this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
28 points (72.6% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5383 readers
675 users here now

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:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
28
Excess memes and ‘reply all’ emails are bad for climate, researcher warns (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

"... research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy..."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I agree, but the key point of the story isn't IT in general as a growing problematic sector, it's specifically storage. IT is a broad category that can include a lot of different technological modalities (ICT according to that study you linked), but whinging about memes stored somewhere forgotten is pretty low on the list of practical concerns.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yes I agree that the headline and article is silly to reference memes and undermines the study as a whole which seems more sound.

I know loads of people of take hundred of photos a day and then pay a cloud hoster (or use a "free" service) to store it indefinitely and never look back at it again.

Cloud storage isn't straight forwardly just hard storage because its kept in data centers such that it can be downloaded at any point.

Cloud storage is replacing any sense of needing a digital archivist processes for people and businesses because it much cheaper and easier to store it just in case the data is needed again rather than actually strategetically thinking about what data is important to keep and what isn't.