Climate change

[Federberg]

a bit concerning...

 

[Front242]

 

[Federberg]

I feel sorry for this girl. There's absolutely no question in my mind that she's being used. And for the record, I'm concerned about climate change! Although I believe humanity will get it right in the end. The adoption of clean technologies will inevitably reach a parabolic phase. Keep an eye out on Germany by the way. I suspect that they'll eventually land on green tech as a way to replace their loss of auto manufacturing

 

[Federberg]

Why Isn’t Solar Scaling in Africa?—Asterisk

The World Bank designed the Scaling Solar program to set Africa on a course to sustainable energy. Instead, it shed light on how a lack of transparency in the climate and development industry hampers progress.

asteriskmag.com

 

[Front242]

I feel sorry for this girl. There's absolutely no question in my mind that she's being used. And for the record, I'm concerned about climate change! Although I believe humanity will get it right in the end. The adoption of clean technologies will inevitably reach a parabolic phase. Keep an eye out on Germany by the way. I suspect that they'll eventually land on green tech as a way to replace their loss of auto manufacturing

I wouldn't be concerned with climate change when the elites seem more concerned with pushing the climate change agenda than trying to convince the idiots in the US and NATO to try and prevent nuclear war. I can tell you this: nuclear winter will be a hell of a lot worse than a few sunny days...

They don't care as they've tons of bunkers built. "Wildfires" deliberately started to burn down forests to build bunkers. The world is beyond fucked and not 'cos of climate change but because of the idiots running the show.

 

[Federberg]

Beautiful to watch…

 

[Federberg]

 

[don_fabio]

View attachment 9541

That's crazy. How they even do this on 50 degC sweating next to each other and gasping for air? Probably the heat effect in the middle of the crowd is "feels like 70 degC", no wonder people are falling down like pigeons.

Planet is warming up though. In my place there is almost no winter anymore and heatwaves in the summer are becoming more brutal.

 

[PhiEaglesfan712]

Strong la nina possible in 2024-25:

For comparision sake, this is where we were in 2007, a year that developed into a strong la nina:

Note the pocket of cold water (-3, -4) below the surface in each animation. Those pockets are absent in 2017, a year that stayed a weak la nina:

 

[Kieran]

Yesterday I met two pals for coffee, and during a wide ranging chat, we reached the point where I showed them this brief reel, the philosopher Yuval Noah Harare scaring the wits out of me, regarding the threat of AI:

716K views · 15K reactions | Humanity has no experience of coexisting with a more intelligent species. What happens when the world is filled with super-intelligent AIs? #YuvalNoahHarari #AI #Humanity #Intelligence #Coexistence | Yuval Noah Harari

Humanity has no experience of coexisting with a more intelligent species. What happens when the world is filled with super-intelligent AIs? #YuvalNoahHarari #AI #Humanity #Intelligence #Coexistence

www.facebook.com

But an interesting thing happened. Both my friends are young, 20’s, highly educated. He’s a programmer. They both said that even taking into account AI’s limitations as a human driven thought centre, that its energy consumption would drive it out of business before it becomes a threat.

I asked, what about its energy consumption? I didn’t know what this meant. I thought, we click on an app and it works. But to cut a long story short, AI generators use a phenomenal amount of energy to run the engines.

This article by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helps, but the two youngsters said that in 2023, AI consumed 284 BILLION litres of water. For comparison, Kielder Water, the largest man made reservoir in the UK has a water volume of 200bn litres that supplies water to large urban centres in the North East, like Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Durban.

AI would have emptied that whole reservoir and much more, in 2023.

According to the same article by MIT, “it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be.”

And, reports “show that 4.4% of all the energy in the US now goes toward data centers”, and this will only grow, with OpenAI, Donald Trump and Apple plotting to build gigantic data centres worth about $1bn. By 2028, “AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.”

Now my friends maybe wrong, 284bn litres might not be accurate for 2023: it could be more. It could “require as much as 720 billion gallons of water annually just to cool AI servers, enough water to meet the indoor needs of 18.5 million households.”

You get the drift. AI will only grow, and the cost already to the environment is already immense. Maybe it’ll eventually switch to nuclear energy? I don’t know.

The scenario Harare put forward didn’t exactly vanish, despite their further arguments that AI only does what it’s told. I’m not convinced by their reasons for saying this.

But a question among many questions I had for my two late-20’s far left pals was: why is nobody talking about this real time, evidentially proven cost to the environment? Where are the activists? Why are the roads not being blocked? Why are The Face-Masked not out in force, refusing to engage in dialogue, as always? Isn’t this important?

Or is it true that they don’t really care about the things that protest about, they just simply like to protest, and disrupt? They all like their gadgets and comforts too much? The threat to the environment is a cause that will come around again but they only go on popular cycles with these things and the unfathomable No Kings Thingy is giving them all something to whine about for the moment - climate and environment aren’t trending, but they’ll be back?

They’re very good people, my friends. Italians, with great verve and ideas, but they ask too few questions of their own side, I think, and this is most of us when we’re young. They’ll grow out of that, hopefully, when their sense of moral certainty faces stern tests..

 

[Federberg]

Yesterday I met two pals for coffee, and during a wide ranging chat, we reached the point where I showed them this brief reel, the philosopher Yuval Noah Harare scaring the wits out of me, regarding the threat of AI:

716K views · 15K reactions | Humanity has no experience of coexisting with a more intelligent species. What happens when the world is filled with super-intelligent AIs? #YuvalNoahHarari #AI #Humanity #Intelligence #Coexistence | Yuval Noah Harari

Humanity has no experience of coexisting with a more intelligent species. What happens when the world is filled with super-intelligent AIs? #YuvalNoahHarari #AI #Humanity #Intelligence #Coexistence

www.facebook.com

But an interesting thing happened. Both my friends are young, 20’s, highly educated. He’s a programmer. They both said that even taking into account AI’s limitations as a human driven thought centre, that its energy consumption would drive it out of business before it becomes a threat.

I asked, what about its energy consumption? I didn’t know what this meant. I thought, we click on an app and it works. But to cut a long story short, AI generators use a phenomenal amount of energy to run the engines.

This article by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helps, but the two youngsters said that in 2023, AI consumed 284 BILLION litres of water. For comparison, Kielder Water, the largest man made reservoir in the UK has a water volume of 200bn litres that supplies water to large urban centres in the North East, like Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Durban.

AI would have emptied that whole reservoir and much more, in 2023.

According to the same article by MIT, “it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be.”

And, reports “show that 4.4% of all the energy in the US now goes toward data centers”, and this will only grow, with OpenAI, Donald Trump and Apple plotting to build gigantic data centres worth about $1bn. By 2028, “AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.”

Now my friends maybe wrong, 284bn litres might not be accurate for 2023: it could be more. It could “require as much as 720 billion gallons of water annually just to cool AI servers, enough water to meet the indoor needs of 18.5 million households.”

You get the drift. AI will only grow, and the cost already to the environment is already immense. Maybe it’ll eventually switch to nuclear energy? I don’t know.

The scenario Harare put forward didn’t exactly vanish, despite their further arguments that AI only does what it’s told. I’m not convinced by their reasons for saying this.

But a question among many questions I had for my two late-20’s far left pals was: why is nobody talking about this real time, evidentially proven cost to the environment? Where are the activists? Why are the roads not being blocked? Why are The Face-Masked not out in force, refusing to engage in dialogue, as always? Isn’t this important?

Or is it true that they don’t really care about the things that protest about, they just simply like to protest, and disrupt? They all like their gadgets and comforts too much? The threat to the environment is a cause that will come around again but they only go on popular cycles with these things and the unfathomable No Kings Thingy is giving them all something to whine about for the moment - climate and environment aren’t trending, but they’ll be back?

They’re very good people, my friends. Italians, with great verve and ideas, but they ask too few questions of their own side, I think, and this is most of us when we’re young. They’ll grow out of that, hopefully, when their sense of moral certainty faces stern tests..

very interesting

 

[mrzz]

Yesterday I met two pals for coffee, and during a wide ranging chat, we reached the point where I showed them this brief reel, the philosopher Yuval Noah Harare scaring the wits out of me, regarding the threat of AI:

716K views · 15K reactions | Humanity has no experience of coexisting with a more intelligent species. What happens when the world is filled with super-intelligent AIs? #YuvalNoahHarari #AI #Humanity #Intelligence #Coexistence | Yuval Noah Harari

Humanity has no experience of coexisting with a more intelligent species. What happens when the world is filled with super-intelligent AIs? #YuvalNoahHarari #AI #Humanity #Intelligence #Coexistence

www.facebook.com

But an interesting thing happened. Both my friends are young, 20’s, highly educated. He’s a programmer. They both said that even taking into account AI’s limitations as a human driven thought centre, that its energy consumption would drive it out of business before it becomes a threat.

I asked, what about its energy consumption? I didn’t know what this meant. I thought, we click on an app and it works. But to cut a long story short, AI generators use a phenomenal amount of energy to run the engines.

This article by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helps, but the two youngsters said that in 2023, AI consumed 284 BILLION litres of water. For comparison, Kielder Water, the largest man made reservoir in the UK has a water volume of 200bn litres that supplies water to large urban centres in the North East, like Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Durban.

AI would have emptied that whole reservoir and much more, in 2023.

According to the same article by MIT, “it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be.”

And, reports “show that 4.4% of all the energy in the US now goes toward data centers”, and this will only grow, with OpenAI, Donald Trump and Apple plotting to build gigantic data centres worth about $1bn. By 2028, “AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.”

Now my friends maybe wrong, 284bn litres might not be accurate for 2023: it could be more. It could “require as much as 720 billion gallons of water annually just to cool AI servers, enough water to meet the indoor needs of 18.5 million households.”

You get the drift. AI will only grow, and the cost already to the environment is already immense. Maybe it’ll eventually switch to nuclear energy? I don’t know.

The scenario Harare put forward didn’t exactly vanish, despite their further arguments that AI only does what it’s told. I’m not convinced by their reasons for saying this.

But a question among many questions I had for my two late-20’s far left pals was: why is nobody talking about this real time, evidentially proven cost to the environment? Where are the activists? Why are the roads not being blocked? Why are The Face-Masked not out in force, refusing to engage in dialogue, as always? Isn’t this important?

Or is it true that they don’t really care about the things that protest about, they just simply like to protest, and disrupt? They all like their gadgets and comforts too much? The threat to the environment is a cause that will come around again but they only go on popular cycles with these things and the unfathomable No Kings Thingy is giving them all something to whine about for the moment - climate and environment aren’t trending, but they’ll be back?

They’re very good people, my friends. Italians, with great verve and ideas, but they ask too few questions of their own side, I think, and this is most of us when we’re young. They’ll grow out of that, hopefully, when their sense of moral certainty faces stern tests..

The huge amount of energy is one huge piece of evidence that AI is very, very far away from actual intelligence.

 

[Kieran]

The huge amount of energy is one huge piece of evidence that AI is very, very far away from actual intelligence.

Basically yeah but! They’ll have to segue to nuclear energy, and then the fun and games begins. A nuclear powered super intelligent series of machines will be ready to look after us..

 

[Federberg]

The huge amount of energy is one huge piece of evidence that AI is very, very far away from actual intelligence.

lol! In all seriousness if AI helps us achieve superconductivity or fusion power, or both then it'll be worth the energy expenditure

 

[mrzz]

lol! In all seriousness if AI helps us achieve superconductivity or fusion power, or both then it'll be worth the energy expenditure

Definitely. It is a very effective tool, no doubt about that

 

[don_fabio]

You get the drift. AI will only grow, and the cost already to the environment is already immense. Maybe it’ll eventually switch to nuclear energy? I don’t know.

There are several companies already working on a small modular nuclear power plants that will be close to power hungry data centers, but that will still use fission.

On the other hand, fusion reactors developments are gaining some momentum and could become reality within maybe 20 years, but I believe that kind of technology is not in the best of interests for the corporations related with the oil & gas industry.

 

[Kieran]

There are several companies already working on a small modular nuclear power plants that will be close to power hungry data centers, but that will still use fission.

On the other hand, fusion reactors developments are gaining some momentum and could become reality within maybe 20 years, but I believe that kind of technology is not in the best of interests for the corporations related with the oil & gas industry.

Thanks Don, is the use of fission also eco-unfriendly? This is something I know next to nothing about.

They’re going to have to find some better way, right? Because AI is the genie let loose from the bottle. Though the activists won’t hound them to hurry: activists silence on this one doesn’t surprise me. The loudest activists, the most prominent ones, don’t actually care about the causes they make trouble about…

 

[Federberg]

Thanks Don, is the use of fission also eco-unfriendly? This is something I know next to nothing about.

They’re going to have to find some better way, right? Because AI is the genie let loose from the bottle. Though the activists won’t hound them to hurry: activists silence on this one doesn’t surprise me. The loudest activists, the most prominent ones, don’t actually care about the causes they make trouble about…

the latest designs for fission reactors are pretty decent, for example thorium reactors. Small and pretty efficient

 

[don_fabio]

Thanks Don, is the use of fission also eco-unfriendly? This is something I know next to nothing about.

Use of Thorium instead of Uranium is cleaner in a way. Thorium waste is less radioactive and for shorter period. I think these small reactors will need less refueling too.