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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn’t. The process we have now kicked off is not going to change to any great degree whether we continue to build or stop building data centres.
Even if we immediately stopped all pollution and went back to a pre-industrial way of life, the damage is done, the ice caps will continue to melt and we will still have to deal with the consequences of our actions.
I’m not saying we should continue to abuse the environment, but AI wasn’t the catalyst for climate change and it isn’t the worst thing we are doing.
“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.