96 pointsby Anon842 hours ago8 comments
  • MSFT_Edgingan hour ago
    We may lose stable seasons for growing crops, but at least the chat bot can embed an ad into your question while you wait for your burrito taxi.

    What is the point of this convenience when it really seems to just be making people miserable and isolated?

    We're driving off a cliff, and our elected government has a death drive.

    • 21asdffdsa12an hour ago
      Worse, they have a "i want to flee responsibility" drive. You can see it in there eyes, when they hold press conferences, while having on the paper the verbose "you are absolutely right". They want the perks, not the responsibility that comes with power.
    • motbus315 minutes ago
      Which burrito? The one which couldn't be mad because there is not food?
    • otikikan hour ago
      > your burrito taxi

      Which you are financing through a BNPL platform.

      • selimthegrim6 minutes ago
        The financing for the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel got stolen to build a bridge.
    • stavrosan hour ago
      Stop focusing on energy usage and start focusing on energy generation. It doesn't matter how much energy we consume if it comes from renewables.
      • jfengelan hour ago
        Which is why we have just paid billions of dollars to cancel a renewable power project. And are imposing extra fees on cars that can be driven on renewable energy.

        So, now I'm focused. I'm very focused.

        • apian hour ago
          OP did not say this is what we were doing. Said this is what we should do.

          What we are doing is attempting to hold back progress on generation while subsidizing demand, which is literally the absolute dumbest possible thing.

          Unless you are the fossil fuel industry. Then it’s great.

          • jfengel43 minutes ago
            It's also great if boiling the planet is your actual goal.

            I wouldn't have thought that it would be so popular, but apparently it is, and people can't get t done fast enough.

            I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.

            • vixen992 minutes ago
              Hyperbole does not help. Many countries are retreating from renewable promises. Make an argument for them and for instance, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam who are all turning their backs on renewables and increasing fossil fuel use. The Philippines are already using 60% coal and are making easier to increase production.

              Indonesian Energy Minister: "I decided, let coal continue for now. This is about survival mode and efficiency. We must not sacrifice our people with high electricity prices.”. Fair to say that, given some of the highest electricity prices in the world, a popular wish in the UK is for Miliband to do likewise.

              Show a route to renewables plus survival and there will be progress.

              https://climatecosmos.com/blog/10-countries-dropping-their-n...

            • surgical_fire8 minutes ago
              > I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.

              There is something tragic about the human potential being wasted in the most retarded of endeavors, but I wouldn't be able to imagine of a more apt way for the horde of morons that inhabit this planet to go extinct.

            • stego-tech30 minutes ago
              I mean, it's not a hard conspiracy theory to fabricate that space-focused billionaires like Elmo and Butthead would want Earth to become increasingly uninhabitable to justify more outside investment in their "solutions" of space race-ing to Mars or colonies that they can then rule over.

              It's a conspiracy theory, but the best ones are always rooted in some morsel of truth (Elon/Bezos wanting more investment in their space firms).

      • mathgeekan hour ago
        It does matter because of the side effects (pollution, etc.). The environment and how it affects humanity is a complex system with many variables. Both generation and consumption are in there.
        • stavrosan hour ago
          We're talking about global warming specifically here, though. Cars and planes should be a much bigger worry than AI power usage.
          • breakyerself40 minutes ago
            Not when AI is directly resulting in increased greenhouse gas pollution. It's all of the above. Any source of greenhouse gas pollution is bad. Cars, planes, ships, AI data centers running on fossil fuel energy. It's all bad.
            • stavros27 minutes ago
              No. This is disingenuous. Something that consumes electricity doesn't care where the electricity comes from. Fix the power source, and you automatically fix every single consumer in existence at once.
              • discreteevent4 minutes ago
                [delayed]
              • mistrial918 minutes ago
                narrowing the topic, that is exactly the quality that energy transition theorists are leaning on. The electrical grid is uniquely able to maintain a stable engineered and market place while inputs and loads change quite a bit.
          • ajucan hour ago
            There's an easy 19th century solution to cars and planes - public transport. It could reduce the usage significantly, save people lots of time, reduce pollution, make people healthier through making the environment more walkable, reduce crime. We don't do it not because the technology isn't there, but because it's more profitable for people to induce consumption by planning our cities and suburbs around cars.

            There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.

      • goda908 minutes ago
        Renewables are not without impact. We shouldn't consume mindlessly just because we might eliminate fossil fuels some day.
      • agiloban hour ago
        What good does PV generated energy make if all that energy is used to generate heat and evaporating water?
        • jfengelan hour ago
          Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.

          The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.

          If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.

          • goda90a minute ago
            Not all heat from the sun stays in the atmosphere though. How much does photovoltaic impact albedo and radiance through the atmosphere? Of course that's infinitely better than GHG emissions, but it should give us pause in the pursuit of more and more consumption.
        • api43 minutes ago
          That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.

          Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.

          The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.

          • ajuc38 minutes ago
            https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008EO28...

            Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.

            • api32 minutes ago
              If we tame fusion at scale this could become an actual issue in the far future. As it stands we have nothing that can out-scale solar or wind. Fission maybe if we went all in on breeders and stuff but that would not be cost competitive with renewables plus batteries. Breeder cycle fission is complex and expensive.

              Hopefully if we get really good at fusion we will go LARP The Expanse with it instead of boiling the ocean.

      • dopesoap2 minutes ago
        [dead]
      • simgtan hour ago
        It does matter because for now renewables are manufactured mostly with coal and oil

        EDIT: I'm not a renewable skeptic, answers bellow

        • michaelbuckbeean hour ago
          All of the cradle-to-grave studies I've seen about greenhouse gas emissions for renewables versus coal/oil still indicate massive improvements.

          This government meta study of 3,000 such studies puts PV solar at roughly 20x less emissions than coal.

          https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf

          • simgtan hour ago
            Yes, but you're missing the point, I'm not debating that. Renewables aren't free, we should care about consumption just as much as production, and we don't know (yet) how to sustain the current consumption with renewables only, that includes being able to manufacture renewables.
            • michaelbuckbee43 minutes ago
              That's fair and fwiw something I'm in firm agreement with you, but also just not what I took from your comment.
        • anon7000an hour ago
          This doesn’t matter that much. Solar and batteries will last for decades with minimal maintenance and no input.

          Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.

          Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.

          Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.

          • qsera41 minutes ago
            Imagine if all the vehicles that run of fossil fules is converted into EV. What are the incentives in place to properly recycle the batteries? Does a new battery technology go into production before the technology to recycle it is production grade/economically viable? What happens when we are getting like a million EV batteries, globally per day, to dispose off? What happens when these batteries use vastly different chemical composition (because they are from various stages of battery evolution) and need vastly different methods to process? What happens when these things pile up and poison the land? dumped in ocean or rivers? burned up releasing god-knows-what into air?

            How long before the regulation (often times toothless) kicks in to handle these things?

            I am all for getting rid of pollution, but there should be some caution in rushing onto new things, which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

          • simgt37 minutes ago
            Everything you wrote is plain obvious to anyone who looked into the topic. But come on, we don't have to change anything about our consumption because we'll eventually reach some solar punk utopia? That's the comment I was replying to.

            Nothing for now tells us we can power our current needs with renewables only, however we know we can drive around in much lighter vehicles, fly much less, eat more local, buy less clothes, use compute for less stupid things in data centers.

        • speed_spreadan hour ago
          They're manufactured once and then generate way more energy than was used to make them.
          • simgtan hour ago
            Of course, but pretending consumption doesn't matter in that situation is just silly
        • stavrosan hour ago
          Which is a tiny CO2 spend compared to the benefit, unless you dishonestly factor in manufacturing energy costs as coming from oil.
    • cindyllman hour ago
      [dead]
  • ptaffs5 minutes ago
    The Book "Don't think of an Elephant" by George Lakoff covers how the term "climate change" has been pushed by those with a status-quo agenda, to reduce the urgency and engagement with "global warming". The linked article uses both, but global warming more dominantly, including "heating" in the headline.
  • ameliusan hour ago
    Well, at least the frogs won't notice it.
    • loloquwowndueoan hour ago
      The myth that frogs stay in water until boiled has been debunked with actual frogs - at some point they just jump out.
      • pepperoni_pizza14 minutes ago
        IIRC the original experiment that everyone keeps referring to where frogs jump when you put them into boiling water but don't if you heat up the water gradually was frogs with their brains removed.

        Which makes using it as a metaphor for the climate change and humanity either entirely wrong or much more fitting, depending on where you stand.

      • hootzan hour ago
        Maybe they are smarter than humans, then!
      • bcoughlan44 minutes ago
        I misinterpreted the parent comment to mean that they won't notice it because they will be extinct!
    • davidrjones1977an hour ago
      And apparently neither will we, until we are boiling.
  • gmuslera35 minutes ago
    It is not just twice as fast, the pressure to keep rising the rate is still building up. CO2 emissions keeps piling up for centuries, more sea ice is permanently melting, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate. Positive feedback loops are making that that heating twice as fast happen at shorter periods.

    And over that, there are jumps to new higher baselines like with happened in the previous El Niño, and will happen in the incoming monster one.

  • p0w3n3d21 minutes ago
    Oh, better to build more AI centres fast, as long as it's not forbidden
  • chaostheoryan hour ago
    Population decline from collapsing birthrates should help.
    • 20 minutes ago
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    • bdcravens30 minutes ago
      Except many of the same champions of AI are also speaking out against population decline (Musk, Altman, Bezos, etc)
      • p0w3n3d19 minutes ago
        they want to reduce people to have possibility to create AI centres... Highlander rules
        • bdcravens13 minutes ago
          No, I mean the opposite - they are advocating for fighting against population decline, and are waxing poetic on how to increase fertility and birth rates.
      • morkalork11 minutes ago
        It's a real weird contradiction. They don't want the population to decline but they also want to replace everyone's jobs with AI and skip out on UBI. So what's the point?
        • kgwxd7 minutes ago
          Slavery. They've all specifically stated that exact goal as well. No contradiction at all.
  • jmclnxan hour ago
    >If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected.

    I wonder if we are already there :( I remember a year or 2 ago we breached 1.5C for a short period of time.

    Crypto mining was bad enough, now with AI and Trump, I expect it will happen sooner then later.

    We did this to ourselves. We had ~40 years of warnings but politicians we elected did not want to do any real work for fear of loosing their cushy job were lobbyists do all the work for them.

    • leonidasrupan hour ago
      Who do you mean "we"? Look at the evolution of CO2 emisions in the past 40 years by region.

      https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

      • burkaman38 minutes ago
        I think "we" refers to "we human beings". That chart looks pretty similar to population growth by world region (with the notable exception of Africa). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-regions-with-p...
      • Epa095an hour ago
        I find that the per capita graph is more informative https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
        • hokumguruan hour ago
          Why does per capita matter when it’s the total emissions that we actually care about?

          Wonderful, the United States uses more per capita than anyone else. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of total warming. Even if we cut to zero we still continue.

          • myrmidon6 minutes ago
            Because emissions are caused by people heating their homes, fueling cars/planes or building stuff for consumption.

            With twice as many people (acting similarly) you have twice the emissions, it's as simple as that.

            To reduce emissions, you need everyone doing their part. And it is also obviously easier and more effective to tackle high-emitters first (because incentivizing a single US family to have their second car be a bit smaller and electric is obviously less burdensome than banning 3 Indian families from heating their homes in winter...)

          • u_fucking_dork41 minutes ago
            China should clearly just stop manufacturing the US’s entire way of life right now to bring those numbers down.
        • irishcoffee34 minutes ago
          Per capita doesn't mean nearly as much as total. If the countries above the US were instead on par or below the US as it relates to totals, we wouldn't have the same issue we have now.
      • c0nducktr20 minutes ago
        Some people always try to push the blame onto someone else...
      • dtechan hour ago
        In good faith I cannot see an argument here, it's either

        Region X was first and reduced their emissions 10-20% so it's fine and it's region Y that's the problem, or

        Region X is fine because they have less people, region Y should reduce even though they already have a fraction of per-capita emissions

        Both seem like pretty shitty arguments

      • KronisLVan hour ago
        Oh hell yeah, EU is doing something right! I fear to think how the US stats have changed. And China is… alarming.
        • DharmaPolice28 minutes ago
          It's relatively "easy" to cut pollution if you just outsource most of your manufacturing.
        • 41 minutes ago
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      • postflopclarityan hour ago
        now look at it measured from consumption per capita ...
      • simgtan hour ago
        Asia is producing all of our shit. Also: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions
        • irishcoffee33 minutes ago
          And most all of it is actual shit. Literal garbage stacking up in landfills.
      • ajuc35 minutes ago
        WE buy stuff that WE oursourced to Asia and then WE blame them for producing it. WE also set the standard of living that is unsustainable if everybody on Earth achieve it.

        What's your problem with the "we" word, again?

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    • 21asdffdsa12an hour ago
      Trump blocked Hormus, thus stopping oil shipping. Putin blocked gas transfers to the west. They are doing there part.
      • elektrontameran hour ago
        Holy hell you're right. Never thought they were so concerned about the environment and global warming.
        • 21asdffdsa1226 minutes ago
          You use the disabilities to get done what must be done, where reason and institutions can not work.
      • voidUpdatean hour ago
        The ships have to go the long way around instead...
    • Razenganan hour ago
      Writing prompt: Humankind is extinct but the AI servers keep running, and one day a random automated crawler/scrapper bot strikes up a conversation with an AI, somehow sparking sentience...
    • Sharlinan hour ago
      Let's not delude ourselves. Crypto and AI electricity use is bad, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the banal, everyday carbon sources that really matter. Even Trump cannot make things much worse in the big picture (he's actually been pretty good at providing reasons to decouple even faster…)
      • hilariouslyan hour ago
        He can continue to propagandize the lie to reduce people's belief in changing is good(and has), change laws to benefit oil companies (and has), and cause wars over oil(and has). Seems like he has plenty he can do to make the current situation worse.
        • Sharlina few seconds ago
          And all that amounts to a tiny footnote in the bookkeeping as long as people drive ICE cars, travel in airliners, eat beef, and heat or cool their homes with gas or coal or oil.
        • lstoddan hour ago
          What you refuse to understand is all that you cited even if absolutely true would have had an impact unmeasurable with what tools we have at the moment.

          Do you understand the word "unmeasurable"?

          It means that whatever value you assign to that particular trump variable is so below the noise that it does not matter, can not matter, and anyone pretending it does is a manipulator; a crook.

  • indianbungholean hour ago
    [flagged]