this post was submitted on 10 Mar 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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. | How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy? (www.newyorker.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Counterpoint: I have a $5 RISC-V computer I can power off USB that has a dedicated AI chip capable of running basic image recognition/voice synthesis/time series prediction/whatever you want algorithms. This is what people need to think about when they think about the future of AI. All this shit with piping things into datacenters to throw away energy talking to the stochastic parrot is A - not even remotely going to be the main use for AI, B - not going to be necessary for tons of tasks (likely won't be necessary to have ChatGPT-quality interactions within a couple years). ChatGPT is like the ENIAC of AI. Complaining about the energy use of AI and pointing to the energy use behind ChatGPT queries is the same kind of mistake as when Thomas Watson said in 1943 that there was, maybe, a world market for five computers. Yeah, there was maybe a world market for five ENIAC's, tops, but get with the picture, people. AI's much bigger than LLM's.