this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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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.

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Hungry for Energy, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Turn to Nuclear Power | Large technology companies are investing billions of dollars in nuclear energy as an emissions-free source of electricity for AI (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

All for a technology that solves nothing

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nuclear is a good option but calling it emission-free is glossing over a pretty big problem we haven't solved yet.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Even if they don't burn fossils, the steel and concrete alone emits thousands/millions of tons of GHG's; every project.

I guarantee the mining and refinement of fissile material is also extremely energy and water intensive, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of those embodied GHG's are ignored or criminally underreported.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Unfortunately the energy requirements of "ai" are very real and more importantly the massive amount of investment and obsession with ai is specifically because of the moat that the insane energy requirements creates. Corporations have zero interest in an ai technology that is efficient and doesn't require gargantuan energy requirements, it would be antithetical towards the strategic aims of these large technology companies.

The energy efficiency of traditional search engines was always a severe liability for google, ai solves that issue or at least they have convinced themselves it does.

...which isn't to say you are wrong but the atrocious energy efficiency of ai is very very real.