The Movie “The Day After Tomorrow” deals with an overnight Ice Age due to Global Warming.
Heat->Evaporation->Precipitation=Rain and Snow
The Mpemba Effect is the counter-intuitive ability of hot water to freeze faster than cold water under the same conditions.
Suppose we had a REAL Ice Age underway…could warmer waters (during the Summer) freeze faster?
I think sometimes people read too much into the Mpemba Effect. It can be difficult to reproduce.
I also don’t think it really applies here, other than in the sense that climate is very complex, and can also be very counter-intuitive.
Warmer oceans can result in greater evaporation, which causes greater cloud cover, and this can lead to significantly more snow during colder months and lower temperatures overall.
You don’t even need to be in an ice age. We have had an unusually cold and snowy winter here in the mid-Atlantic region this year, and it may very well be due to oceanic warming.
NOAA posted this helpful picture to try to explain the concept to our President:
The Mpemba effect is far from proven. Every time someone finds a way to demonstrate it someone else shows that the conditions are inconsistent or that the experiment can’t be reproduced. None of these experiments approach anything like the real world conditions preceding an ice age.
First, actual global warming has currently reached about 2 degrees F, which doesn’t seem like much until you realize that it only took about 7 degrees F to get us out of the most recent glacial period. The normal swing which has been going on for literally millions of years is up 7 then down 7 then back up again, about every 100 thousand years or so. Generally, it takes about 80,000 years for the average global temp to slowly slowly slowly drop 7 degrees and then it takes about 20,000 years to go back up 7 degrees. The problem is that we’re at the top of the normal swing and should be about ready to start the long slow drop of 1 degree F every 10,000 years or so but instead we’re shooting ever upwards at the breakneck pace of 2 degrees F in less than a century, expecting about 5 more in the coming century.
One of the counterintuitive consequences of global warming is more moisture and more snow, in certain areas. It makes sense when you think about it. If a particular spot in Canada normally has winters around -15F with 8 feet of snow, a winter which averages -10F but has twice the moisture in the atmosphere would naturally get twice the snow. It’s actually warmer than usual but warmer only means less snow if you’re above 32F. Another counterintuitive consequence we are seeing already is the jet stream swinging further south than it usually does, which temporarily produces colder temps and more snow in places like Chicago, even though the year-round-average temp for Chicago might actually be up, but more importantly the GLOBAL average is certainly up.
Another counterintuitive possible consequence is the fact that northern Europe currently has a relatively mild climate compared to other places at similar latitudes (such as Siberia) and this exception might be revoked. Northern Europe is slightly warmed by the Gulf Stream which carries warm water up the Atlantic Ocean. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt quickly, the sudden influx of fresh water could disrupt the Gulf Stream and then northern Europe would get colder than it is now. But we’re talking a difference of 10 or 15 degrees F, not 40 or 80 like in the movies. And, again, the rest of the globe would still have higher than average temperatures.
As for the Mpemba effect, any one of those three mechanisms I listed above are much more likely candidates for why someone would look around and say “Wow that sure is a lot of snow and I feel cold.”
Couple of papers which reproduced the effect were published last year.
The paper you linked to was about a study using modeling. Was there a study that reproduced it physically?
Here’s a paper that calls it invalid. And provides this simple conclusion why it’s pointless to pursue this effect as it is described in the OP or anything close to that:
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Please don’t use that particular movie for evidence of anything other than the imaginations of Hollywood script writers. Even by Hollywood standards, it was ludicrously out in left field.
I have seen a suggestion that drastic climate change could have appeared “suddenly”. But generally, that meant in a matter of decades, not hours, and usually triggered by an unusual event like an excessively dusty volcanic eruption…
Hotter water takes longer to freeze, just like the laws of thermodynamics predict.
AFAICT “Mpemba” is Swahili for “gullible” .
If there was any lab anywhere that could falsify the basic theories of thermodynamics, called “Laws” because they are close to the basis of modern science, there would be Nobel prizes all around, Science books would have to be reprinted.
There is no Mpemba-effect. Unless you are trying to describe the effect that when presented with sufficiently vague bullshit people will accept anything.
There is no perpetual motion and there is no Mpemba-effect.