Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.
That’s what you get when you build insane amounts of AI data centers. In The Netherlands Microsoft data centers are responsible for 1% of all power consumption in the country. Google refuses to give insight in their power consumption. And now there’s a sharp acceleration in global warming. I wonder how. FFS.
The acceleration started happening 11-13 years ago…
When did they start building insanely huge data centers? (:
Yeah, because if it wasn’t for AI, the climate would be just fine.
Blame the motor vehicle, logging, industrial farming, factories…
I get that AI is the new poster-boy for everything that’s wrong with the world, but the environment was fucked long before it came along.
Plus in theory the data centers could be using green energy, makung their main impacts come from the cooling towers and additional mining of resources rather than the energy they consume. Its the same argument with EVs they are better if powered by green energy, but still better if the energy isn’t spent at all, for example being able to take a bike to the store rather than a 6000 lbs EV.
Right. In theory ai datacenters came along at the perfect time, when renewables are the cheapest power source. We could be using them to trigger a massive increase in renewable energy generation. That’s a nice fantasy
Some data centers are necessary for modern life. They facilitate pretty much everything you do online. Some could also be used to optimize the power grid when running on renewable energies.
Just because it was already fucked doesn’t mean the insane acceleration due to AI data centers doesn’t matter anymore.
“AI data centers are ALSO bad” wasn’t your initial statement, and you know it.
And even if it was, that’s kind of beside the point. AI data centers are a relatively new (10 years) usage of the energy produced with the burning of hydrocarbons. The burning of hydrocarbons is the problem and has been for 150 years.
We can’t focus on the real problem if you insist on redirection of people’s ire towards your latest socio-political beef.
The rise of those centers did cause an insane increase. The energy and water used is insane. They contribute for a very large part. Cars are suddenly not that big of an issue anymore, compared to those data centers. Next to the energy and water usage, it’s also made from components which have an insane carbon footprint themselves.
Don’t underestimate those centers. We were alarmed by climate change, we discussed how we can reduce it, then built these centers making it early impossible to come back from, while the construction of these centers is far from done.
Right, “AI” LLM chatbot companies shouldn’t exist, for many reasons; climate change is just the cherry on top for why they should be dismantled.
I believe there could be some valid uses for responsible use of them, but summarizing the best chocolate chip cookie recipes every time someone searches for a recipe certainly isnt that use.
That 1% figure was one data center, not combined. That one had to disclose its energy usage. And the country has an energy problem
Because of data centers.
If you spend an evening in talking with an AI instead of streaming a movie from Netflix in 4k you’d have used less energy. Which would be still less than just the gas used to drive a few miles away for a night out.
And all data center usage is significantly less than something like A/C usage (which is likely to be increasing as temps increase).
There’s a lot of legitimate grievances and concerns about AI — just today I was seeing a mathematician having an identity crisis in response to the unrelenting solving of open questions, something probably every field will soon struggle with adapting to — but the inflated perception of the environmental impacts means that so much less public attention is being spent on the actual culprits and possible solutions thereof.
Is that what Ai told you? Because that is complete bullshit.
Just taking to Ai doesn’t use that much energy, except unless you let it make complicated code, but the energy it took for training the LLM’s for your evening conversation took so much energy, resources and caused so much pollution, you could fly an airplane around the world for an entire year and still pollute the earth less.
There should be solar panels on all the roofs to help offset aircon use etc.
I have solar panels on my roof, why don’t you?
For me its mostly the cost to benefit ratio given my current electricity prices. At current prices I’m not even sure I’d break even financially for my maintenaince costs of solar (like battery replacement) versus just paying my utility bill. As energy prices change that might change but currently it doesn’t make sense for me, i still have a mortgage to pay and other major repairs to do to my house and ideally id have to prematurely redo the roof before installing solar.