Is it really beyond mans' technology to build large ice machines that could slow down/reverse global warming?They could even be solar powered,or something.

The technology might be there but the funding isn't. And such ice machines would likely produce more heat than they combated.

Technology effect to all over life. Global warming is a term that is frequently used to describe the rising temperatures that are occurring on our planet. As the planet heats up, ice melts away. When the ice melts away, the levels of the sea start to increase. Global warming is a result of many years of neglect by people to the planet.

Several people have touched on this issue but the problem with an ice-machine is that it will generate more heat than it saves. To produce ice you need to remove heat from the water, this waste heat would be released into the atmosphere, but in addition there’s the heat generated by the machine itself. It’s the same principle with a fridge, the fridge doesn’t get rid of heat it just moves it from one place to another.

However, there is a way round this and that would be to let nature make the ice.

One area of concern is rising sea-levels. A viable, but not particularly practical solution, would be to pump the excess water onto Antarctica where the temperature is always below freezing. The sea-water would freeze and remain on land thus lowering sea-levels. The two main drawbacks are that we would need to freeze 24,000 tonnes of sea-water per second just to balance the melting that’s presently occurring, more if we wanted to reduce sea-levels.

The other problem is that which has already been mentioned, namely that the heat lost from the water when it freezes would be released into the atmosphere. This would cause additional warming, which in turn would melt more ice and so it would be necessary to pump ever increasing amounts of water onto Antarctica.

Another solution, and one which has been tried successfully, is to reflect sunlight back into space and so cause less warming in the first place.

Many people rely on water from melting glaciers, but around the world half the glaciers outside the Polar regions have melted. The result is that many people have lost their water source. This happened to a group of villages in the Andes, more specifically on the slopes of Chalon Sombrero.

Their solution was to paint the mountain with white paint, this reflected the incoming sunlight, the mountain cooled down and the glaciers started reforming.

This approach works because the heat from the Sun is the wrong type of heat to cause global warming (incoming solar radiation has a very short wavelength, it’s the outgoing thermal radiation that has a wavelength that corresponds to the vibrational frequency of greenhouse gas molecules and allows it to be absorbed and retransmitted).

So perhaps the way to restore ice and to stop it melting quite so fast is to reduce the amount of energy we receive from the Sun in the first place. The Chalon Sombrero example works on a local scale but the same principle can be adopted elsewhere.

For example, what about encouraging light coloured trees and plants to grow, they would reflect more sunlight than the ground beneath them and help slow down warming. We could follow the example of people living in hot countries and paint buildings white, this too would reflect sunlight and keep the interiors of the buildings cooler. These would only make a small difference but there are ideas on a much larger scale.

One such idea is to enhance the formation of clouds. A scheme has been proposed to ‘seed’ the atmosphere over the oceans by spraying sea-water into the atmosphere, the tiny salt crystals would act as condensation nuclei (seeds) around which the moisture in the atmosphere would condense to form tiny water droplets, and if you have enough of these droplets you get clouds. In the right places you would get marine stratocumuli clouds forming, these are cotton candy or cotton wool type clouds that form high up in the atmosphere, they’re bright colour means they reflect much of the incoming sunlight. If there were enough of these clouds they would reflect enough sunlight back into space to slow down, or even stop, global warming.

An Ice machine gives off heat, far more heat than the effect of the ice melting has on the earth. So the net effect would cause more warming of the earth.

My friend, the great scholar Daal Mogaaah once said, "If you keep plucking the weed at the stem, it will keep growing and causing problems. Only when you take care of the root do you defeat the weed" An ice machine to slow global warming would have little effect as it would simply not get rid of the true causes of the heating effect. For example, how will ice relieve the greenhouse effect? or how will ice stop the Earths orbit from venturing slightly nearer to the sun? It will not. If we are to tackle potential problems with global warming, we must tackle the root of our effect on the environment and overall effect. However we must be mindful of the fact that this is a natural process that has been happening throughout our mighty planets history. We must find ways to lessen the blow rather than futilely try to stop that which was out of our hands from the beginning.

Namaste, Bal Rolaaah II, The Dalai Goat

If they're solar powered, why not just use the electricity that powers them and forget about making ice?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics always gets in the way of such ideas. It's the same reason you don't leave the refrigerator door open to cool the house.

That's a great idea. Hey, we could make snowcones too!

Watch these and find out there is no man-made Global Warming.

The Great Global Warming Swindle