Bad news everyone! We have a problem. Since the industrial revolution, we’ve been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, in turn warming our planet at a rate we’ve never experienced before. I guess we could drop a giant ice cube in the ocean every now and then like the classic Futurama scheme, but not even that will save us. It will help us put the problem into perspective however.

In my latest Because Science, I’m calculating the actual dimensions a giant ice cube would need to account for all the excess heat our planet is taking in — our energy imbalance. Earth naturally warms and cools, but when the atmosphere is laden with molecules that prevent heat from the sun from escaping back into space, that cycle becomes artificially loaded towards heating. Think of it like your car on a sunny day, but you double the thickness of all your windows. Just look at what happened to Venus.

Assuming that all the excess heat produced by global warming can perfectly flow into a giant ice cube and go towards melting it, the size of the cube is staggering. Not even the Planet Express ship would be able to deliver it. It’s so big that maybe global warming will seem like a bit more of a problem than you thought before.

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