using a freezer that can hold this volume) or dividing the ice caps and transferring them to the middle of the ocean.
bottom line? not easy, if not at all possible..
| Indi wrote: |
| nappa wrote: | | However my question here is can we create ice bergs to prevent us from global flood? Are there anyway we can do this? |
No way that is even remotely practical today.
You are probably thinking that we could simply make a big ass freezer that we could use to freeze millions of kilos of seawater a year, and make icebergs that way. Nope, won't work. A heat pump (aka, big ass freezer) "sucks" the heat out of something (in the case of the common freezer, it sucks the heat out of the inside of the freezer) and dumps it into a reservoir (in the case of the common freezer, anywhere outside the freezer - feel the back of your fridge, it's pretty damn hot because that's where all the heat is being dumped). If you wanted to make a freezer to (ultimately) cool the Earth, you would need to dump the excess heat into a reservoir outside of the Earth... but space is a poor conductor, so we couldn't just dump the heat into space. |
The only way to cool the whole earth down is to release its total heat into space. This is infact possible by radiation i.e. the same way the heat reaches the earth's surface from the sun. The major part of the radiated energy from sun goes back into space and a part of it is retained which keeps our earth warm. The amount of heat that earth keeps back depends on few factors and one of them is greenhouse gasses. If we can control the amount of greenhouse gases then we can actually control the rate at which heat gets radiated out of the earth. Reducing the greenhouse gases hence cooling the earth down. Cool it down enough and we can prefent the melting of ice. In short we can compare the greenhouse gasses to the thermostat of a refrigeratorI just got something came across my mind. We can't create ice berg, ok accept that. So get rid of the green house gas is the way to go.
People always want to reduce the gas, but nobody ever think about how to get rid of the gas that already there! So we can't do it! Can we just make it gone? I mean the gas up there the cause the green house effect.
Surely we have to reduce to way we produce it, but I think if we can get rid of the gas up there, then we can be fine.
Cheers
nappa, I honestly think you should check out this website its called "wikepedia", go to www.google.com type it in, then once u get to wikepedia type in "global warming" and/or "greenhouse effect" I think the focus of this post has been lost. While we can create more icebergs, it would expend more energy than they prevent us from gaining. However, if the global warming people are correct, then losing icebergs is an exponential heat gainer which might make it worthwhile.
| dwinton wrote: |
| I think the focus of this post has been lost. While we can create more icebergs, it would expend more energy than they prevent us from gaining. However, if the global warming people are correct, then losing icebergs is an exponential heat gainer which might make it worthwhile. |
Yes, if more icebergs mean more reflected sunlight, then it might make sense to freeze a bunch of them. While that may raise the average temperature in the short-term, it may negate that effect by decreasing the average temperature enough in the long-term to tip the balance in its favour.
Like i said, i haven't crunched the numbers and i don't know if anyone has. But based on my knowledge of refrigeration... i doubt it would work out.
Here's the thing, the more you freeze, the more heat you generate. Freeze one iceberg, melt two. Maybe not quite so bad, but that's the principle (and with refrigeration on that scale, that might even be a conservative estimate). Now, let's say we had a way to store most of this excess heat, at least temporarily - so that when we freeze one iceberg, we only melt a half of one, which is a net gain of a half an iceberg.
Now it seems like we're making progress, but that's only the start of our problems. You see, the amount of light that gets reflected from an iceberg can't be linear. If you take an iceberg that reflects 1 W, an iceberg with twice the mass will not reflect at 2 W. The total volume of the iceberg is proportional to the mass, but the surface area of the iceberg above the water (which, ideally, would be hemispherical for best scattering) is not linearly proportional to the volume (doubling the volume only increases the total surface area by ~50%... and you're only going to get whatever fraction of that gain happens to be above the water). Note that you're still reflecting more with your manufactured iceberg than was being reflected before... but perhaps not as much more as you might have thought.
Now, sunlight is only roughly 1 kW/m² (that's just from rough memory, so don't quote me), and ice will only reflect some fraction of that... say 50%. That means that you have to build some kind of energy storage system that leaks a maximum of 500 kW per m² of newly created ice cover, for as long as it takes to totally negate the energy you release while created the ice cover.
i don't see it. i don't see how we can possibly store the energy generated from the freezing process to begin with - which means that even attempting it will reduce the total ice cover - and even if we could, i can't imagine how we could maintain a good enough level of storage long enough to break even.
My bet - if it became critically important to create more icebergs, that is, if simply cutting back emissions is not enough - would be on setting up a huge film screen in space, to reduce the amount of sunlight by just a little bit. Even a reduction of 1% means 10²⁰ J less heat per day.
However...
| nappa wrote: |
I just got something came across my mind. We can't create ice berg, ok accept that. So get rid of the green house gas is the way to go.
People always want to reduce the gas, but nobody ever think about how to get rid of the gas that already there! So we can't do it! Can we just make it gone? I mean the gas up there the cause the green house effect.
Surely we have to reduce to way we produce it, but I think if we can get rid of the gas up there, then we can be fine. |
That's not a bad idea. i imagine the way to do it would be to get huge quantities of some chemical up there that reacts with the greenhouse gases to create heavier, but harmless, substances, that would then dribble down to Earth.We can't stop global warming but we can slow it down... If you do not believe that is possible, think about how we "saved" ourselves by stopping the emissions of chlorofluorocarbons by the Montreal Protocol WORLDWIDE, which were discovered to destroy the ozone layer rapidly..
I was thinking about this again the other day. If we create artificial icebergs and raise the average temperature. They will remelt more rapidly.
I think the ozone issue is different. There have been very high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere before . The earth naturally goes in heat cycles and we are approaching what would normally be one of the high points (it looks like a saw graph). How much of the climate change is the result of humans no one can fully say. I think the solution is to grow a mountain of algae or something like that. When the algae dies, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean (so the CO2 ends up dissolved in the water, in some other animal (eaten) or under the ground) and is replaced my new algae. I am just afraid that if the earth naturally goes in these cycles we will mess something up to a far greater extent by overcompensating. Something like flipping the boat over one way because it started to lean the other way.
I insist, if we wont to cool down the earth, the only plausible solution is to radiate energy to outer space, or to make artificial clouds that would create an artificial winter. There is no other way to do it if we have fixed the actual conditions.
Listen to this mates, If the polar caps melt the water will join the ocean and reduce the amount of salt in the northen ocean where the gulf current sinks to deep waters and goes back to its begining in mexicos gulf. The increase of sweet water here would perhaps make the gulf current too scarse in salt to have the suficient salt concentration in order to sink. If the current stops we will have Ice Age so maybe we can stop eating salt and pour it all on the current in the northen europe so it keeps going.
I believe we can save our future each one will make the difference!
