this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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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: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions, researchers say (theconversation.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10267315

Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.

The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Where I live we have this huge river around our city that provides most of the province with freshwater (along with all of the rivers that feed into it, but the population concentrates around that one big river)

That one big river is also a place for ships to go through, and an ecosystem (despite all of the disruption).

More water in use by all kinds of facilities still manages to lower the level of the river significantly, to the point where there have been worries raised about the ecosystem and where shipping capacity was reduced.