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Covid was sent by time travelers as a last ditch effort to stop climate change.
@[email protected] When I saw the “Industrial Revolution” label next to the vertical increase in global temperatures, I couldn’t help but recall of some text written in 1995 by a certain former math teacher, and how right he was about the Industrial Revolution’s consequences…
Do they ignore it? Yes but the only reason they ignored it was because…
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The oil industry (and other adjacent industries) did their best to make sure everybody doubted the science of climate change
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Governments (the U.S gov’t in particular) took the oil industry’s side and subsidized their ventures
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Libertarian think tanks (like the Heritage Foundation and ALEC) took money from Big Oil to misinform the public about climate change and its connection to fossil fuel burning.
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The shopping realization for me is that I can’t find this kind of graphs online with my average ass searching skills.
I can find linear graphs from the last 200 years or log graphs from the last 2000, but not what is show in this picture. No ship average joes think it looks natural, I’m convinced no one sees this graph, they see the shitty confusing ones. I bet many people don’t have any idea what a log graph even is.
And people think I’m crazy for starting an algae farm… There is no quick fix. “Science will figure something out”
I am part of that science, and I can barely afford to scale beyond what I consider my carbon footprint.
narcimalgae on YouTube, although the algorithm killed it (500 to 6 views on my last video)so I may move to peertube soon.
Can you give a quick elevator pitch for algae farms?
Water holds 8 times the gasous CO2 as the atmosphere it is exposed to at a given pressure(altitude). The algae, being carbon-based, pulls the carbon from the water to grow, and releases the oxygen as a biproduct. The algae biomass can then be condensed and stored, or used as a raw agriculture material. Water, sunlight, and a small amount of fertilizer all fed by an air pump.
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Sam Altman (OpenAI) is a Millennial. So is Zuckerberg. LLMs are one of the big energy sinks right now, reaching 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026 and the current rate of use is doubling every year. For comparison, total global commercial (excluding industrial and transportation, so, office buildings - lights, AC, computers) energy use is 50,000 TWh.
It’s still being ignored. Boomers are out of the work force (if not politics), and Gen X is just starting to retire. Between Millenials and Gen Z, they hold 32% of the voting power in the US, the same as Boomers. And Gen Z is only just entering voting age, at 8%.
Half the voting population is under 50 and global temperatures keep increasing. There’s every indication sticking your head in the sand is a cross-generational behavior.
Gen Z is 1997-2010
How are they just entering voting age?
well, those who are born in 2010 can’t vote, and those born in 1997 can vote. Some of them are too young to vote and some are not. So they’re entering voting age.
Well the last couple of years still can’t vote, so I imagine that’s what they meant
Who do you suggest we vote for in order to adequately address this problem? Like fascism, I don’t see a way to vote ourselves out of this predicament.
We’ll have to remove power from capital owners (like Zuck and Altman) directly, in order to save ourselves.
I agree! I don’t think we can vote out way out, not in one fell swoop.
We need to vote locally, and support voting reform efforts. If we can normalize IRV at the local level, so that people lose their fear of the unknown, we have a chance to get it into congressional elections, and that’s where real change will happen. Eventually, ideally, we get rid of the electoral college and use IRV in presidential elections, and then we might see a surprise third party win. We can do most of this without constitutional changes.
But, can we survive as a country long enough to get there? It’s a long road, and I don’t know.
By your own numbers that’s a tiny fraction of the world’s energy use. It seems strange to put such a disproportionate focus on such a small fraction. Where is this rage for the transportation sector?
My numbers were mixed in the previous post; I was mixing total global and total annual use. I’m sorry about that; the numbers looked off but I didn’t catch the time scale difference.
AI companies are projected to use 1kTWh in 2025. Transportation is projected to use 1.2TWh, industry, 1.1TWh. Bitcoin, everyone’s favorite whipping-boy, is estimated to use only 173TWh globally, a mere 17% of AI. Residential is only 800TWh, 4.5x Bitcoin, but 80% of AI. Commercial is less, at 600TWh.
These all come from different sources: homeinst.org and Deloitte are the main ones, but the Bitcoin stat comes from Cambridge and the EIA (eia.gov), and the AI industry number comes from an MIT and backed by a different Deloitte report.
The industrial sector is the largest energy user, but AI is a close third just below transportation.
I was surprised that cryptocurrency energy use was so relatively small, given the hysteria. Bitcoin alone is 173TWh, far smaller than all of the sectors, and a fraction of AI; but even adding all of the other cryptocurrencies, the estimated consumption rises only to 215TWh. That pushes it past the smallest user, the agriculture sector sitting at 200TWh, but still well below everything else.
AI is the third largest energy consumer, annually, globally.
Transportation is moving in the right direction atm, even if it is slow. AI is going the wrong direction.
Shh, we don’t want to talk about that, car is comfy
On a more serious level, the type of AI that all the energy is being used for, generative AI, is not particularly necessary. Transportation often is. There are types of AI that are ridiculously useful, like the one that does protein folding, or a lot of machine learning algos that classify things for X or Y business reason… But LLMs and image generation are a fucking novelty.
Do you think these are just different technologies that happened to have been developed simultaneously? These are all from the same spark. Neural networks giving rise to emergent unexplainable phenomenon when prodded in very very specific ways. Ai research is almost all trying to understand how the fuck that happens and why it can do all these things.
Radiology is a good use case. Ai porn maybe not so much.
But as god help me. You are saying that cruising in a several ton metal missiles, often alone, back and fourth over the planet or to McDonalds is necessary! No transportation isn’t often necessary! Americans often say this but DUH you didn’t build sidewalks or trains! You astroturfed the shit out of oil. This is very embarrassing, I get it, but GOD DANN NO transportation with exploding dinosaurs that you frack out of gorgeous boreal forests ISNT NECESSARY AT ALL, we have invented train, bus, bicycle, electric cars, please for god sake stop working for astroturfing oil company proxies and get a fucking bike and then spit and be rude to all single drivers in all cities.
Americans often say this
First off, I’m not American.
You are saying that cruising in a several ton metal missiles, often alone, back and fourth over the planet or to McDonalds is necessary!
First of all, fuck off, I’ve flown back and fourth across the planet exactly once and that was to see my father before he died. I hadn’t seen him in 25 years, because he left to the US to pursue something resembling income when I was 2, as our own country was only just getting started economically. Second of all, I said it’s “often necessary”, not strictly always necessary.
we have invented train, bus, bicycle, electric cars, please for god sake stop working for astroturfing oil company proxies
Who’s been astroturfing oil company proxies? And anyway, when talking about the CO2 impact, trains, buses and electric cars are part of the number. Bicycles quite a bit less, because the CO2 there is production (once per bike and not comparable to a car or a train) and the extra food you need to eat. But trains, buses and electric cars absolutely do use energy - and therefore increase CO2 emissions, even if indirectly.
But the most important part
Do you think these are just different technologies that happened to have been developed simultaneously? These are all from the same spark. Neural networks giving rise to emergent unexplainable phenomenon when prodded in very very specific ways. Ai research is almost all trying to understand how the fuck that happens and why it can do all these things.
Radiology is a good use case. Ai porn maybe not so much.
I realize that neural networks are the basis of all that, but I’m saying we don’t need to be pushing everyone to use a super energy-expensive chatbot instead of a regular search. We don’t need AI chatbots embedded into literally every software application we use daily. This doesn’t benefit the research, it benefits stock values because AI is a buzzword and you CAN’T run a publicly traded company without saying you’re harnessing the power of AI, shareholders will literally murder you.
That’s why people are dunking on AI instead of cars. Because 99% of public-facing AI is useless shit people actively dislike and so is 99% of AI energy usage. With cars, I’m willing to bet at least 10% of trips are strictly necessary, and 40-50% of trips are deemed necessary because of stupid car-centric city design with no transit, so still necessary, but for the wrong reasons. I doubt more than about 50% of trips are just leisure altogether. But these are just numbers pulled out of my ass to illustrate a point: There is some car travel that is necessary, some car travel that could be avoided by political change, but is currently necessary for the people doing it. But very little AI usage that is necessary.
Google, Microsoft, etc, aren’t building billions upon billions of dollars worth of data centers at a never-seen-before pace to run models that benefit humanity. They’re doing it because right now all the money in the world is in building a better “Here are the tallest buildings in NYC to jump off after losing your job” machine than your competitor, and shoving it in more products nobody asked for.
And worst of all, just shoving more and more input data at larger and larger LLMs alone isn’t likely to cause new breakthroughs in AI. For all we know, it might be a dead end in the search of AGI - and they’re well into diminishing returns as far as investing more and more energy into training new models is concerned.
For sure cars are worse for the planet than AI. But cars DO something. They get you to places. AI tells you how to kill yourself, or how to make pizza with glue, etc. Its best use cases are for cheating at homework, and replacing human workers without even making sure AI CAN do their jobs (good luck hiring all your support staff back, Klarna). It’s currently a completely new plague on the planet, and tech CEOs are doing everything to point it out more and more. You know when was the last time I heard anything from Gernot Döllner or Ola Källenius? Fucking never. They don’t shove themselves everywhere to let you know what they’re doing to destroy the planet. At best they’ll tell you what they’re doing to reduce their impact. But tech CEOs right now will outright tell you they’re going to fire everyone they can, build as many energy-intensive data centers as they can, and drain desert towns of their last drinking water, just so you could see what it would be like if the chick from Avatar had 3 boobs.
THAT is why people are mad at the AI industry.
Americans often say this
Altman isn’t sticking his head in the sand, he’s delusional and selfish. He doesn’t care what happens to the rest of the world after AGI.
He’s also delusional if he thinks AGI is coming if you just keep pumping up LLMs.
We didn’t invent the automobile by breeding faster, and faster, horses.
He’s not delusional, he’s lying. He saw a chance to be the first trillionaire and grabbed at it
Our parents didn’t ignore it.
Our Governments, and the corporations who bribed those governments, just didn’t give a shit enough to listen.
Stop it, my parents ignored climinate change, my dad still doesn’t believe it.
…my parents beat me for trying to do something about it: fuck them, they’re complicit to this day…
The corporations alone don’t elect climate deniers.
My parents, to their extremely rare credit, complained about it and separated their trash.
Nah it’s time to hold Boomers accountable. They were too busy focusing on hedonism, selling out future generations for a tax cut and buying pickup trucks they didn’t need, to care about big picture concepts like climate change.
AI is going to fix this by increasing the scale of the Y axis.
Just hallucinate better data
If someone told you that you had to give up your iPhone and video games to save the planet, i guarantee you wouldn’t, even knowing the benefit. People in the Industrial Revolution didn’t know this was coming
Well you’re wrong.
I gave up having kids. It’s the biggest effect I can have on my carbon footprint. Raised a few, but didn’t add to the population.
No you don’t understand.
Jesus.
That’s all, any questions will be met with a holy sword to the clavicle. Jesus!
Next generation is going to post this map but with higher temps
Lol why do you think we’ll last long enough for another generation?
Honestly, I hate to bandwagon on to the antenatalism but having a child now would almost certainly condemn them to an existence of scarcity and pain.
What makes this doubly difficult is that if we had acted at the first sign of trouble, we almost certainly could have lived comfortable lives with minimal sacrifices and every year we put it off the sacrifices we would have to make in order to maintain our climate get more severe.
I love Lemmy because I get to read regarded comments like yours
I mean you could try to change my viewpoint by articulating your viewpoint in response but I’m guessing that’s a little above your skill set.
We aren’t putting it off. Already many countries are deploying renewable energy like it’s going out of fashion, and have been for years. China, France, the UK, Spain, and India all have significant parts of their energy coming from renewables and nuclear, or are building more as we speak. Here in England our largest source of power is wind. People are already doing stuff about it, just not fast enough or universally enough. Technology for renewables and energy saving has gotten progressively better over the past several decades. Even fossil fuel technologies like cars and natural gas plants have gotten markedly more efficient meaning they produce less CO2 than they did previously, while also emitting lower levels of other pollutants too. It’s even possible now to power planes with biofuels.
power generation has come a long way but specially in the North America the story isn’t as good, while we’ve made progress the amount of methane produced by our natural gas wells is not only frightening but difficult to track due to lack of accountability.
it’s my opinion if we want the sort of radical greenhouse gas reduction required to stave off the worst of climate change then we need three things:
- an aggressive plan to phase out coal and natural gas
- embrace public transportation and bikes
- drastically reduce the amount of red meat we eat
I do believe it’s possible I’m just also think it’s really difficult to get political will for those sort of things.
Nobody is going fast enough.
The fastest efforts going right now are half assed solutions.
I don’t think you understand how urgently fucked we are.
Climate scientists are scientists. They can only tell youbwhat thry know. Science inherently moves slow, moves with certainty. Kind of the best thing about it.
But all these climate models keep getting hit with ‘shit we didnt know could happen’ and ‘feedback effect nobody’s ever seen before’, even the grim ones.
So however bad the models are, we are more fuckef than that.
The turn radius on this thing is so slow that we may already be past the point of no return. Everything from here on might be a death rattle. Maybe, if you’re young, from before you were born. We don’t know how bad it is, we have sort of repeatedly proven that we can’t know how bad it is, and all we know is how good it isn’t.
And babe, its not good enough to be so fucking casual about shit.
Whatever effect you are currently feeling is the effect from our collected fuckedness 30 40 50 years ago. However fucked this summer felt? Thats the damage we had accrued and sent out when your parents were born.
No you’re correct, the co2 levels act slowly over time to increase temperatures so we haven’t even got a tiny fraction of the total warming. The only way to deal with it is to go sharply carbon negative as soon as possible and use Geoengineering to actively cool the planet.
geoengineering
Maybe, but its like natural gas; going to be used as an excuse to mot fix anything else and jack off about svifi bullshit til we all die.
Not that it couldn’t alao be a useful tool in tje hands of responsible adults.
At a certain point you have to ignore the " but someone will use it as an excuse" argument, that’s been the response for decades. It can’t mean that because someone could object you just have to do nothing ever.
This kind of talk isn’t really useful and is making the problem worse. Where are you getting all this from? You must have some good sources to make claims like this.
There wasn’t a time line 25 years ago where we could use only technological solutions as said technological solutions didn’t exist. Those have only been invented since then, many still haven’t been invented or are still being worked on now. Take batteries for example, it took us until the 2010s to manufacture enough lithium ion batteries with the right chemistry to even think about using them as grid storage. Said batteries still have limited lifespans and manufacturing them is costly to the environment and requires lithium which has a limited supply. We really need Sodium ion batteries but those are only ramping production now. Starting to switch over 50 years ago would have been even more impossible, not that we understood the problem fully 50 years ago. This is all revising history.
Fyi CO2 levels have been higher in the past than they are now. None of this is actually new, it’s just changing far faster than it would naturally. It’s the speed that’s the issue, not the actual magnitude of the change. It’s a case of changing things faster than nature takes to adapt. We are still technically in an ice age after all. Pollutants like microplastics and forever chemicals are the new thing, not greenhouse gasses. No one has any idea what that might lead to in the long term.
You feel insane because your suggesting things should have happened before they are actually possible. You are saying things that are extremely alarmist without giving evidence and without considering context.
Edit: There was one way to decarbonize earlier than 25 years ago or maybe before. It’s called Nuclear. I wonder who prevented that? Oh wait it was climate activists. Funny that.
25 years ago
There was some tech stuff, new-deal-with-chinese-characteristics, and specifically a very climate conscious US president was elected, but everyone just let the other guy take office.
climate activists stopped nuclear
No. Dipshit appropriate environmental and residual anti nuclear activists, which were tangled up wuth a bunch of other movements, stopped it. Wouldve been nice though.
only technological solutions
I think i said ‘no changes (that wouldnt have improved our quality of life anyway)’, so things like modal shifts in transportation and moving to dense walkable cities or well cared for and/or utilized rural places
Things like solar and wind power (and yes nuclear, especially back then)
starting 50 years ago
Bitch have you not heard of jimmy fucking carter? Do you not remember the solar panels on the white house? Dude wasn’t perfect, but he proposed both renewables and nuclear power, and i assume knew what the hell he was talking about (given his education). It would have taken some time, but if we had started then, i think we’d be in a pretty good place. I dont know much about the situation on the periphery, but i assume the USSR would have matched the americans if only for the sake of appearances.
whataboutism, absurd bullshit
Okay you dont seem like a serious person; i wish you luck at the fracktory.
I don’t use the term whataboutism in my post anywhere. So I don’t know who you are quoting.
The not serious person here is you, saying we are all going to die anyway instead of encouraging people to do anything. I had to look this up as I don’t know anything about Carter, but it turns out the panels he was installing are for hot water. They don’t generate electricity. This makes perfect sense as it took much longer than that to develop photovoltaics and get them ready for mass production. Even now modern photovoltaic panels are fairly inefficient devices.
We already have walk-able cities in much of Europe. It’s not a compete solution by itself, we still have cars. You are weirdly fixated on USA history when this is a global problem. It’s not all about the USA. Stop pretending it’s the only country that exists. India and China are the biggest polluters these days if I remember correctly, you should be focusing on them.
Edit: Carter was also aiming for 20% of energy in the US to be made renewably by 2020. That wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to stop climate change.
CO2 levels are still rising pretty much unabated though. Probably mostly due to The Green Paradox and Jevons Paradox…
If you mean climate change we absolutely will though
There be other generations but I think you are wrong to be so confident. Those next generations will not have an organized society and quite possibly will not have any form of internet or a lot of technology in general.
Shit is going to get BAD and FAST.
Eh things will get more dire but doubt it’s happening anywhere fast enough for that
What are you basing that conclusion on, other than vibes?
Seriously, have you looked at ANY of the data? Any reports or papers written by people who study it?
The theme is consistent among them: sooner and worse than expected.
The actual data. It doesn’t say at all that we won’t survive a generation.
The theme is consistent among them: sooner and worse than expected.
Compared to what exactly? A lot of the data just confirms the earlier data
It’s already having nasty effects already? Storms are worse and more intense, more flooding that kills people… how many people have to die before you say “that was quicker than I expected”?
How would stuff I know have happened already in a timescale I know be unexpected to me?
Shit would have to get worse at a rate beyond what’s expected now for me to think it was quicker than expected.
It’s like doing multiplication. 12 = 2. Okay makes sense. 24 = 4 oh damn that was quicker than expected! lol
2 x 4 = 8
Your grasp of basic math explains a lot.
Earth: Ok, HMB…
Fortunately for them, I flushed my kids.
This is my boomer dad whenever he complains about it being extremely hot in the summer, cold in the winter, too much rain, etc. Always responds well it won’t last too long and that’s just nature, nothing we can do about it because it has a mind of its own.
Have you considered that humanity does not actually have enough data to know what is and is not a “safe climate zone”?
How long, in years, did the climate take to “recover” from siberian traps eruptions? How about the dinosaur killing asteroid/deccan traps episode? What was more damaging to the environment, particulate in the air or the release of volcanic gasses?
The planet has been through multiple unimaginable apocalypses. It will survive humanity just fine. And if it doesn’t? Im sure something will evolve to take our place. Terraforming is well beyond our means as a species, intentional or not.
You’re right, all those studies and scientists are actually pulling that stuff out of their asses, just to be contrarians.
Idk man remember when that ozone hole was supposed to kill us all but we started fixing it in like 10 years? How about when we decided plastic would choke the oceans to death only to find that microbes are busily learning how to break down all those man made forever polymers? Member those? Meeeember?
I don’t know about 10 years, but the hole has yet to close completely and required effort on OUR part; and if you think that something like the Pacific Trash Island is something that only we “decided” was bad, then I can’t convince you. Just “member” these when you run out of convenient excuses.
From when we discovered the ozone hole to banning hairspray and shit was about 10 years.
Also, I didn’t say we decided the pacific trash hole was bad. I said we decided it would kill all the life in the ocean, and that was hilariously wrong.
Have you taken a reading comprehension course in the last 10 or 15 years?
Yes, yes, you’re very smart and edgy. Better not do anything, since the planet will do just fine on its own.
The problem is not the planet surviving, we know it’ll most likely be fine eventually. The problem is that we’re causing wide-spread death and destruction, including our own.
We evolved to be smart enough to be able to create and use tools, but not the wherewithal to prepare for compounding trends. Maybe this is the great extinction barrier that explains the Fermi paradox
Not just ignored, but vehemently dismissed as “woke” quoting the fossil fuel lobby almost verbatim.
A majority of us voted for Al Gore, but I’m sure someone will next tell me he wouldn’t have made a difference, both sides are the same, blah blah blah.
How much faith do you have that dems under Gore would have fought the republicans and their own donors when they were complacent letting the republicans steal the election?
