In order to reduce the melting of polar ice, why couldn’t we use liquid nitrogen in some ways, to freeze parts of the pole’s seas?
In: Physics
Cooling things takes a lot of energy (ironically). At the moment most of our energy globally still comes from fossil fuels, which means producing more CO2 to make liquid nitrogen, increasing the greenhouse effect.
Also, when you cool stuff, you’re not “adding cold”. You’re just moving some heat away to a different place to cool the original place down. That means making a whole ton of liquid nitrogen and throwing it at the poles might temporarily cool them down, but only by increasing the temperature elsewhere, and that temperature increase would spread back to the poles really quickly, leaving you worse off than you started (because of the energy requirements to freeze the nitrogen).
It’s like trying to stop a wound from bleeding by making a bigger wound higher up the artery. Sure, maybe the one wound stopped bleeding as much, but as a whole, it just makes things worse.
**Edit:** *I just realized that you can technically cool things without moving heat around, just by trapping some thermal energy as chemical energy by doing some chemical reactions. Still not an efficient or effective way to fix icecaps.*
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