We SO need a change in leadership.

I think what we need is a great big black out, not a rolling black out, but a nice long sustained black out during the Peak Demand period of a heat wave on the right and left coast!

Not an Enron, nothing over money, but over principles! We can’t divert our energy because they don’t want wind, hydro, coal, or any thing else that is going to foul up their way of life. (I get rippled during this period of time and have to pay a premium for Electricity – We call it off peak) Kind of like this Peak Oil thing!

When I lived in TX in the early 80’s they had record heat down south and people were dropping like flies do to heat stroke. Is that what it’s going to take before we have a meeting of the minds?

 

OK, now I see what you're saying about "sinking". I presumed you meant sinking into the mantle, not being covered by water. Actually, during the Cretaceous Period sea levels quite high cause of the high rate of seafloor spreading going on. The oceanic crust was less dense because it was warmer. Thus, ocean basins were somewhat shallower than they are now. Coupled with the complete lack of polar ice, there was considerably less land area than there is now. Anyways, thanks for the link, it was an interesting read. Seriously mate, don't be so defensive when people ask you for a citation, that's a good thing. It means they're reading what you have to say critically (and paying attention ) .

The atmosphere is not really helping to retard heat loss (it is, but the hundreds of kilometres of crust does a much better job). The thermal conductivity of rock is VERY low and converction cells in air and water are much more efficient at wisking away heat than the conduction of heat through rock near the Earth's surface.

While many of us here share your concern for the environmental impact of energy production (and pretty much everything else we humans tend to do), I think that developing geothermal resources ranks pretty far down the list. More of a risk than heat loss would be the potential for lubricating faults (the Army actually did that in Denver in the 1970's when they were injecting "stuff" down into the ground).

 

Or what you're paying down at the bank.

 

I knew how to spell it,,,,I was just seeing if the spelling police were awake!

lol

Icarus

 

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the radioactive decay of Uranium, Thorium, et al. No spacemen needed.

Of course it would... but I'll wager you couldn't even measure it.

It is. And we're about 480Kyr overdue for a flip, IRC. That has really nothing to do with current geothermal production, however.

You've also got to remember that Geothermal power has to compete with other sources of power. It was some benefits, but like other renewables, location is everything. Iceland, New Zealand, CA, and a few other places can utilize it economically, but in the main that's not true elsewhere. It's one piece of the puzzle. The greatest advantage of it is it's ability to provide baseload power, something that a lot of the other renewables can't do economically on a large scale.

 

They were disposing of some kind of waste, probably pretty nasty. I don't know what. Anyways, it was triggering small but quite measurable earthquakes. They decided that that was bad and stopped injecting the stuff.

 

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Right. So the Earth's core is theorized to be liquid iron that convects. We know this for 2 reasons. First, S-waves (which are a shear wave) don't travel through the outer core. Liquids have a shear strength of 0 and thus shear waves have a velocity of 0 in liquid. Secondly, we have the magnetosphere, which implies that the outer core is made of iron and in motion (which creates a magnetic field). We also know that the poles flip on a fairly regular basis. We know this mostly because of data from the sea floors. When magma reaches the surface at the seafloor it cools. The minerals in the magma are rich in iron and the cystals will align themselves in the magnetic field while the magma is still liquid. Once the melt solidifies you have a fossilized snapshot of the magnetic field. So we have lots of data on this. More interesting is the fact that clay pots can work the same way. We can also infer the intensity of the field based on how well the grains are aligned. So we know that over the past several thousand years the field has been weakening.

Now, the bloody thing just doesn't stop and switch. I think that you're correct to think that that doesn't make physical sense. Computer simulations suggest that there is a transitional period where weirdness can ensue. You can end up with multiple, weak poles. The magnetosphere will be very weak during these sort of events. The northern lights will probably be phenomenal. Eventually, a new, stable convection regime will develop and the poles will have flipped. Seems to happen every couple hundred thousand years on average. It's been something like 680Kyr this time around, so we're rather due for one.

 

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Well, there's 30 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. I can't find one shred of written information about this hole or the U.S. satellite that ventured in there and got fried. As far as all your other claims, I think I'm just going to have to ignore them... It's normally such a pleasure (and an education) to read PC because of the high standards respected w.r.t. providing citations. But the more you send me on a wild goose chase, the more I think your claims are just a waste of my time.