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Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

newscientist.com

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Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#151

Post by Cthulhu_ »

stavros wrote: post #8
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #5

We may lose stable seasons for growing crops, but at least the chat bot can embed an ad into your question while you wait for your burrito taxi. What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated? We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.

Stop focusing on energy usage and start focusing on energy generation. It doesn't matter how much energy we consume if it comes from renewables.

This is an issue though. Netherlands is / has invested heavily in e.g. offshore wind parks, but their capacity has been bought up by datacenters (= new energy consumers) immediately.

My point is that if demand only increases, then they won't be able to shut down carbon-emitting power plants. The first objective should be to replace non-renewables with renewables, and only then scale production up.

Granted, there will likely always be non-renewable power generators running to maintain a baseline / frequency / etc, at least until very-large-scale power storage is a thing.

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#152

Post by Cthulhu_ »

stavros wrote: post #20
mathgeek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter because of the side effects (pollution, etc.). The environment and how it affects humanity is a complex system with many variables. Both generation and consumption are in there.

We're talking about global warming specifically here, though. Cars and planes should be a much bigger worry than AI power usage.

While you're not wrong, it's also not an either / or. But yes, any concerns about AI resource usage should be fairly compared against others.

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#153

Post by Cthulhu_ »

api wrote: post #47
agilob wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good does PV generated energy make if all that energy is used to generate heat and evaporating water?

That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains. Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%. The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that ev…

This is the thing I don't get - lots of concerns about water shortages, but for some reason the price of water doesn't go up accordingly. In fact, large consumers of drinking water get a discount.

It should be the other way around: consumers and public interest things like hospitals should get preference and low prices for water, corporations should pay more and invest in their own water systems, like collecting rainwater, cleaning surface water (thinking of NL here), or desalinating seawater (and handling the waste responsibly instead of putting it back in the sea).

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#154

Post by jjav »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #5

We may lose stable seasons for growing crops, but at least the chat bot can embed an ad into your question while you wait for your burrito taxi. What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated? We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.

> and our elected government

The elected government is cashing in through corruption and insider trading at a pace never seen or even imagined before.

Everyone else, is in for a very bad time.

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#155

Post by Timon3 »

yongjik wrote: post #141
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But maybe perhaps the billionaires should be the ones driving the progress, as the power they wield is very much disproportionate?

What I'm saying is, people will still complain when the "ruling class" try to drive the progress because it does not conform to their worldview. Like, Canada once tried to implement carbon tax, which was even revenue-neutral. If you're a Canadian and you emitted less CO2 than others the government will literally give you money. It was widely unpopular and the plan was scrapped in 2025. A lot of people think "billiona…

Every time I've seen such taxes proposed or implemented, it seems to be followed by waves of misinformation washing through most media outlets. Even verifiable lies keep being repeated, and are slowly picked up by broad strokes of the population.

Is there a chance that something similar happened in Canada?

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#156

Post by chaostheory »

bdcravens wrote: post #60
chaostheory wrote: post #12

Population decline from collapsing birthrates should help.

Except many of the same champions of AI are also speaking out against population decline (Musk, Altman, Bezos, etc)

They can champion natalism all they want but when they’re against things like remote work, which helps with affordability and time for a personal life, they’re not helping declining birthrates

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#157

Post by temp8830 »

modzu wrote: post #110
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #5

We may lose stable seasons for growing crops, but at least the chat bot can embed an ad into your question while you wait for your burrito taxi. What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated? We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.

jesus will save us

But will he reload us?

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#158

Post by comicjk »

sometimelurker wrote: post #93

wheres those people working on fusion? are they making progress?

It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than expected) or like nuclear fission reactors (harder to build than expected).

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#159

Post by simgt »

dalyons wrote: post #86
qsera wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if all the vehicles that run of fossil fules is converted into EV. What are the incentives in place to properly recycle the batteries? Does a new battery technology go into production before the technology to recycle it is production grade/economically viable? What happens when we are getting like a million EV batteries, globally per day, to dispose off? What happens when these batteries use vastly different…

“Caution” does nothing except ensure we keep spewing more co2 for longer and cooking the planet. There is no practical alternative to EVs. So let’s go all in as fast as possible please

It depends on what you mean by EVs really. There is an alternative to big electric individual cars, we've been building for 70 years car-centric urban areas for big vehicles doing 30km+ of commute every day. Good luck with a hellscape like Dallas but electrifying Utrech or Tokyo will scale to 9B people just fine.

Re: Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

#160

Post by dalyons »

simgt wrote: post #159
dalyons wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Caution” does nothing except ensure we keep spewing more co2 for longer and cooking the planet. There is no practical alternative to EVs. So let’s go all in as fast as possible please

It depends on what you mean by EVs really. There is an alternative to big electric individual cars, we've been building for 70 years car-centric urban areas for big vehicles doing 30km+ of commute every day. Good luck with a hellscape like Dallas but electrifying Utrech or Tokyo will scale to 9B people just fine.

The alternative is rebuilding 100 years of urban areas? For unimaginable trillions of $, and monumental construction emissions? Nah I’ll take EVs please
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