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End humanity, maybe not. Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.
Show me clear sources quantifying the pain vs the emissions.
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> They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing. What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
> What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? It’s not that it did not happen before, civilisations rose up and disappeared several times in the past. It’s just that it is happening now, largely driven by climate issues. What we are seeing now is regions becoming uninhabitable, crises sending waves of refugees, a dramatic shift towards nationalism in the West, which is…
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If enough climate systems collapse, lots of existing farms will no longer be viable. That means famine and migration, which means war, which means lots of death. I don't know anyone who thinks we'll see extinction (outside of possible "hothouse earth" scenarios, where we become a second Venus) but societal collapse is definitely on the table. Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the sci…
> Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science. Please show me sources that the current emissions would lead to "lots of death"? Show me any decent modelling of emissions vs annual death? This one shows a million more deaths annually if we have even more emissions in 100 years than now. Million more deaths is around 2% increase in death rate compared to the hypothetical without emis…
https://iiasa.ac.at/news/feb-2026/course-correction-needed-q...
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He's talking about the interconnection queue. You see the 100MW of solar they're wiring up, but not the hundreds of gigawatts in the queue.
I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs with solar and grid scale battery. You'd essentially be asking the grid to act as a backup and sink for spare generation. Avoiding a need for central generation capacity buildout.
You'd be wrong. Projects get evaluated FIFO, and each has to do a grid impact study. Data centers are buying other generation projects to get a better position in line. This is all the result of bad regulation.
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You can’t get a grid tie for those panels in most of the US right now. The process for connecting to the grid is done serially, and requires a large study for any new generation.
Sure you can. The datacentre builders just don't want the (fairly modest) extra expense to do so properly. Obviously some preparatory work is required before dumping a lot of extra capacity into the grid. My state allowed the power utilities to charge a modest fee ($10,000 to $100,000, depending on project size) before a yet-to-be-built data centre could demand a large amount of electricity. The amount of planned dat…
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> Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science. Please show me sources that the current emissions would lead to "lots of death"? Show me any decent modelling of emissions vs annual death? This one shows a million more deaths annually if we have even more emissions in 100 years than now. Million more deaths is around 2% increase in death rate compared to the hypothetical without emis…
... Do you understand feedback loops? Yes? Interconnected climate systems where one system hits a threshold and accelerates change in one direction which causes another system to hit a threshold faster causing a cascade of systems to fall over until all the thresholds have been reached? Why are you showing me a document about the economic impact of "current" carbon levels applied linearly as if this system grows pred…
In fact I can justify not just net zero, but net negative emissions and stalling of all progress of humanity itself by using your article.
It would have been another story if there were some graph between emissions vs probability of hitting an irreversible tipping point. At least this gives us a prescriptive analysis on how to deal with the tradeoffs.
Your article contains NONE of that. And I posit that it doesn't contain it because the real probabilities are much lower.
You can't make serious policies by handwaving tipping points. No country should immediately go net zero because of your article or even the studies your article cites.
I get that it feels good to be in a position to scold people into stopping progress. I'm willing to learn new perspectives - at least come up with a emissions vs probability quantified. Till then its just scolding and handwaving.
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Make all DCs provide their own power and suddenly they’d be large amounts of solar and battery in cheap scrubland A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b. Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.
I'm actually fine with only having access to the AI shaitan when the sun is shining over the datacenter.
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"Climate conspiracy"? Like you, mean, the conspiracy of climate scientists to publish facts to the best of their understanding? I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of co…
> But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for Show me academic consensus showing that more than 1% of our species will go extinct within 100 years if we continue the emissions as now? I assume that's a reasonable characterisation of "mass extinction" and "on track for".
I was referring more to everything else. Corals, certain insects, polar bears, salamanders and so on. With some quick googling it appears that the "Bramble Cay Melomys" is the first species so far to be declared extinct because of climate change, but the number that seems to be thrown around is that an average of 18% of terrestrial life will be critically endangered by 2100 in a scenario with 2 degrees warming. I can't be bothered with figuring out what degree of academic consensus there is around that number, but I think it's reasonable to assume that there's at least some kind of consensus about "more than 1%".
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I'm actually fine with only having access to the AI shaitan when the sun is shining over the datacenter.
That triples the cost of the data centre per unit of compute.
Man, we are cooked, literally
The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.