We have that many gallons of crude. No problem. It would have the double benefit of being able to be lit on fire!
Are you sure there isn’t a terminology error here - kcal can sometimes mean the same as calorie, not 1000 of them.
because women never pass gas, and when they do they blame it on the dog.
No error – human body uses ~2000 Calories/day = ~2000 kcal/day
When shivering in the cold, this can go up past ~10000 kcal/day
So give me the energy consumption for total launches and size of the needed fresnel lenses in order to melt Antarctica in 100 years? got a feeling that would also exceed our industrial capacity by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Salt? Would that work better then nukes or a bunch of napalm or better yet some solar reflectors?
Well, extremely conservatively you’d at least one kg of salt per cubic meter. Given that there are about 10E16 cubic meters of ice, it would require at least 10E16 kg of salt. World salt production is about 10E11 kg/year. So this method would take a minimum of 100000 years.
Force 10 from Navarone. Robert Shaw, Edward Fox, Carl Weathers. Grossly inferior to the original Guns of Navarone with Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn.
nm
You don’t actually want to melt the ice in place. You want to get the glaciers to slide into the oceans where they’ll eventually melt. Use well-placed nukes to melt ice at their bases to lubricate flow. Do computer modeling to figure out the most efficient locations. Maybe pumping in sea water would help.
There is not that much oil in the Earth’s crust.
The energy requirements, or the current capability of the space launch industry? It would certainly exceed the ability of the latter, which struggles to put up a couple dozen large satellites a year worldwide. We’re probably talking on the close order of a few thousand launches of payloads with thin fresnel lenses embedded in an expanding clear BoPET film (each one expanding to an area of roughly 1 km[SUP]2[/SUP]) to increase the incident solar flux on the Antarctic by ~10%. But in terms of total energy it is negligible compared to the energy requirements to actually melt the bulk of ice; furthermore, once you have the array in place the additional flux is virtually cost-free, aside from maintenance costs. Alternatively, you could use metalized BoPET to act as a reflector, though there is a limited angle of incidence where this would be useful, so the increase in solar flux would likely be closer to an order of 1% (although this would be more effective in winter than lenses). To be practical, you’d want to set up a manufacturing facility in space to produce the lenses and associated devices (stationkeeping thrusters, control systems, et cetera) using materials mined from Near Earth Objects. It isn’t trivial, but it is a hell of a lot less energy intensive than attempting to melt ice by any conventional means.
The plans to use nuclear weapons to “lubricate” the ice sheets into falling into the oceans? Not feasible. Nuclear weapons deliver a lot of heat energy to a small area in a very short period of time. You would locally vaporize a lot of ice into steam, which is very inefficient (pouring energy into two latent heat transitions) while not transmitting much heat to the surrounding ice. The magnitude of energy required to melt the ice in Antarctica is just not comprehensible in normal terms.
Stranger
Well, granted 
The point, anyways, it that regardless it would not be a practical proposition.
You didn’t factor in the heat from water splitting into hydrogen/water and burning.
They could have Emmy Jo from the New Zoo Revue, dance around in her airplane skirt and go-go boots. That would generate a lot of heat 
You’re hoping there’s giant ants up there, aren’t you? 
Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burning it doesn’t produce any energy at all.
Thanks, I guess that’s the movie, but I remember almost nothing of it (even that Harrison Ford starred) except that one line! 
My comment, of course, wasn’t really about the movie, but that the remembered line exposes the ignorance of comments in this thread. As usual, septimus is ignored; ignorant comments continue, with one Doper even planning to get energy by electrolysing hydrogen out of water and then burning the hydrogen. :smack: :smack:
All you need to do is to relocate Congress to McMurdo Station. I figure a session or two should do the trick; less if there are some actual filibusters.
The quickest way is probably to get the Sun to go nova. The technical difficulties are left as an exercise for the student.
If there were an ounce of science in Down to a Sunless Sea then an all-out nuclear war could, with suitable timing, upset the Earth’s tilt and bring the Antarctic into temperate, even equatorial, regions. More doable, but slower, and with a big if.
And Harrison Ford!