Journal Will.Woodhull's Journal: A simple question on climate change: heat of fusion of ice 4
Google tells me that at the temperature of freezing, it takes 80 calories to melt one gram of water that remains at that same temperature. I think that's called the heat of fusion but my memories of high school science are more than 50 years old, and kind of rusty.
It should be easy to use this combined with current estimates on the amount of ice lost from Antarctica, Greenland, and glaciers to determine how much heat of global warming is being absorbed by melting ice. I'm guessing that this is a significant heat sink but I have not seen any articles about it. I don't trust my own research on this (haven't practiced sci-tech stuff since I retired and was never into climatology or this kind of physics).
So my questions for Slashdot readers: How much of the tapering off of measures of AGW is due to melting ice? Does the difference between the forecast global warming and the actual measures of the last decade provide another way to estimate the net retreat of glaciers? Can this be used as an alternate way of estimating sea level rise?
Troll Bait (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, I could not. I've got better things to do than to try to repeat the research of other people who know their subject areas better than I will ever learn them.
Your post on the other hand is flamebait. Do you have no better way to bolster your ego? Can you not think of some positive way to score points?
Re: (Score:3)
No, I could not. I've got better things to do than to try to repeat the research of other people who know their subject areas better than I will ever learn them.
Translation of "No, I could not. I've got better things to do than to try to repeat the research" - I'm too lazy to even attempt a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Also, the value of the heat absorbed in melting isn't relevant - if the ice is melting, it's obvious the environment the ice is in is getting more energy than it can absorb without changing states from solid to liquid.
Ice in a box (Score:2)
I think I see where you're going with this... you're recalling the lab where you're measuring the temperature of a substance undergoing a phase change, and as you add heat energy to the system, the temperature stops rising momentarily at the transition zone (solid to liquid, or liquid to gas), until finally all the solid changes to liquid or all of the liquid boils off and then the measured temperature starts going up again. And you're thinking that since the global average temperature seems to have level