9 ms·

Temperature changes around the world – 1901-2018

154 points by NeedMoreTea 7y ago

cagenut 7y ago
imho the ipcc made this the first chart in their latest report for good reasons: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1_figure-final-e1541758557589.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1... its time to move past slam-dunking on the creationists/anti-vaxers/flat-earthers/climate-deniers and focus on the much harder part: engineering for zero by 2040. that is within the realm of your next mortgage. your utilities and larger institutions are already financing infrastructure that will be around then.
Waterluvian 7y ago
Visualizing temperature change isn't the problem I've ever had with people. It's always been about: "okay, so what does 1.5C mean?" I think what we need to be using when we talk about climate change are things like projected coastline and population displacement maps. One of the most powerful facts I've seen recently in Canada was an insurer talking about how some houses simply aren't insurable anymore because they will be flooded again every few years. I want to show people a map of "communities that will be uninsurable by 2050"
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  the toronto islands properties an example of the very flooding right now
  - shitgoose 7y ago
    houseboat is the solution. i always wanted to get one.
- ianai 7y ago
  The book “uninhabitable earth” is good for this. As is his talk on the Chris Hayes podcast. Some key points: 2C means genocide. Entire island nations under water and lost. Every minor increase means exponentially higher costs - many more dead, large swaths of the earth uninhabitable. 4C is something like Hong Kong/Shanghai, and many other parts of th world uninhabitable. Going outside would be fatal within minutes. Here’s a map someone put together for 4C: https://mymodernmet.com/parag-khanna-global-warming-map/ https://mymodernmet.com/parag-khanna-global-warming-map/ At 8C of warming, clouds may be unable to form.
  - ianai 7y ago
    The majority of emissions have been released in the last 30 years. All human emissions prior to that point are less than the human emissions from that point. People were talking about climate change back then. People decided to burn more oil. The map I included there seems pretty optimistic compared to some others I’ve seen. In a recent paper, “Boaty McBoatface” saw faster wind currents increase ocean churn and aided sea warming faster than expected. I’ve taken this to suggest the current ocean raises predicted are under estimates.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    The thing with that map is it's absurdly optimistic, as it implies a world entirely happy to have entire populations of other countries and continents to move into yours. The amount of migration, displacement, rebuilding and major wars that would actually get us to that point is unimaginable. Uninhabitable Earth is terrifying, and convincing. I thought I had a pessimistic outlook on climate until I read that.
    - ianai 7y ago
      I took it as “this is what would have to happen for the least of us to die”. So yes, optimistic. I also think their projected coastlines are optimistic. I don’t remember seeing so much of the US labeled uninhabitable in other discussions.
  - Anthony-G 7y ago
    Scarily, much of the regions marked in that map as suitable for food-growing is mountainous or tundra. I wouldn’t be optimistic about its fertility and suitability for agriculture – even with optimal climatic conditions.
- SECProto 7y ago
  > I want to show people a map of "communities that will be uninsurable by 2050" Relatedly, there was a recent story in CBC [1] pointing out that flood maps are due to get updated next year, and the impact it will have on housing prices. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/flood-plains-1.5135336 https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/flood-plains-1.5135336
  - southern_cross 7y ago
    Recent research suggests that flood maps (at least in the US) now and always have understated flood-prone areas by a factor of something like 3x. So those 100-year and 500-year and such flood pronouncements may be equally off, too.
- donjoe 7y ago
  Similar to this map? https://ss2.climatecentral.org https://ss2.climatecentral.org
- gmuslera 7y ago
  People must understand that increasing 1.5ºC of yearly average of global temperature is not the same as the increase of 1.5ºC in any particular day in their local city. It is not only not evenly distributed around the world (this chart, and the monthly ones on https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/index_v4.html https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/index_v4.html gives a different picture), that is the average could well mean 10+ ºC in their particular area in several given days (this week there was like 40ºC in Poland, and there was over 50ºC in India and Vietnam the previous one) while decrease in others, that is not just how they feel temperature, but also what is affected by it in larger areas (more energy to fuel extreme weather events, including the ones that brings extreme cold), and that the regions with the bigger increase in temperature have also several of the possitive feedback loop factors for increasing the global temperature even more. You don't need 100ºC to get a lethal temperature, with half of that (it is becoming increasingly common), depending on hidration and humidity, a lot of people will die. And you die in a particular place/day, not in a global yearly average, after you are dead doesn't matter if the next week the temperature is bearable. And the food sources that feed billions of people must survive too. And the complex ecosystem that enables that you, and your food sources survive as it is now, even if you are not aware of how something that just got extinct was essential, should survive too.
  - taneq 7y ago
    It kind of reminds me of when stereo manufacturers stopped using RMS power to rate speakers and instead started using peak power. Suddenly your 50W speakers were 2000W and wow that number was really big. Climate scientists have been using RMS temperatures but it's peak temperatures that people notice.
    - _0ffh 7y ago
      >using RMS temperatures I suppose you mean the temperature that minimises the RMS residual?
      - taneq 7y ago
        I just meant by analogy to the speaker example I was using, but yeah, that'd be a better way to describe it.
- DenisM 7y ago
  I found this to really illustrative of what 1.5 might mean. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ And it's not speculative - it's historical. It shows that decline of 4.5 means basically complete icing of the north North America and puts 1.5 in perspective.
- DanielleMolloy 7y ago
  Is there a good similar chart for daily or monthly maximum temperatures that one could share instead? As you say, people don't understand the problem about 1.5 degrees increase in average indeed. If temperature regularly exceeds 40°C it will look more threatening to people.
- wdr1 7y ago
  > Visualizing temperature change isn't the problem I've ever had with people. It's always been about: "okay, so what does 1.5C mean?" That plus a few other things, including how much variance is to be expected?
  - MrMember 7y ago
    The variance is tricky because of the enormous time range and the huge number of variables. It's also impossible to account for any black swans, positive or negative, that might happen in the next 80 years. We have no idea if some miraculous carbon removing technology will be discovered that saves us all. Or if we're missing some key component to the puzzle and actually we'll be extinct by 2050.
pepijndevos 7y ago
Are you telling me that every country in the 1900 recorded their yearly temperature? I'm not saying it's fake, but I'd like to know where the data comes from, and how reliable it is.
- Y-bar 7y ago
  From the article: > most stripes are built on global data collated by Berkeley Earth
  - epistasis 7y ago
    That's the project that was started by a physicist that didn't trust the numbers previously in the field, and basically called climate scientists amateurs, and set out to show them how they're all doing it wrong. What happened in the end was he just recapitulated exactly what climate scientists had been saying all along, so he had to trumpet "oh but it's never been done this precisely," just glancing over all the damage he had done to the credibility of the field with his completely unfounded doubt. Replication is great, and I'm glad Berkeley Earth is still at it. But we need to start holding people accountable for their predictions on this matter. If somebody is filled with unfounded doubt, why the hell should we listen to them until they've actually done the work to provide data? If you haven't even bothered to check sources but want to parade around how you think the data is untrustworthy, data which you haven't even sourced much less evaluated, why should we listen to such data-free and evidence free speculation that has proven to be wrong every time is has been evaluated? If somebody is skeptical of climate scientists at this point in history, it says a lot about their inability to evaluate technical matters and their ability to form unfounded opinion when there is no need for unfounded opinions. That reflects extremely negatively on the technical capabilities of a person.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of their background, or that it was Muller that vocally "broke the hockey stick" then ended up proving it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth
gmuslera 7y ago
1 dot per country, regardless of its size or shape, may not be very fair. Maybe data availability will rig the chart, but perhaps something similar, not grouping countries and continents but similar sized areas by latitude could show a more definite trend. It ss not the same kind of chart, but https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ai94ek/global_warming_at_different_latitudes_x_axis_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ai94ek/glo... seems to show that.
boybd 7y ago
Seems particularly manipulative to only show the last 100 years. How about the last 1000 or 2000 years instead?
- frumiousirc 7y ago
  rXKCD https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- epistasis 7y ago
  But if they just show 2000 years, why would they cut off there? Seems manipulative too, we should definitely go back to at least 10,000 years.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    To avoid cherry-picking, it should go back to the formation of the Earth.
- harsh3195 7y ago
  Temperature estimates over the past 2000 years using multiple proxy methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years#/media/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past...
admiralspoo 7y ago
Very manipulative, and definitely misleading to show only land surface temperatures, and only for the last 100 years.
cheschire 7y ago
I find it interesting how the warm years in the rest of the world seem to correspond to cold years in europe. The strange deep cold of early WW2 in Europe is also interesting.
- imeron 7y ago
  Very interesting indeed. WW2 cold: It would be interesting to know if this was a result of the increased dust in the air because of the war or just pure randomness.
  - AlbertoGP 7y ago
    The article mentions it at the end: This is quite a well-studied period that was probably linked to a large El Niño event - the climate cycle associated with shifting pressure patterns and a weakening of the trade winds in the Pacific. The world warmed, apart from Europe which had a deep cold spell. And it probably had an impact on the outcome of WWII. The harsh winters at the time frustrated Hitler's armies as they invaded the Soviet Union.
your-nanny 7y ago
I've used a similar compartment plot as a way of evaluating fMRI quality, and how different preprocessing routines affect it. Compartments determined by structural masks, eg white matter, gray matter, cerebrospinal fluid, etc.
martincollignon 7y ago
Reading these headlines is pretty depressing. If you want to do something about it, a paper called Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning[0] just came out, and under Tools for Individuals a startup called Tomorrow[1] is mentioned. They're actively looking for help to get more integrations to their app to calculate people's personal CO2 emissions. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433 [1] https://www.tmrow.com/ https://www.tmrow.com/
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  edit: If you want to do something about it, vote for elected officials with credible plans to address our climate crisis.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > vote for elected officials who are promising to address our climate crisis. Vote for ones with credible plans, instead.
    - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
      right on.
  - martincollignon 7y ago
    Completely agreed - this is priority #1. But individuals could probably benefit from being aware of their emissions
- jellicle 7y ago
  > personal CO2 emissions I think trying to frame this as an issue of personal responsibility, as "turn the lights off when you leave the room to save the world", is not only wrong but actively harmful to doing what is needed: massive, concerted, governmental, action.
  - martincollignon 7y ago
_Microft 7y ago
I found a surprising way to reduce my carbon footprint: I downloaded the music and am playing it locally now instead of streaming it over and over again. I was listening to music on Youtube pretty much all the time and that amounted to about 35GB of traffic per month in average. That's 420GB per year and with 7kWh/GB and emissions of approximately 500g/kWh that's a surprising total of roughly 1.5t of CO_2 emissions per year. And a downside is almost non-existant. Edit: my playlist consists of a small number of songs, so I actually get savings. That would not work when listening to a list that does not actually repeat of course.
- tjoff 7y ago
  Where on earth did you dig up the 7kWh/GB figure from?
  - _Microft 7y ago
    It was mentioned in [0], it's actually the higher one of two different sources (I haven't looked at the sources to be honest because that would require actually finding them which I haven't yet): A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. An assessment at a conference of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reached a lower number: 3.1 kWh per gigabyte. [0] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud (2017)
    - tjoff 7y ago
      It's an absurd number that can't really be considered as is. Does that include storage for 100 years? Or just the few seconds needed for transfer. Do they count all of the datacenters energy usage as something needed to just transfer and store the data (with no other processing)? Unfortunately that article didn't answer anything.
    - philipkglass 7y ago
      Those numbers are way off. The article cites a study claiming 5 kWh here: https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-00... It's from 2012 and cites numbers from as long ago as 2009 to determine normalized energy intensity. It also combines different numbers in a way that mean you can't estimate how much energy is saved by downloading a gigabyte to local storage instead of repeatedly streaming it. The single largest energy segment in their estimate is actually desktop computers! And it counts the energy used by CPU-intensive scripts along with the energy required by actual data transfer. Sanity check: Cisco estimates "busy hour" internet traffic at around 3 petabits per second in 2019. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white-paper-c11-741490.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-p... If it took 5 kWh/GB for data transfer during that busy hour, corresponding peak hour electricity use would be in excess of 6.5 terawatts. But that's more electricity than the world can generate in any given hour.
ForHackernews 7y ago
If you want to help, pressure your political representatives: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ https://rebellion.earth/ https://rebellion.earth/ There is no chance your individual actions will have any impact. Our only hope is drastic, large scale policy changes at the national and international level.
seaghost 7y ago
Nature will take care of it by killing us until we start to do things differently.

154 points by NeedMoreTea 7y ago

imho the ipcc made this the first chart in their latest report for good reasons: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1_figure-final-e1541758557589.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1... its time to move past slam-dunking on the creationists/anti-vaxers/flat-earthers/climate-deniers and focus on the much harder part: engineering for zero by 2040. that is within the realm of your next mortgage. your utilities and larger institutions are already financing infrastructure that will be around then.

Waterluvian 7y ago

Visualizing temperature change isn't the problem I've ever had with people. It's always been about: "okay, so what does 1.5C mean?" I think what we need to be using when we talk about climate change are things like projected coastline and population displacement maps. One of the most powerful facts I've seen recently in Canada was an insurer talking about how some houses simply aren't insurable anymore because they will be flooded again every few years. I want to show people a map of "communities that will be uninsurable by 2050"

hi5eyes 7y ago
the toronto islands properties an example of the very flooding right now
- shitgoose 7y ago
  houseboat is the solution. i always wanted to get one.
ianai 7y ago
The book “uninhabitable earth” is good for this. As is his talk on the Chris Hayes podcast. Some key points: 2C means genocide. Entire island nations under water and lost. Every minor increase means exponentially higher costs - many more dead, large swaths of the earth uninhabitable. 4C is something like Hong Kong/Shanghai, and many other parts of th world uninhabitable. Going outside would be fatal within minutes. Here’s a map someone put together for 4C: https://mymodernmet.com/parag-khanna-global-warming-map/ https://mymodernmet.com/parag-khanna-global-warming-map/ At 8C of warming, clouds may be unable to form.
- ianai 7y ago
  The majority of emissions have been released in the last 30 years. All human emissions prior to that point are less than the human emissions from that point. People were talking about climate change back then. People decided to burn more oil. The map I included there seems pretty optimistic compared to some others I’ve seen. In a recent paper, “Boaty McBoatface” saw faster wind currents increase ocean churn and aided sea warming faster than expected. I’ve taken this to suggest the current ocean raises predicted are under estimates.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  The thing with that map is it's absurdly optimistic, as it implies a world entirely happy to have entire populations of other countries and continents to move into yours. The amount of migration, displacement, rebuilding and major wars that would actually get us to that point is unimaginable. Uninhabitable Earth is terrifying, and convincing. I thought I had a pessimistic outlook on climate until I read that.
  - ianai 7y ago
    I took it as “this is what would have to happen for the least of us to die”. So yes, optimistic. I also think their projected coastlines are optimistic. I don’t remember seeing so much of the US labeled uninhabitable in other discussions.
- Anthony-G 7y ago
  Scarily, much of the regions marked in that map as suitable for food-growing is mountainous or tundra. I wouldn’t be optimistic about its fertility and suitability for agriculture – even with optimal climatic conditions.
SECProto 7y ago
> I want to show people a map of "communities that will be uninsurable by 2050" Relatedly, there was a recent story in CBC [1] pointing out that flood maps are due to get updated next year, and the impact it will have on housing prices. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/flood-plains-1.5135336 https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/flood-plains-1.5135336
- southern_cross 7y ago
  Recent research suggests that flood maps (at least in the US) now and always have understated flood-prone areas by a factor of something like 3x. So those 100-year and 500-year and such flood pronouncements may be equally off, too.
donjoe 7y ago
Similar to this map? https://ss2.climatecentral.org https://ss2.climatecentral.org
gmuslera 7y ago
People must understand that increasing 1.5ºC of yearly average of global temperature is not the same as the increase of 1.5ºC in any particular day in their local city. It is not only not evenly distributed around the world (this chart, and the monthly ones on https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/index_v4.html https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/index_v4.html gives a different picture), that is the average could well mean 10+ ºC in their particular area in several given days (this week there was like 40ºC in Poland, and there was over 50ºC in India and Vietnam the previous one) while decrease in others, that is not just how they feel temperature, but also what is affected by it in larger areas (more energy to fuel extreme weather events, including the ones that brings extreme cold), and that the regions with the bigger increase in temperature have also several of the possitive feedback loop factors for increasing the global temperature even more. You don't need 100ºC to get a lethal temperature, with half of that (it is becoming increasingly common), depending on hidration and humidity, a lot of people will die. And you die in a particular place/day, not in a global yearly average, after you are dead doesn't matter if the next week the temperature is bearable. And the food sources that feed billions of people must survive too. And the complex ecosystem that enables that you, and your food sources survive as it is now, even if you are not aware of how something that just got extinct was essential, should survive too.
- taneq 7y ago
  It kind of reminds me of when stereo manufacturers stopped using RMS power to rate speakers and instead started using peak power. Suddenly your 50W speakers were 2000W and wow that number was really big. Climate scientists have been using RMS temperatures but it's peak temperatures that people notice.
  - _0ffh 7y ago
    >using RMS temperatures I suppose you mean the temperature that minimises the RMS residual?
    - taneq 7y ago
      I just meant by analogy to the speaker example I was using, but yeah, that'd be a better way to describe it.
DenisM 7y ago
I found this to really illustrative of what 1.5 might mean. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ And it's not speculative - it's historical. It shows that decline of 4.5 means basically complete icing of the north North America and puts 1.5 in perspective.
DanielleMolloy 7y ago
Is there a good similar chart for daily or monthly maximum temperatures that one could share instead? As you say, people don't understand the problem about 1.5 degrees increase in average indeed. If temperature regularly exceeds 40°C it will look more threatening to people.
wdr1 7y ago
> Visualizing temperature change isn't the problem I've ever had with people. It's always been about: "okay, so what does 1.5C mean?" That plus a few other things, including how much variance is to be expected?
- MrMember 7y ago
  The variance is tricky because of the enormous time range and the huge number of variables. It's also impossible to account for any black swans, positive or negative, that might happen in the next 80 years. We have no idea if some miraculous carbon removing technology will be discovered that saves us all. Or if we're missing some key component to the puzzle and actually we'll be extinct by 2050.

pepijndevos 7y ago

Are you telling me that every country in the 1900 recorded their yearly temperature? I'm not saying it's fake, but I'd like to know where the data comes from, and how reliable it is.

Y-bar 7y ago
From the article: > most stripes are built on global data collated by Berkeley Earth
- epistasis 7y ago
  That's the project that was started by a physicist that didn't trust the numbers previously in the field, and basically called climate scientists amateurs, and set out to show them how they're all doing it wrong. What happened in the end was he just recapitulated exactly what climate scientists had been saying all along, so he had to trumpet "oh but it's never been done this precisely," just glancing over all the damage he had done to the credibility of the field with his completely unfounded doubt. Replication is great, and I'm glad Berkeley Earth is still at it. But we need to start holding people accountable for their predictions on this matter. If somebody is filled with unfounded doubt, why the hell should we listen to them until they've actually done the work to provide data? If you haven't even bothered to check sources but want to parade around how you think the data is untrustworthy, data which you haven't even sourced much less evaluated, why should we listen to such data-free and evidence free speculation that has proven to be wrong every time is has been evaluated? If somebody is skeptical of climate scientists at this point in history, it says a lot about their inability to evaluate technical matters and their ability to form unfounded opinion when there is no need for unfounded opinions. That reflects extremely negatively on the technical capabilities of a person.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of their background, or that it was Muller that vocally "broke the hockey stick" then ended up proving it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth

gmuslera 7y ago

1 dot per country, regardless of its size or shape, may not be very fair. Maybe data availability will rig the chart, but perhaps something similar, not grouping countries and continents but similar sized areas by latitude could show a more definite trend. It ss not the same kind of chart, but https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ai94ek/global_warming_at_different_latitudes_x_axis_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ai94ek/glo... seems to show that.

boybd 7y ago

Seems particularly manipulative to only show the last 100 years. How about the last 1000 or 2000 years instead?

frumiousirc 7y ago
rXKCD https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
epistasis 7y ago
But if they just show 2000 years, why would they cut off there? Seems manipulative too, we should definitely go back to at least 10,000 years.
- mikeash 7y ago
  To avoid cherry-picking, it should go back to the formation of the Earth.
harsh3195 7y ago
Temperature estimates over the past 2000 years using multiple proxy methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years#/media/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past...

admiralspoo 7y ago

Very manipulative, and definitely misleading to show only land surface temperatures, and only for the last 100 years.

cheschire 7y ago

I find it interesting how the warm years in the rest of the world seem to correspond to cold years in europe. The strange deep cold of early WW2 in Europe is also interesting.

imeron 7y ago
Very interesting indeed. WW2 cold: It would be interesting to know if this was a result of the increased dust in the air because of the war or just pure randomness.
- AlbertoGP 7y ago
  The article mentions it at the end: This is quite a well-studied period that was probably linked to a large El Niño event - the climate cycle associated with shifting pressure patterns and a weakening of the trade winds in the Pacific. The world warmed, apart from Europe which had a deep cold spell. And it probably had an impact on the outcome of WWII. The harsh winters at the time frustrated Hitler's armies as they invaded the Soviet Union.

your-nanny 7y ago

I've used a similar compartment plot as a way of evaluating fMRI quality, and how different preprocessing routines affect it. Compartments determined by structural masks, eg white matter, gray matter, cerebrospinal fluid, etc.

martincollignon 7y ago

Reading these headlines is pretty depressing. If you want to do something about it, a paper called Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning[0] just came out, and under Tools for Individuals a startup called Tomorrow[1] is mentioned. They're actively looking for help to get more integrations to their app to calculate people's personal CO2 emissions. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433 [1] https://www.tmrow.com/ https://www.tmrow.com/

aaronbrethorst 7y ago
edit: If you want to do something about it, vote for elected officials with credible plans to address our climate crisis.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > vote for elected officials who are promising to address our climate crisis. Vote for ones with credible plans, instead.
  - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
    right on.
- martincollignon 7y ago
  Completely agreed - this is priority #1. But individuals could probably benefit from being aware of their emissions
jellicle 7y ago
> personal CO2 emissions I think trying to frame this as an issue of personal responsibility, as "turn the lights off when you leave the room to save the world", is not only wrong but actively harmful to doing what is needed: massive, concerted, governmental, action.
- martincollignon 7y ago

_Microft 7y ago

I found a surprising way to reduce my carbon footprint: I downloaded the music and am playing it locally now instead of streaming it over and over again. I was listening to music on Youtube pretty much all the time and that amounted to about 35GB of traffic per month in average. That's 420GB per year and with 7kWh/GB and emissions of approximately 500g/kWh that's a surprising total of roughly 1.5t of CO_2 emissions per year. And a downside is almost non-existant. Edit: my playlist consists of a small number of songs, so I actually get savings. That would not work when listening to a list that does not actually repeat of course.

tjoff 7y ago
Where on earth did you dig up the 7kWh/GB figure from?
- _Microft 7y ago
  It was mentioned in [0], it's actually the higher one of two different sources (I haven't looked at the sources to be honest because that would require actually finding them which I haven't yet): A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. An assessment at a conference of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reached a lower number: 3.1 kWh per gigabyte. [0] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud https://stanfordmag.org/contents/carbon-and-the-cloud (2017)
  - tjoff 7y ago
    It's an absurd number that can't really be considered as is. Does that include storage for 100 years? Or just the few seconds needed for transfer. Do they count all of the datacenters energy usage as something needed to just transfer and store the data (with no other processing)? Unfortunately that article didn't answer anything.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    Those numbers are way off. The article cites a study claiming 5 kWh here: https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-00... It's from 2012 and cites numbers from as long ago as 2009 to determine normalized energy intensity. It also combines different numbers in a way that mean you can't estimate how much energy is saved by downloading a gigabyte to local storage instead of repeatedly streaming it. The single largest energy segment in their estimate is actually desktop computers! And it counts the energy used by CPU-intensive scripts along with the energy required by actual data transfer. Sanity check: Cisco estimates "busy hour" internet traffic at around 3 petabits per second in 2019. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white-paper-c11-741490.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-p... If it took 5 kWh/GB for data transfer during that busy hour, corresponding peak hour electricity use would be in excess of 6.5 terawatts. But that's more electricity than the world can generate in any given hour.

ForHackernews 7y ago

If you want to help, pressure your political representatives: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ https://www.sunrisemovement.org/ https://rebellion.earth/ https://rebellion.earth/ There is no chance your individual actions will have any impact. Our only hope is drastic, large scale policy changes at the national and international level.

seaghost 7y ago

Nature will take care of it by killing us until we start to do things differently.