
My grandfather had a fridge, less modern than the one depicted above (an Electro Lux from around 1928)... Grand dad's was a Frigidaire... The machine never gave up. Bought around 1923 — grand dad was a průkopník in regard to new stuff — it only had days-off when it caked up. It was still going strong, never repaired nor re-gased, when grandpa died 40 years later. Defrosting a fridge then was a major 24 hour operation but one has to know that as the fridge caked-up with ice, the inside of the fridge was less cold... This was a contradiction, the same conundrum that is happening in Antarctica...
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(Gus note: this was posted 2 Apr 2013. Warming and melting of Antarctica has accelerated since). As global warming increases, the sea-ice extent increases around Antarctica... Strangely, the more ice, the less cold... I have mentioned this before... New study have confirmed this contradiction, which can last till global warming increases further, and the extra ice melts as well...
I have known about this contradiction since my defrosting battles with granddad's fridge and other contraption such as my kero-fridges in Africa in the 1960s...
Before the invention of the self-defrosting fridges, twice a year, even up to four times a year, one had to go with ice picks, or turn the fridges off and wait for the thick ice that had caked on the freezing unit to fall off and flood the kitchen, because the tray below the freezing unit was getting full of melting ice and water that one could not remove fast enough. So we were well prepared with old blankets and towels on the floor to mop up the mess... Once the ice had been removed, the fridge would make ice and cold as if the fridge was brand new...
Then there was the invention of the cycle auto-defrost fridges that automatically defrost the ice around the freezing unit every hour or on special cycles... This was eventually superseded by the dry-cycle "frost-free" that are used in most fridges today... while cold dry air is pumped in, the dry air accentuate sublimation when ice is transformed into water vapour that may eventually end up sogging up your freezer frozen-peas compartment — who knows where the water goes now....
In the old fashioned fridges, while the freezer unit was caked up with ice and the engine overworking, the food would perish from lack of cold inside... This is part one... In part two, the ice melts, sending water splashing everywhere. In part three, unless one switches the engine of the fridge back on, the fridge becomes no more than a smelly mouldy box... In simple terms, global warming is like an old non-self-defrost fridge that is intermittently turned on and off, until the engine burns off... Of course, global warming is far more complex than this, but quite predictable.
As Dave Lister would quote Shakespeare on Red Dwarf, "we're in a real pickle." ... In fact Thomas Tusser may have been the first to use the word in his Five Hundred points of Good Husbandry: “Reap barley with sickle, that lies in ill pickle.”
At present there are quite a lot of confusing data in regard to global warming, from the arctic with record melt in September last year, to the present freezing European winter and Antarctica icing of the sea... There is a myth in Europe that roughly translates in English as "Warm Christmas, Easter Alas!..." But this does not explain fully the coldest days on record in some region of Europe, including England, while some Russian cities have near record warm in the same winter... In Australia we just had a record HOT summer... When all tallied, the picture of an alarming global warming acceleration is on the radar...
For example, most global warming computer models predict cooling off in England.
Back to Antarctica, the study is clear: as the deeper oceans warm up, more sea ice forms.
Changes in sea ice significantly modulate climate change because of its high reflective and strong insulating nature. In contrast to Arctic sea ice, sea ice surrounding Antarctica has expanded
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