Along with cleaning up emissions couldnt we grow icebergs?
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Not easily. Our freezers and refrigerators work by pushing/pumping heat around. We simply value making the freezer/refrigerator cold more than we care about the temperature of the room.
To freeze icebergs, we’d need to dump the heat somewhere. If we were to just dump it to the atmosphere (the “room”), then it would simply melt the iceberg again.
Not easily. Our freezers and refrigerators work by pushing/pumping heat around. We simply value making the freezer/refrigerator cold more than we care about the temperature of the room.
To freeze icebergs, we’d need to dump the heat somewhere. If we were to just dump it to the atmosphere (the “room”), then it would simply melt the iceberg again.
An iceberg is 100,000 to 1,000,000 tonnes of water.
To cool or raise it by even a degree take an enormous amount of energy.
To turn water (especially salt water!) into ice takes even more energy (the transition from liquid to solid consumes a lot of energy, and salt water like the ocean needs to be incredibly cold to freeze).
It takes INCREDIBLE amounts of energy to freeze a large iceberg (which can be miles wide) and expending that energy has a cost elsewhere that you would have to make up somehow.
That’s why icebergs melting is so worrying – we have no real tech that would scale to freeze them, and the energy required to melt them means that countless extra energy is coming from “somewhere” (i.e. staying on earth because of the greenhouse effect rather than being emitted into space from the ENTIRE PLANET) in order to raise their temperature enough that miles upon miles of icebergs are melting away.
There is absolutely no quick fix, this is geological scale warming and you’d have to “invent” an ice age to solve it in any reasonable amount of time. Though collectively that kind of energy does exist in synthetic sources, and theoretically we could build some incredible, unprecedented, machine the size of a country to do it, it would literally be the only thing we could do. We’d have to devote every global resource to doing nothing but that, and that would probably means millions of people dying elsewhere.
We can’t “clean up emissions” either. We have no significant technology to do that. All we can do is stop them escaping into the air directly and put them somewhere else for the meantime, and even that is difficult and expensive.
The time to fix this problem was 100 years ago when we could have stopped causing the damage. It’s probably too late to do anything about it now. Everything we do is just a tiny, tiny damage limitation to stop it being quite so bad. There’s no easy reversal whatsoever.
You can’t uncook an egg, and we’ve still got the gas turned up to “9” on the dial while complaining about how the egg is already burning away. All the green measures in the world so far are about the equivalent of turning the gas down to 8.9, but still cooking it away. And nothing is bringing that egg back to the raw state, even if we shut off everything tomorrow.
An iceberg is 100,000 to 1,000,000 tonnes of water.
To cool or raise it by even a degree take an enormous amount of energy.
To turn water (especially salt water!) into ice takes even more energy (the transition from liquid to solid consumes a lot of energy, and salt water like the ocean needs to be incredibly cold to freeze).
It takes INCREDIBLE amounts of energy to freeze a large iceberg (which can be miles wide) and expending that energy has a cost elsewhere that you would have to make up somehow.
That’s why icebergs melting is so worrying – we have no real tech that would scale to freeze them, and the energy required to melt them means that countless extra energy is coming from “somewhere” (i.e. staying on earth because of the greenhouse effect rather than being emitted into space from the ENTIRE PLANET) in order to raise their temperature enough that miles upon miles of icebergs are melting away.
There is absolutely no quick fix, this is geological scale warming and you’d have to “invent” an ice age to solve it in any reasonable amount of time. Though collectively that kind of energy does exist in synthetic sources, and theoretically we could build some incredible, unprecedented, machine the size of a country to do it, it would literally be the only thing we could do. We’d have to devote every global resource to doing nothing but that, and that would probably means millions of people dying elsewhere.
We can’t “clean up emissions” either. We have no significant technology to do that. All we can do is stop them escaping into the air directly and put them somewhere else for the meantime, and even that is difficult and expensive.
The time to fix this problem was 100 years ago when we could have stopped causing the damage. It’s probably too late to do anything about it now. Everything we do is just a tiny, tiny damage limitation to stop it being quite so bad. There’s no easy reversal whatsoever.
You can’t uncook an egg, and we’ve still got the gas turned up to “9” on the dial while complaining about how the egg is already burning away. All the green measures in the world so far are about the equivalent of turning the gas down to 8.9, but still cooking it away. And nothing is bringing that egg back to the raw state, even if we shut off everything tomorrow.
To add to everything other have already said: freezing new glaciers is only treating the symptom of the problem, not the cause. Its like having a bad tooth and getting painkillers prescribed. Sure, it make you feel (somewhat) better, but your tooth is still causing other problems and you now need these painkillers continuously, because your tooth didn’t get treated properly.
It would be more sensible to treat the actual cause, so remove the tooth / fight climate change in a way that makes a difference.
When you use a refrigerator it actually takes heat from inside it and places it.outside of it.
Same for air conditioners.
So these technologies are moving heat from one place and putting it elsewhere.
So while you can do that in the arctic it would also heat up the arctic at the same time.
To add to everything other have already said: freezing new glaciers is only treating the symptom of the problem, not the cause. Its like having a bad tooth and getting painkillers prescribed. Sure, it make you feel (somewhat) better, but your tooth is still causing other problems and you now need these painkillers continuously, because your tooth didn’t get treated properly.
It would be more sensible to treat the actual cause, so remove the tooth / fight climate change in a way that makes a difference.
When you use a refrigerator it actually takes heat from inside it and places it.outside of it.
Same for air conditioners.
So these technologies are moving heat from one place and putting it elsewhere.
So while you can do that in the arctic it would also heat up the arctic at the same time.
When you cool something down, you have to heat something else up even more. This is one way to describe the second law of thermodynamics. Time travel and anti-gravity are both more plausible than finding a way around this law, to give you an idea of how ironclad it is.
When you cool something down, you have to heat something else up even more. This is one way to describe the second law of thermodynamics. Time travel and anti-gravity are both more plausible than finding a way around this law, to give you an idea of how ironclad it is.
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