When that ice melts, huge expanses of darker, open ocean water absorb the heat instead, warming things up.
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Melting sea ice is unable to reflect the sun, and the revealed oceans absorb more heat, increasing temperatures.
When the vast ice sheets and glaciers melt, they lose their reflective power, and instead, oceans and land absorb the heat, causing the Arctic waters and the atmosphere to warm faster.
CNN: Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says
Where the ice vanishes entirely, the surface loses its usual highly reflective whiteness - which sends most solar radiation back into space - and is replaced by darker waters instead which absorb more heat.
Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas and will absorb yet more heat.
Any loose dust picked up along the way will absorb still more heat, creating a feedback loop that can send storms surging across the face of the planet.
Blackening copper allows it to absorb more light and heat, increasing the range of uses for the metal.
Like a wet blanket swollen with water, the climate can only absorb so much excess heat before global temperatures begin to rise.
The states are thrilled to let the IRS absorb the public relations heat for overreaching tax enforcement while collecting their share of the loot.
Placing the reactors underground would make them less vulnerable to the shaking from earthquakes, and the surrounding earth would absorb much of the heat released if an accident occurred, Genoa said.
Water, however, can absorb 4, 000 times as much heat as air, for a given rise in temperature.
They absorb the light and convert light to heat with incredible efficiency.
The collector also promises to do more with sunlight once it's trapped: since the microchannels should absorb more than half of the waste heat, their hot water byproduct can either be filtered into drinkable water or converted into air conditioning.
Then there is one of the oldest ways of getting power out from the sun: solar "thermal" installations, which absorb the sun's energy, transforming it into heat so it can boil water and run a turbine.
While ice reflects around 80 percent of the sun's heat, having a cooling effect, blue sea water can absorb up to 95 percent of solar radiation, warming up the sea and accelerating the melting process further.
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