Weather modification has been a well understood, but not particularly effective program that has been run in various places across the US for decades. The main difference with chemtrails is that those are a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories that assume that the government is trying to do widespread mind control. Weather modification is just trying to get it rain to rain a tiny bit more, with limited success.
All this time the chemtrail people I know have been talking about weather control, I hadn't heard of mind control being part of it.
My take has been yeah I know cloud seeding and solar geoenhineering is real, ergo some amount of chemtrails are "real" in that they are deliberate particulate being sprayed and not just water. While the thing the chemtrail people claim that seems dubious is the scale and other nuances - claiming that all contrails are chemtrails. It's the scale that we don't know and that I assume it's pretty small because it seems expensive and pointless to do it constantly. But I don't know how I could ascertain the scale at which it's done either.
The chemtrail conspiracies have always been a catch all for any idea except "it's a contrail or non-hidden spraying of some sort". To quote the 20 year old snapshot of the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chemtrail_conspir...:
> The term "chemtrail" should not be confused with other forms of aerial dumping (e.g. crop dusting, cloud seeding, aerial firefighting, although the principle is much the same. It specifically refers to covert, systematic, high-altitude dumping of unknown substances generally for some illicit purpose, be it that of Governments, terrorists, private corporations, or all of the above.
> Among the theories proposed for the purpose of the alleged "chemtrails": atmospheric and weather modification, biological warfare, mind control, occult purposes, or other functions associated with a New World Order.
So sprayed metal particles from airplanes for weather modification are only "chemtrails" if it's done covertly.
Language sure is interesting.
I guess there's also a spectrum of what covert means. If a government does this but only announces it in places where only a few people hear about it from the official source, I guess that still counts as public and so not chemtrails.
> Any idea except "it's a contrail or non-hidden spraying of some sort"
Meaning the chemtrail conspiracy is "contrails are actually cover ups for chemical spraying that isn't otherwise known", not just "if chemical spraying is covert, then people made a language rule saying it should be referred to as a chemtrail instead".
I.e. chemtrails refers specifically to the conspiracy about a contrail based cover up for covert chemical spraying by world powers, not just a term for a claim that someone somewhere has sprayed chemicals covertly.
My previous job was at an insurance company in part of the country that is not disaster prone. Even then, once in a decade hailstorms would essentially wipe out reserves and necessitate reinsurance. It would take probably 5 years to recover from the effects. You always had your fingers crossed during hail season that you'd finish the year in a position to get some bonuses. And this was a mutual insurance company, so no quarterly shareholder pressure, just long-term sustainability goals. That company would never dare expand into Florida.
Following on to this, enough sunlight hits the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. So geothermal wouldn’t need to provide all of today’s human energy consumption, just that last bit that renewables, existing nuclear, transmission, storage, and demand response can’t provide for today.
(1GW of solar PV is deployed every 15 hours globally as of this comment)
I wonder how much ΔT you need at the crust to meaningfully change Earth's magnetic field by altering convection patterns in the outer core. I don't know enough physics to attempt an answer.
The outer core is 2,890 KM (~ 1800 miles) below the earths crust, and has the mantle in the way. The crust itself is only 30KM thick. [https://phys.org/news/2017-02-journey-center-earth.html] The crust is basically a thin layer of slag on top of a giant ball of molten everything.
Even at million+ year timescales, I can’t see any way the temperature of the upper crust could matter to the core at all - even if the crust was at absolute zero.
Dirt insulates relatively well, and the amount of thermal mass present is mindboggling.
> would be a rounding error above absolute zero anyway
Kind of joking: unless there are nonlinear effects near 300K? Fig 4 [1] seems to suggest that the thermal diffusivity of the mantle grows very fast as temperature declines past 300K... but the data stop at 200K.
Reason for initial comment: we could probably set up a spherical heat equation to guess how crust cooling would change heat conduction at the outer core. But I have absolutely no idea how to reason about changes in heat conduction affecting the convection dynamics that generate the field. I was silently hoping for one of the domain experts lurking this forum to see it and share wisdom. (But overall it was a silly question, I know).
Calculating or simulating how earths magnetic field behaves or is generated is quite a complex task. So im doubtful we can usefully estimate it to such precision. It would be interesting though.
We know that if the convection in the outer core stops, the Earth's magnetic field stops, and removing enough heat from the core will stop the convection.
I've seen a confident estimate in the form of a calculation. They know what kind of compounds (term?) are in the outer core and they know the minimum temperature those compounds need to be at to be free-flowing enough to sustain the field. And I'm pretty sure we know the current temperature of the outer core.
My memory is that the calculation found that if humanity switched to geothermal for all its energy needs, then in only about 1000 years, the core cools enough for the magnetic field to stop, but I am not sure.
(We should definitely deploy geothermal in the Yellowstone caldera though long enough to cool it down enough so that it will not erupt again.)
That is definitely not true hahaha. The outer core is several thousand km down, and the crust is only 30km thick. And we have the entire mantle below us.
Humanity could max out geothermal for a million years and never make a dent.
Whoa, this is a bit scary. As mentioned earlier, it should basically be used in a way where other energy sources are tapped first, and only the shortfall is covered.
My conclusion: Geothermal makes research into plate tectonics and earthquake mitigation considerably more valuable, so we can figure out how to do it in a way that reduces earthquakes rather than creating them.
I have been following this company and several others (Quaise, Fervo, Sage) in the EGS Space for a little bit now, and I think we are on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in baseload renewable energy. This site in Utah is one of the largest test cases that expands the use of EGS to a much broader area than just a few geothermal hot spots. Prices are dropping dramatically, and these things are moving quickly beyond the R&D phase. There is a world where every major data center across the Western US has its own base load power supply that has essentially no pollution, no footprint, no hazardous waste, and no need for complicated permitting. EGS truly could be a game changer in the world's push to decarbonize. I'm super excited.
At least in Tuscany - where there is a cluster of geothermal power plants creating 1/3 of the region electricity (it should reach 40% in a few years) - they had to invent special filters to lower the emission of mercury and hydrogen sulfide https://www.enelgreenpower.com/stories/articles/2024/10/geot...
I don't know if it's "no footprint" at all. For what I know, which is not much, but just what a person living here might know, there's a footprint that can be somehow managed. But I'm not an engineer
As a layman, I assume waste heat would still be an issue? Even so I would also assume it's still way less damaging to the environment than everything else.
I'm not quite sure about that. The earths core should generate the same amount of heat (through gravitational friction and radioactive decay) regardless if we tap it or not. If the heat didn't escape somehow already it would slowly get hotter.
Whaste heat from nuclear or fusion does contribute to earth heating, though insignificant compared to any source pf c02.
But my intuition tells me geothermal wouldn't...
Mm. Actually, water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas; and that's how to covert heat to energy. So mabie it would indeed be significant.
TFA states the Cape Station plant (created and operated by a company called Fervo) are closed systems - they capture the emissions so no water is wasted or spewed into the environment as steam.
They deserve big props for this innovation and effort, as historically Utah has frequently been been treated as an industrial dumping grounds. The long-term ecological damage and visual eyesores due to strip mining, chemical dumping and other pollution is significant.
Waste heat is always "an issue", but rarely an issue worth caring much about.
Global warming isn't happening due to industrial waste heat - it's happening due to CO2 emissions being a massive leverage for messing with how the planet absorbs and emits heat.
Complicated permitting as compared to what? I would assume it's much more complicated than solar, and less complicated than... is there anything else available at small scale?
Nuclear is the comparable power source -- both have high upfront costs, long build times, low operating costs and clean generation. If deep geothermal can come in cheaper than nuclear, there's basically no reason to do nuclear.
Not really an issue in the US at least. Their primary geothermal basins already have earthquakes far stronger than any that might be triggered by fluid injection. They also have earthquake swarms due to natural circulation of geothermal fluids in some of these areas.
It is mostly an issue in places like Europe that do not have a history of strong earthquakes and therefore lack seismic resistance civil engineering. There are a few places like that in the US (e.g. New England) where a minor M5 earthquake can cause damage but those don't overlap with areas with high geothermal potential.
For sure! I’ve been following this tech for decades. The advantage of high-quality geothermal basins is maximizing the ROI and efficiency of the first installations, which places the product in the best possible light for marketing purposes. It also provides a comparison against more conventional geothermal power generation which is deployed in the same environment.
I understand the problem to be energy RoI. The larger the size of a wind turbine’s blade, the more energy it produces compared to the cost of producing it. Small wind systems just can’t avail themselves of these economies of scale.
I absolutely understand the sentiment and the goals that citizens should, by default, not be tracked. However, how do you square that with the proof, time and again, that truly secure and encrypted networks are primarily use by criminals (drug/human traffickers, and plenty of other people) who, through their trade, make the world a shittier place for the rest of us?
If we accept that the right to privacy is real, that not being followed, watched, and monitored every hour of my life, is something democratic societies should strive for:
This has changed before. HTTP used to be just fine. Only your bank used HTTPS. Now everyone uses HTTPS. It's the default, if you don't support it on your webserver, customers will have troubles reaching it.
Your reasoning is so biased that it is hard for me to wrap my head around it, but at the same time it's very common because it confuses the tool with the crime. Criminals use cars and phones, too, but we don't ban them for everyone.
The argument ignores the catastrophic cost of the solution: destroying privacy for all of us. Creating a backdoor for police doesn't just hinder criminals; it makes everyone's data, from journalists to your medical records, vulnerable to hackers and abuse.
I believe we stop crime with good policing, not by building a system of total surveillance that sacrifices the very freedom we're trying to protect.
But this has been "squared" already. Can the police enter your home without a warrant? No? Why? I bet criminals are pretty secretive around their stuff too, no?
I'm unconvinced that secure communications is the bottle neck when it comes to criminal prosecution. We can expand police power without sacrificing our communications like that.
Anecdotally, take a look at China where privacy doesn't exist and yet Chinese syndicates are responsible for a major chunk of the issues you've listed. So clearly lack of privacy doesn't even correlate with decreased criminal behavior.
Which happens due to totalitarian control of CCP which prohibits self correction mechanisms we have in democratic societies, so what's the Goldilocks area of authoritarianism here? My bet is that compromising all secure communications is all the way in the big bears bed, if we're sticking to the Goldilocks analogy. It's just a fundamental dead-end without fantasy scenarios like benevolent dictatorship which we all know doesn't exist in the real world.
If you have two networks, one encrypted and one not, and the unencrypted network is significantly easier / cheaper to use or has better network effects, that's where most people will naturally flock. The only ones who will put in the effort to use the encrypted one are criminals and a few principled technologists / civil libertarians. In such a world, the mere fact of using the encrypted network is suspicious in itself.
We define "criminals" here as "anybody the government doesn't like." In the US, this is mostly child predators, drug traffickers, thieves, and maybe a few (legal) sex workers. In other places, this is mostly homosexuals, human-rights activists, journalists and the opposition.
The way to fix the "witch hunt" problem is to make all networks encrypted and secure.
While cryptocurrency is mostly used by criminals, as the traditional financial system is just good enough for most people, TLS is used by everybody, as it is just the default way to do things on the internet nowadays. This is despite the fact that TLS makes wiretapping criminals' communications much harder.
The US and Europe[1] should use the influence they have over standards bodies to make prosecuting the latter group of "criminals" much harder, recognizing that this comes at the expense of also letting some criminals in the EU/US sense of the word run free. It is just the morally right thing to do.
[1] I mostly mean American and European companies and organizations which participate in the process of standard setting, not governments, which mostly cannot do things for complicated political reasons.
However, with the current "regime change", the targets of tracking are expanding exponentially to basically anyone who says or does anything the current leadership does not like.
This has been warned about repeatedly with this type of tracking for decades - when "bad actors" take power and abuse that power, then everyone becomes a target. Fascists love data collection, aggregation and data-based decision-making.
Better remove the locks on your house and bathroom and set up a public webcam while you're at it. After all, I'm not sure you're not a criminal, and to be sure of that I — and the rest of society — need to be able to observe you in your bathroom.
"innocent until proven guilty" exists for a reason.
It’s quite easy to square: your argument is nonsense through and through, barely deserving an iota of rebuttal. I could justify absolutely appalling invasions of privacy with what you’re saying.
We are not beholden to ruining everything for almost everyone to stop a small fee from doing bad things. It’s not any more complicated than that.
>By your logic me and the majority of people using Signal are criminals
False. "The majority of X are Y" does not imply that any particular X is Y.
I don't have data for Signal. I use it extensively. Even setting aside that the American legal system makes everyone a criminal several times a day so that the laws can be selectively enforced against anyone who becomes a target, I have no data on whether the majority of Signal users are criminals, but given that criminals have significantly higher interest in secure communications than the general population it wouldn't shock me if evidence came out that it was the case.
maybe we need a law against selective enforcement of laws. together with the comprehensive statistics collection agency that would be required to enforce it.
There are plenty of places outside of Louisiana with public stakeholder processes in place before some shenanigans like this happen. There may be some mild form of "corruption" however you define it, but my experience is that wealthy blue state politics is a little less shitty.
