Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/3122178

Here is the original link: https://actionaid.org/news/2023/causes-fueling-climate-crisis-are-receiving-20-times-more-financing-solutions-new

Nonprofit organizations in Borneo are training Indigenous communities to formally establish their native land rights in order to protect their local areas from such encroachment. But first, they need to demarcate which land is theirs. To do so, they are turning to mapping technologies such as GPS and geographic information systems (GIS), and in some cases drone photography, to document their native land. Once it has been sufficiently mapped, they can apply to have their land be legally recognized as protected native land, and fight against illegal intrusions by logging and plantation companies in court. Without that protection, these communities face displacement, destruction of their homes, and a loss of their cultural identity.

India's mining and oil giant Vedanta ran a covert lobbying campaign to weaken key environmental regulations during the pandemic, and India’s government approved the changes without public consultation and implemented them.

@PaulHBeckwith

Note – I authored this piece, welcome all critique and discussion on the subject, thank you!

As the world struggles to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and parts of Asia, Europe and the United States swelter in extreme heat, subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas are costing the equivalent of 7.1 percent of global gross domestic product. That’s more than governments spend annually on education (4.3 percent of global income) and about two thirds of what they spend on healthcare (10.9 percent).

Well, this is the saddest thing I've seen for a while.

English translation of linked article:

STARTMAG » Energy and Environment » How much water the data centers of Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft consume

How much water the data centers of Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft consume: While data centers have been audited about their electricity usage, little is known about their water usage. But that could change soon. All the details. 19 August 2023 07:53

We tend to think of the Internet as an immaterial object, but websites exist in the real world in the form of rows of servers that never shut down, filling data centers that need to be cooled down to prevent technical failures. Operators such as Amazon, Google , Meta and Microsoft use a variety of systems to do this: the most energy efficient ones – such as cooling towers – typically evaporate water to cool the air circulating in buildings.

DATA CENTERS AND DROUGHT

With drought spreading across the globe, battles are emerging between data center operators and adjacent communities over local water supplies in places like Chile, Uruguay and parts of the US Southwest. In the north of Holland, public outrage erupted last year when a local news agency reported that a Microsoft data center complex was consuming more than 4 times the amount of water the company had previously disclosed.

Some of northern Europe's colder and wetter hubs, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, have stalled development of new centers due to concerns over energy use, leading companies to look further afield. Operators of hyperscale data centers – those with more than 5,000 servers – are migrating to places where water is abundant, such as Norway, but also to drought-prone places, such as Italy and Spain, where energy is more affordable (and where extreme heat is becoming the norm).

HOW MUCH WATER DO DATA CENTERS CONSUME?

While data centers have undergone scrutiny about their electricity usage, little is known about their water usage, even from the tech companies themselves. A survey conducted last year by the consultancy Uptime Institute found that just 39% of data centers also tracked their water usage, a 12% drop from 2021. Tech companies have in the past refused to disclose information on the energy and water consumption of individual centres, arguing that those data are a trade secret.

Over the past two years, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have begun publishing their total water usage across their operations, but they don't break down the number by business unit, or use standardized metrics. Bluefield Research has estimated that data centers use over a billion gallons of water per day, including water used for power generation.

WHAT THE EUROPEAN UNION WILL DO

Governments are starting to ask for more information. From March 2024, the European Commission will require operators to disclose wide-ranging data on their energy and water consumption to the public. In the UK, utility Thames Water is studying how much water data centers use in London and, depending on the results, may adjust its pricing model for water-intensive activities.

“Identifying which water-intensive customers the data centers are hasn't been easy,” said John Hernon, who is leading the investigation. Operators often use shell companies to apply for planning permits, and from the outside a data center can look like any department store or factory.

CALCULATION POWER AND WATER CONSUMPTION

Arman Shehabi, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, best known for a landmark paper on energy use in data centers, thinks data centers could be contributing to water shortages as droughts get longer and deeper. intense. Part of the problem, he explained, is that data center operators "usually ask last at the table," straining the system by demanding access to scarce water, after agricultural interests and local communities they have already worked out a plan. “Everyone will experience it,” he added.

Companies say data centers are becoming more energy efficient, but the increase in overall demand for computing power is outpacing those gains. The rush to build large language models used in generative AI has created an increased demand for more powerful processors. The specialized chips required for artificial intelligence, known as accelerators, emit so much more heat than generic chips that "data center operators are having to completely rethink their cooling systems," commented Colm Shorten, data sustainability expert center at real estate investment firm JLL.

Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California Riverside, conducted research estimating that training GPT-3 in Microsoft's US data centers directly consumed 700,000 liters of water in about a month, not including the indirect use of water associated with electricity generation. The team also calculated that each short conversation of 20 to 50 questions and answers with ChatGPT consumes approximately 500 milliliters of water.

WHAT THE COMPANIES WILL DO

“Microsoft is investing in research to make large systems more sustainable and efficient, both in training and in application,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Climate change is a real and urgent challenge, with an increasingly serious impact on our businesses, our communities and the ecosystems that support them”. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Shorten said that over time data centers will need to fundamentally change the way they dissipate heat. “The gold standard is a process called immersive cooling, where servers are immersed in a special fluid that transfers heat from the chips,” she explained. For now, operators are likely to opt for a hybrid model, where a high-performance section of the data center will be liquid-cooled, while the rest will continue to use air conditioning."

Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft have all made water stewardship commitments, promising to use more unpotable and recycled water and replenish more water than they consume operationally by 2030. That's the equivalent of carbon offsetting planting trees, something that looks good on paper, but may not directly benefit communities affected by data centers, because water can only be replenished in places where it's easy to do so.

See also: Google's Water Use Is Soaring. AI Is Only Going To Make It Worse.

So how much water do these data centers use? The short answer is that not even the owners know, but estimates put it in the area of billions of gallons per day. Meanwhile Google is planning to open a data center in Uruguay, a country currently undergoing an historic drought.

Archived version

Like many others I have been keeping a close eye on the graphs at climatereanalyzer.org for awhile, and let me tell you they are TERRIFYING right now.

The 'anaesthetics' mentioned in the title refers to things like the ENSO, carbon captured by the ocean, and ice and aerosol albedo, whose roles the last few years have helped mask the true effects of global warming. That's changing this year.

From the article:

The last El Niño event was in 2015 to 2016, which also happened to be the warmest year on record for global average surface temperatures on land and sea.
But Dr Cai said the Earth this year was “eight years of background warming” worse off than in 2016.

The bright, smooth surface of the ice reflects a lot of sunlight back into space, meaning its heat is not absorbed into the ocean.
Antarctic sea ice extent this year has fallen to record lows and is struggling to recover substantially during the winter months like normal.

Aerosols act like a “shade” to incoming sunlight, reflecting it back into space.
“We’ve been reducing emissions, which is good for air quality, but it means now the carbon dioxide signal can punch through,” Professor Collins said.

Dr Bracco said this year’s record was indicative of a level of background global warming that could not be undone for hundreds of years, and urgent action was needed to stop it getting worse.

Source: https://digital.mdl.nws.noaa.gov/?zoom=4&lat=37&lon=-96.5&layers=F000BTTTFTT®ion=0&element=8&mxmz=false&barbs=false&subl=TFFFFF&units=english&wunits=nautical&coords=latlon&tunits=localt

If you live in any of these areas, stay safe and healthy and remember to look out for your friends and neighbours who might be vulnerable.

edit: thanks for the correction Deme.
edit2: the temperatures were in Fahrenheit, I guess I switched to Celcius and took the screenshot before the change had loaded. The website seems to reeeeeally struggle with switching units, so I'm going to leave it in (properly marked) Fahrenheit. I don't know, I thought the National Weather Service was going straight to the source, but their website is really shit.

The dominance of the coal-based blast furnaces-basic oxygen furnace (BF–BOF) method in the Chinese steel sector, along with its large scale, presents significant challenges for decarbonisation efforts. [And it may also be a major reason why China is trying to discourage other countries from imposing a carbon tariff, ed.]

Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Ontario put Dungeness crabs in water just slightly more acidic than normal—conditions that are already present in some coastal ecosystems and could be widespread by the year 2100 if humans continue to emit a high level of greenhouse gases. They found that the animals need to be exposed to cadaverine, a food signaling chemical, at a concentration 10 times higher than normal before they register its presence.

The world’s largest freshwater lake by volume and declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996, Lake Baikal is both sacred to the indigenous populations living around it and a popular eco-tourism destination. Now Russia’s lower house of parliament approved amendments to the country’s law on the protection of Baikal in their first reading, which ecologists believe the amendments would pave the way for mass commercial wood harvesting and the building of outsized tourism infrastructure.