Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

I think GLM's problem is a lack of vision input.

Western Europe mostly, for 6 days a year and that's the part of the world that most certainly has the means to install it whenever it decides so.

It's hardly an existential threat to civilization or locally to societies it affects. It's a symptom of things going sough, sure.

> Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.

This doesn't count innovation due to technology. For instance, a lot of data centres in the past like 1990's, indirectly contributed in a lot of ways in reducing poverty and deaths - improving supply chain logistics, increasing general efficiency, helping in biological and pharma science. Stopping industrialisation disallows any progress in such fields. In the last 200 years we have made progress in science and tech allowing us to fight back with the environment.

> The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000.

That doesn't count income rising, acknowledging you specified inflation adjusted.

You can verify this yourself: try to ask whether the average person today can buy more food with their income or less food. The answer is unambiguously more food because Americans have much more disposable income through social programs, better wages and so on.

> We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse.

Source? Please show any source that tells us something like: this much emissions causes this much death in the future with relative confidence. And the tipping point must map to some meaningful tipping point where death rate increases by a big amount.

The only few sources I can see tell me that even if we don't reduce emissions, even if we stall scientific progress we still increase the annual death rate by 2%. This puts us still much much better in the future than now because of poorer countries catching up. So even in this bad case scenario, we are still better off in the future than today.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bf26af29f187c6f3a9f...

Building the nuclear power plants should solve the problem in about 50 years...

> 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 terribly ill-equipped to solve global problem and is leading to a progressive crumbling of the international rules-based order. The US gave up on any pretense of sanity and went on a shooting match with Iran, throwing a wrench in the economies of a whole bunch of countries in Asia. Iran itself is in a terrible situation, with a lot of the country running dry. Trump of course is not a direct consequence of global warming, but it helps with the civilisation altering bits and adds to instability.

Europe is under its third heat wave of the year, all of them having been comparable to the historic ones from 1976 and 2003. This is also having a destabilising effect on several governments that are completely feckless, having spent 20 years trying to convince themselves that it was not happening, and was no big deal anyway.

These weather phenomena, along things like tropical storms in the Atlantic, are of course not new, but their frequency and magnitude is increased by global warming. They are currently costing billions and dealing with their consequences is not going to get cheaper.

> Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?

I can. For example, the French Revolution was fueled by crop failures in the couple of years before due to particularly bad weather, related to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The revolutions of 1848 came after about 4 years of crop failures due to bad weather again.

The point is not that it never happened before. The Earth used to be much hotter (and also much colder). The environment used to not have humans around and it was fine. Revolutions and wars, and societal collapse are not new. Look at the late Bronze Age collapse if you want to have an idea of how bad it can realistically get. It’s not the end of the world, not even of humanity, but still a thoroughly unpleasant period to live in.

The point is that this is going to happen not because we rolled a bad dice, but because we’re bloody idiots and are doing it to ourselves.