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A new cooling technology freezes food without warming the climate
(www.anthropocenemagazine.org)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Technology
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That's thermodynamically impossible but ok.
When you cool something you take heat energy out of it you have to do something with that heat energy you can't just delete it.
You don’t overcome thermodynamics, but you can work around them. For example:
Or you can shunt it into space so that it doesn’t heat the atmosphere on its way out. That’s called radiative cooling and it’s brilliant.
And it can be done at home with household items. See Nighthawk’s YT channel for more info: https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY
And that’s just one out of many possible approaches. Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_surfaces_(climate_engineering)
That's reflection of external heat not removal of internal heat. Refrigeration requires effort and therefore energy.
I was talking about cooling and a practical example of “working around the rules”.
As for refrigeration in particular: any similar mechanism can do this too. Example: if you can figure out a material that emits IR in the ballpark for that specific range of wavelengths, you can use it as an active shunt.
Also read somewhere before (not sure when or where tbh, but it might’ve been an old school 2000s forum discussion or something) about a way to possibly achieve it via phase change cooling at a molecular scale iirc. It wasn’t viable at the time and we made light of it, but with the material science advancements of today? Who knows. Maybe someone figured it out.
My guess is that it only moves the heat and doesnt generate more on top of that but havent read the article
Seriously this! I feel like that cobra chicken meme where I'm yelling
"where does the entropy go?"
"WHERE DOES THE ENTROPY GO‽"
Entropy isn't about conservation of energy
You can down vote me all you want, it doesn't change the facts.
Heat is literally entropy.