this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
87 points (98.9% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5909 readers
860 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

"This road is long, and much of the map remains blank. The biggest problem is drilling miles through hot rock, safely. If scientists can do that, however, next-generation geothermal power could supply clean energy for eons."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

You're right, i was being rude as well. Apologies for the rudeness.

If they can be cheaper, this may have an impact, but they dont seem to have any numbers to back up their cheapness claims? They seem to be spruiking their speed instead, but thats only one part of the cost.

And their drill tip, while fast, is a relatively uncommon piece of kit, and requires significant amount of power to run (1MW to hit 70m/s), so its probably not going to be usable in less developed areas, and scaling their processes will be interesting.

I'll look forward to them publishing their costs when they complete their fullsize trials.

[โ€“] glimse 2 points 9 hours ago

They only have to be cheaper for deep drilling which is what's currently prohibitively expensive - traditional drilling is still used for half the job.

It's very, very new technology but they have to start somewhere. The rest of geothermal (running the power plant itself) is figured out but a drilling deeper brings significantly more power