Your Opinion: Ice cube effect on climate change

Dear Editor:

This is in response to recent letters on climate change, global warming. All of them neglect to factor in, or even mention, what I call the Ice Cube Effect.

It has been determined that we are losing our ice. I think it was in 1992 that a scientific party measured ice thickness and area north of the Bering Strait. They reported loss of surface equal to the area of France and thickness reduced. Glaciers are melting; we are losing ice in the Antarctic, Greenland, the Arctic and other areas.

To better understand the effect of this loss, we need to understand some science. A calorie is the amount of heat that will raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree celsius. It takes 37 calories to melt one gram of ice.

This means that every gram of our huge store of ice that melts is absorbing 37 calories from the atmosphere. For a cubic mile of ice, that's a huge amount of heat. Can anyone really claim to have made a scientific study of global warming if this is ignored?

We have all either experienced, or at least observed, the fate of an ice cube in a glass of root beer or other beverage. As long as there is visible size of the ice cube the drink remains cool. After the cube is melted the drink will rapidly approach room temperature.

The melting of our big ice cubes are keeping world temperatures in a viable range. The question: How long will it be before the ice store will be too low to prevent the extinction of the human race and many other species?

Will our leaders wake up in time; will you wake up in time to build a fire under the leaders? The many wars have added tons of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. Even though we avoided the MAD of nuclear war, we may still have the same result.