Earth Has Lost 28 Trillion Tons of Ice Since the Mid-1990s
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The ice-water phase change absorbs much more heat than heating water by 1 degree. The energy required for that phase change, called the 'enthalpy of fusion', is 333.55 Joules/gram. This is huge compared to the energy required to heat 1g of water by 1 degree, 4.18 J.
In other words, the ice 'cold bank' is much more of a cushion for temperature change than water is. One metric ton of ice is one million grams. The phase change melt absorbs 333 million joules ... the energy in about 2.8 gallons of gasoline. Multiply that by 28 trillion.
The bank is emptying.
Life did pretty well even in the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum.
This is left out of nearly every climate debate, which typically goes back in the last few hundred years rather than millions.
Example graph: http://jeremyshiers.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/glob...
Obviously there is some thermal impedance to the deeper down rocks, but I still suspect the ice mass to be negligible.
That's a quarter of the 4.18 J/g.K, not a quarter of the enthalpy of fusion.
> Obviously there is some thermal impedance to the deeper down rocks
Rock has very low thermal conductivity. That's one reason why land heats up at 2 to 3 times the rate of the surface of the oceans, so you go to the beach in summer.
Finally, experts in the field consider this (permanent ice melt) to be important. When you think they're wrong, surely the appropriate response is "what am I missing? What don't I understand?".
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=333.55+kJ%2Fkg*28+tril...
It's not the net energy gain in the earth from one day of warming, which isn't all that much. It's the total amount of energy that falls on the earth, which is a lot. Enough to do massive damage if it happened all at once.
This was spread over 10 years so it doesn't provoke that kind of disaster. But it illustrates what an enormous amount of energy is involved, and is now permanently added to the earth's biosphere. And ten more years will add even more than that, only now we have less ice to moderate it. That means more of the delta will go into warming the seas and the atmosphere.
Not in the headline, and not in the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
"Give me half a tanker of iron and I’ll give you the next ice age." - John Martin
Iron deposits occur naturally from Volcanic eruptions. It produces huge phytoplankton blooms which create huge fish blooms later. It also drops CO2 like crazy.
UN banned all study of this process in 2008: https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080603/full/453704b.html
Scientists have since gone rogue and done large scale studies anyway to prove it's safe, like this in 2012:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-...
Now the Canadian government appears to be prosecuting the founder.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/ocean-...
And now they are they are trying to do the same thing in Chili and the mainstream media is fighting it:
https://www.nature.com/news/iron-dumping-ocean-experiment-sp...