what happens when all the ice caps or glaciers melt? Do we get super hot forever, or does it cool the earth eventually?
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As far as we can tell now, the ice caps/glaciers melting will have little (direct) impact on how the world temperatures are going to go.
What will have much more of an impact is going to be our CO2 production/removal and how much CO2 and other greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere.
More water being in the oceans won’t directly impact those CO2 numbers, but it’s possible that increased flooding due to it then drives humanity to try to more actively control and regulate our atmosphere.
It’s been hotter before and colder, these things come in cycles. But usually the ramp up is over a much much longer period. Technically we’re still in an ice age I believe because there is ice in the poles.
So yes it will cool eventually
*Eventually*, yes, we’d expect the earth to cool back down. Probably. But we’re talking a cycle time of tens of thousands of years, so “never” in human terms.
The most immediate effect is rising sea levels…all that extra water will raise the oceans so that a lot of coastal areas become underwater or far more prone to flooding.
The slightly longer effect is that the “buffer” effect of the ice caps goes away…all other things being equal, solar heating goes up (because the ice isn’t there to reflect sunlight) and we lose all the energy storage that ice represents…ice/water can store/release *huge* amounts of energy without changing temperature. We lose that climate buffer.
There’s some probability (I have no idea the value) that we turn ourselves into a Venus-like greenhouse. If we do that, I don’t think it’s reversible over timescales so long that we shouldn’t care.
You ask a question that has 2 answers – those answers are dependent on the cause of the scenario you describe.
If the cause is Earth’s natural cycle of climate change, no problem – that’s a slow process that (usually) gives life on the planet time to adapt.
If the cause is our profligate burning and release of greenhouse gasses – as we are doing at breakneck speed – there’s no time to adapt, and having reached that point, little possibility we will be able to reverse it. Someone already mentioned it *might* end up like Venus – there’s no maybes about it. Precisely the same greenhouse effect, caused by the same gasses, under very similar conditions, has resulted in our sister planet having a surface temperature of around 470°C (900F).
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