Global warming refrigerator question?

No. That would ADD TO THE WARMING. A refrigerator does not "make cold". It moves heat from one place (inside) to another place (outside). If you leave the door open the heat that was moved outside just gets back inside and has to be removed again. And the energy needed to move the heat around (the motor you hear running in the refrigerator) makes heat as well as using electricity that is (usually) generated by power plants that emit CO2.

I'm glad you are looking for an answer but this idea would add to global warming.

Fridges use electricity to pump coolant through a system so that heat is extracted from the inside of the fridge and released to the outside air. The cooling inside is balanced by the warming outside but the electricity used is generally generated in ways that add to global warming.

Leave the door open and the fridge will work harder and consume more electricity so adding to global warming.

The real answer is to reduce waste and to generate electricity in ways that do not involve the burning of fossil fuels. We need to subsidise wind, wave, tidal, hydro, geothermal and solar sources of energy and tax fossil fuels more heavily.

Hi David,

A fridge works by removing heat energy from the air inside the fridge and then expelling this heat into the room. As such, all that a fridge does is to move heat from one place to another.

But the fridge requires an electric motor and this gives off heat. Odd as it may seem, if you had a sealed room with an open fridge inside it, the room would warm up.

The main problem that fridges have when it comes to global warming concerns greenhouse gases. The electricity needed to power the fridge produces a lot of carbon dioxide when it’s generated and this leads to global warming. Also, many fridges, and particularly older models, use a very powerful greenhouse gas as the coolant, this being dichlorodifluoromethane; one drop of this causes as much warming as 8,500 drops of carbon dioxide.

Another thing to consider is the scale of the problem. Even though there are seven billion of us on the planet we’re pretty insignificant compared to natural forces. Every year the Sun delivers some 174 petawatts of heat energy to Earth, a lot of this goes back into space but some stays in the atmosphere or is absorbed into the oceans.

The total amount of energy we produce is tiny in comparison, so even if we diverted all our electricity into powering devices that sucked heat from the atmosphere, it wouldn’t make much difference. To give you some idea, the total excess amount of heat being retained by the Earth each year is about 200 zettajoules (a 2 followed by 23 noughts) this compares to the total global power generation each year of about 500 petajoules (a 5 with 17 noughts after it). In other words, planet Earth is absorbing very roughly a million times more excess heat energy than all the electricity we generate in the world.

It would neither change anything on a global scale, any more than you going down to the beach and peeing in the ocean will raise the sea level significantly. (Sorry for the crudeness but it is clearly an easy concept.)

The net effect would be a slight heating due to the efficiency of the refrigerator. If the refrigerator's conversion efficiency was to be 100% then there would be no gain or loss.

No, it would increase CO2 emissions. A refrigerator uses energy to produce the cold, and emits heat in the back.

NO. Global Warming ended in 2012. Weather today is like it was before Global Warming in the 1970's. Mike

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No the fridge was use significantly more power which would like more than offset the cooling. Pluss being winter time in many places would take more energy to heat the house

Units are designed too heat or cool within a desired envelope. That means parameters are defined within a finite boundary. Not a global scale. So the answer is no.

Hi David, my wife has tried that, it didn't make a scrap of difference. It should have the same effect as a 70 watt light bulb but did not notice it.