this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
121 points (96.2% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5394 readers
213 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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And some diamond thermal paste
Wouldn’t that basically just be graphite?
No! good question though, but it misses a detail of their molecular geometry/energy structure.
They're both allotropes (different forms) of carbon but the way they are arranged atomically is different. Like soot is basically just random balls of carbon (??? bonds), graphite is rings bonded in a plane (3 bonds, a single layer of which is called graphene), and diamond is a network that extends in 3 dimensions with each atom bonded to 4 carbon atoms.
When you grind them up you are more making smaller and smaller shards of the base material than changing it's energetic structure, although at the edges it is changing. If you grind pathologically I suppose you would eventually reduce it all to soot.
The physical properties of stuff is in part altered by the surface configuration when we get extremely small, but in general we just consider the bulk as even tensie tiny fragments of stuff are thousands (tens, hundreds of depending on geometry) of atoms, of which only a handful have different bonds at the edge.
I love learning. Thanks for sharing!