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Not just bills. These data centers, a major driver of new energy use, are contributing to climate change. Sadly it seems to be another way for large companies t
by grafmax 1y ago
Not just bills. These data centers, a major driver of new energy use, are contributing to climate change. Sadly it seems to be another way for large companies to offload externalities onto the public.
- kolinko 1y agoAre they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.
- rambojohnson 1y agoCarbon neutrality doesn’t refill a drained reservoir used to cool off these machines. Running your servers on wind power doesn’t make the millions of gallons they’re dumping into cooling systems any less gone.
- arghwhat 1y agoThe water cycle refills drained reservoirs - the "carbon cycle" is not one we want to be part of. Also note that there's other cooling solutions than evaporative cooling, such as closed loop water cooling with chillers, cooling with sea water, using heat pumps to redirect the heat to district heating loops (making use of the heat!), just building in colder places requiring less cooling, etc.
- cma 1y agoGoogle stopped claiming "operational carbon neutrality" shortly after the release of chatgpt.
- aurareturn 1y agoAre they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources. It's like saying "our crypto mining energy is carbon neutral" but ignoring the fact that if the carbon neutral energy is going into crypto mining, it's not going into something more useful. If crypto mining buys all the carbon neutral energy sources, then those sources aren't being used by other industries. We have limited carbon neutral energy production.
- croes 1y agoMS revised its climate goals thanks to AI https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed-microsofts-sustainability-strategy https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed...
- rambojohnson 1y agoTo say nothing of the exorbitant amount of water used to cool these machines, we’re on track to face a water shortage crisis long before any other climate change impact.
- arghwhat 1y agoWater availability is a regional climate change impact, which does not apply everywhere due to differences in water sourcing and weather patterns and how climate change affects these. It's very stupid to evaporate potable water on purpose in dry regions, but note that many numbers in this area are highly sensationalized by taking e.g. the maximum design capacity of the cooling system instead of the actual load, and that there are several other cooling solutions. Most proper facts die tragic deaths before they make it to mainstream news media. :/
- croes 1y agoWater vapor is a greenhouse gas
- arghwhat 1y agoAnd sunlight causes skin cancer, but we don't want to boycott neither water vapor nor sunlight lest we will have no precipitation and no... life. Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed. Evaporation from a datacenter is unlikely to make any notable impact through water vapor. What it could impact is highly localized potable water availability and humidity in places with e.g. low precipitation and limited reservoir capacity. And, again, note that other cooling methods are also in use, and that other things also use evaporative cooling. Heck, even when evaporative cooling is used, it doesn't necessarily mean that the water escapes into the atmosphere! Both heat pipes and refrigeration cycles are forms of evaporative cooling where the gas is allowed to condense, cool and evaporate again.
- croes 1y ago