1 hour ago
Ice water is a dynamic system. The amount of ice versus water depends upon the overall temperature. If you could cool a small (minuscule) part of the ocean to freezing, you really haven't changed the dynamic. The process of freezing means that the heat has to go somewhere.
@orchdork775
1 hour ago
Couldn't that heat just be directed into the submarine to keep it warm inside?
@john2001plus
1 hour ago
@orchdork775 It wouldn't matter. The temperature of the ocean isn't going to change, so you are going to have the same amount of ice, which is dependent upon temperature. (There is going to be heat exchange between the submarine and the ocean.) If it takes any energy at all to do this then we are going to warm the oceans, giving us a net loss of ice.
However, if you can change the reflectivity of the ocean then there might be some merit to this. Some of the sunlight will go back into space.
What people don't know is that due to gradual changes in the Earth's orbit because of the Malankovich cycles, we are halfway toward the next period of mass glaciation. That is 10,000 years off, but we are in the cool-down cycle right now. Pesky humans have warmed the atmosphere a little bit, at a rate of about a hundredth of a degree Celsius per year, but we will run out of most fossil fuels within 100 years. Our oil reserves will only last 40 years at the current rate of usage. The long-term problem (greater than a hundred years) is not global warming, but global cooling.
@user-fq3hj5cd9o
36 minutes ago
This is definitely a dumb idea, but y'all are missing the point. They're not cooling the water to freeze it. There's no violation of conservation of energy or whatever. They're removing salt to lower the freezing point. The creation of the ice isn't supposed to directly cool down the ocean like dropping an ice cube in your drink, it's supposed to reflect sunlight and reduce solar heating.
@john2001plus
56 seconds ago
@user-fq3hj5cd9o No, I understood this. I think that the idea is very flawed. If you had a glass of ice salt water, but you somehow expended a bunch of energy, since desalination takes energy, to turn some of the water into a freshwater ice cube, eventually the contents will mix and it won't make any difference. It is the overall heat content of the system that matters, and this is what I meant by it being a dynamic system.
I did say that if you could change the reflectivity of the water it could make a difference.
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