Answers by visitors named: Robert RACookPE1978

Thank you for the quick answer! So, absorbed energy (over the 12 hours of daylight) is (1-albedo)*(available energy at the surface) ... that is, what radiation is not reflected from the surface is absorbed into the ice .. That's clear. "The absorption of infrared energy from the sky has not been accounted for. It varies with could cover." Wouldn't the 50 watts/sq meter diffuse radiation be that infrared radiation coming back from the clouds you mentioned? The Stefan-Boltzman equation sigma*emissivity*(temperature)^4 does assume the ice is radiating into clear (black) space, right? Or should I make some assumption about temperature of the cloudy skies we are radiating up towards? On-line on other sites, I keep finding various mixes of the S-B equation: some with no second temperature^4 value at all (as you used it above), some with a second temperature^4 value subtracted (apparently for the "sky" temperature) but no emissivity value, and still others with a third term (1-emmissivity). But the reason for the various differences in the same fundamental S-B equation are not given. I know in the real world we are not dealing with a perfect "black body surrounded by a perfect vacuum" but isn't that difference between an gray body and a black body exactly what the emissivity factor is intended to specifically correct for?

By the way, I got 82.1 x 10^6 watts for the absorbed energy (50 watts/m^2 over 12 hours) into the ice, and 194.6 x 10^6 watts for the radiated energy (lost to space) over 24 hours. Net? In September, at the time of minimum sea ice extents, under these conditions, the ice cools off every day.

Reduce taxes and the workers (people who actually produce goods and services) increase useful, productive economic activity ... and the economy grows larger. The people (in government who don't produce valuable or useful goods and services but who take from the producers) receive more money because they are taxing a larger economy. Increase taxes, and the producers (who then refuse to "work for the government" which takes ever larger amounts of their labor but returns little or nothing) produce less, the economy shrinks, and the tax taken by the government goes down. Lower taxes have increased economic activity and led to greater tax receipts in every country every time taxes have been reduced: The US (1920 - 22, 1946-48, 1982, 2002; The UK, the USSR under Khrushchev in the 50's, under Stalin in the late 30's, etc.