Oct 17 2007
Adding Ice, To Cool Your Drink, Is Melting The Arctic - True Irony
The other day at work as I momentarily watched ice cubs melting in my cup of hot water for tea (what’s the point of having water so hot you have to wait fifteen minutes to take a sip) I thought about how the melting ice was cooling off the hot water and ever so slightly the room around me. So in actuality I am cooling the earth. We did the experiment in 9th grade, cup of hot water and cup of ice water in closed container - eventually the temperatures balance out to the same (the hot water to a cooler temp and the ice water to a warmer). So by adding the ice cubes I am technically cooling the temperature of the hot water in the cup, the room, and the earth, thereby slowing global warming. Then I thought about the amount of energy needed to make the ice and keep the ice frozen until I took it from the ice machine and added it to the hot water. Some oil, coal, wood, or other resource for generating electricity was needed to freeze my ice and keep it ready (unless a wind farm, solar energy, or a hydroelectric dam produced the electricity). This brings up an interesting question - if we made mass amounts of ice with wind energy and threw it on the ground would we cool the earth?
I am a big fan of ice (we have crushed ice at work which is the best kind) and I eat a couple cups of it a day - mixed with pop, tea, or water. So the next time I see melting ice cubes in my cup I will pause and think of the melting ice sheet in the poles - and hopefully I will walk to the store instead of drive to offset the effect. (I realize its a little amount of electricity needed for the ice and the fact that the hot water heating takes energy too - just an ironic observation).
So the true irony is the next time you add ice to a beverage to cool it down - you are actually contributing to global warming (unless the ice is from a clean electricity source).
If anyone from work is reading this I was on a 2 minute - tea getting break during my earth cooling thoughts.
This post is one day past Blog Action Day but fairly close. The science and logic of this post would be more accurate if it was room temp water for the tea.