this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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: 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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Why personal climate action matters – according to experts (theconversation.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Your choices do not exist in a vacuum. Earth is an interconnected community of living and non-living things says ethicist Patrick Effiong Ben of the University of Manchester. African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam and Aïda Terblanché-Greeff have a helpful concept for thinking through the weightiness of your decisions: complementarity.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Google, and most of today's tech bros designed their infrastructure to be wasteful and cloud-based. They very well could have designed it with a focus on decentralized equipment that does not need to be running all the time.

Beyond Google searches, just think how much power is wasted in the entire cloud compute pipeline these days, using a mobile device as an example:

  • Power to run cell towers, that today consume thousands of watts of power even when idle, and in countries like the US where carriers do not colocate on the same physical hardware, 3x to 6x that.
  • Power to run the data link to the cell towers,
  • Power to run the infrastructure on the Internet to link that connection to whatever cloud service you use.
  • Power to run the datacenter servers and cooling systems that handle your request.
  • All of the above is turned on whether you are using it or not.
  • Going on, power consumed on your consumption device.
  • All the advertising, tracking, and telemetry-gathering that every program on your device, web browser, web sites, services, and operating system perform, eating your battery faster and causing you to have to use more power to recharge more frequently, which also limits the life of your non-removable battery in your compute device.
  • All the bandwidth and power consumed with apps being set to auto update, and developers following CI/CD models "because it's hip" but really because it's a great way to reset and manipulate reviews on app stores, so apps are pointlessly updated almost daily despite having no significant changes, and your flash is worn, your battery is consumed, more power is consumed across the entire stack, every time this happens.
  • In the reverse, apps don't take advantage of I'll call it "predatory" caching (even though this would also lead to flash wear) to do something like, "they're watching episode 1 of a show, whenever I use Internet bandwidth, I'll also download the next three episodes at the same time to minimize collective power use." Doing so will use *some *more power, but overall if designed "smart" enough, it would effectively reduce power and bandwidth consumption at inopportune times.
  • Oh, and for all this infrastructure, the energy consumed maintaining, repairing, and upgrading this entire stack by humans, electricity, water, and fuel.
  • Probably other stuff I forgot.
[–] spidermanchild 2 points 2 months ago

These are some really great points. This to me is a reflection of our (in particular US) view that energy is something unlimited and cheap. The idea that we might simply do less or optimize to anything other than profit is laughable to most folks, so efficiency barely enters the conversation except as a means to profit further in some niche cases after the fact. The organizational changes required to correct the issues you identified seem truly insurmountable, unfortunately, but you're absolutely right.