Tag: climate change

Guilty…

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One evening in the spring of 2015, I filmed a 15-second video out the window of an Amtrak train as it rattled across the barren flatlands of southern New Jersey. There’s nothing artful or interesting about the clip. All you see is a slanted rush of white and yellow lights. I can’t remember why I made it. Until a few days ago, I had never even watched it. And yet for the past nine years, that video has been sitting on a server in a data center somewhere, silently and invisibly taking a very small toll on our planet…

Data centers and data-transmission networks now account for as much as 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption…

With other forms of consumption that are bad for the planet, we all understand that the main burden of responsibility falls on the big players—industry, government, the rich and powerful. But we also acknowledge that everyone else has a part to play too. I stop running the water while I’m brushing my teeth. I carry groceries in a burlap tote. I turn off the lights whenever I step out of my apartment, regardless of whether I’m leaving for five minutes or a week…

Every time we make a new video or send an email, or post a photo of our latest meal, it’s like turning on a small light bulb that’ll never be turned off…We’ve got to think about whether it’s really bad to carry on with our current digital practices.”In other words: To help save the planet, should we be using less data? Given how much of modern life depends on megabytes and teraflops, the answer could be a key facet to living nobly in the AI age…

By my estimate, following a formula included in a recent research paper, storing my train video has created about 100 grams of CO2 over the past decade. At first blush, this is effectively nothing: less than one three-100ths of a percent of the yearly CO2 emissions from a pet cat. But data slough off us like skin cells. Last year, I sent 960 videos to the cloud. Because phones record videos in much higher quality these days, most of these clips are larger than that 15-second video from 2015. And like many other people, I have a sprawling digital footprint; many of my stored videos have been either sent to or received from at least one other person who is also storing them on one or two cloud platforms…

We just need to start to think around the impact of every button we press ‘Send’ or ‘Upload’ on,” Jackson told me. As a first step, he suggests going back through your phone and computer and getting rid of all the data that you’ll never use again. (The industry term for such detritus is dark data; much of Jackson’s research focuses on teaching companies to reuse old information instead of making new bytes.) That’s easier said than done. When I was looking through old videos for this story, I found many clips that sparked cherished memories. None of these videos was particularly fascinating. But a data center had conserved the data for so long that watching them now transported me, joyfully, to a simpler time. Deciding whether to scrap any of these is not the same as deciding whether to turn a light bulb off when you step out of a room. “The light bulb, you can just come back and switch it back on,” Jackson admitted. “Once you’ve gotten rid of data, it’s gone.” Even my feelings about the train video—which did not spark any fond memories—remain unresolved. For now, it’s still up there…

In a report published in 2021, Berners-Lee and a team of researchers found that if the information-and-communications sector is going to match the reductions necessary to keep global warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, it will have to cut its carbon emissions by 42 percent by the end of this decade, and 72 percent by the end of the next…’

More fundamentally, maybe we don’t need to turn everything into data. If I put down my phone the next time I’m on a train, it won’t save the planet. But I’ll be looking out the window with my own eyes, creating a memory that emits no carbon at all.

— Arthur Holland Michel, from “Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever.” (The Atlantic, July 5, 2024)

…Successive dawns to re-merge perennially into the light. It basked in a wordless moral plenitude, innocent…

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Video taken at Twilight, 5:25 a.m. this morning. 68° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.

For more shots from this morning click here: Frank & Egrets and here: Waves and Light Show.

Post inspired by a quote from Rachel Cusk’s new book: “Nature seemed to be in its heyday, seemed to speak of its power of recovery from human violence, its vigil through successive dawns to re-emerge perennially into the light. It basked in a wordless moral plenitude, innocent.” — Rachel Cusk, Parade: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 18, 2024)

That’s my diagnosis

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That’s my diagnosis. My prescription might be simple: be kind to each other, remembering the distress we’ve all lived through; defend the facts with ardor; fight fascism and climate chaos in the ways you’re best equipped to (and if you’re lucky, that will connect you to other good people doing that crucial work). And if you’re lonely know that even in that you’re not alone; millions are, in large part because of how our world got rearranged. But diagnosis is the first step of treatment or cure, and just talking about how personal the impact is of this chaotic new era matters.

— Rebecca Solnit, from “Trump, Covid, the climate crisis – we’ve had a hard few years. The wounds linger.” (The Guardian, June 4, 2024)

It’s a cloudy day…

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…clouds remain one of the least understood—or least reliably predictable—factors in our climate models…

“They are among the biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate change,” Da Yang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told me.Yang is a cloud expert—a cloud guy, really, drawn to their mysteries. He recently moved from California to Chicago, where he gets to see a lot more clouds on a daily basis. “I find clouds are beautiful to watch,” he said. “If I take an airplane, and I can see clouds down below or far away, I’m always fascinated by how rich the cloud organizations are. How they interact with each other …” He trailed off. Clouds are complex and ephemeral, which makes them difficult to fully understand. Yang listed for me key aspects of clouds for which we still lack comprehensive understanding: how they form, what determines their spatial scale, how long they can last. “Those sound like simple questions,” he said, “but they are actually at the forefront of the field.” […]

One major stumbling block is the resolution of climate models, or how finely or coarsely they represent the Earth; to represent individual clouds, which can be the size of a minivan or the state of Minnesota, would require models at a resolution finer than the current finest model. Climate modelers have recently begun to produce fine-scale models at the regional level, where they can zoom in on the individual details of clouds. But, Yang told me, stitching such snapshots together into a picture of the whole globe would exceed the capacity of the largest existing supercomputer……

— Zoë Schlanger, from “No One Really Understands Clouds. They’re one of the greatest climate mysteries left.” (The Atlantic, May 28, 2024)

DK Photo: May 29, 2024 @ 7:00 pm.

Lightly Child, Lightly. The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

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No matter the circumstance, human suffering matters. Our attending to it matters. Acts of tenderness are not morally trivial. […]

For as Naomi Klein has reminded us, our demise isn’t all or nothing, at least not for the next few centuries. “There are degrees to how bad this thing can get,” Klein says. “Literally, there are degrees.” As we struggle to figure out how to notch back the degrees, so as to mitigate the suffering that a warming planet is going to bring, we also need to figure out forms of relationality—both to ourselves and to each other—that won’t make things worse.

By the time I finished 10:04, I felt like I understood some options: not being ashamed of the desire to make a living doing what we love, while also daring to imagine “art before or after capital”; paying as intense attention to our collectivity as to our individuality; demanding a politics based on more than reproductive futurism, without belittling the daily miracle of conception, nor the labor and mysterious promise of childbearing and -rearing; attempting to listen seriously to others, especially those who differ profoundly from ourselves, no matter how precontaminated the attempts; spending time reading and writing poetry; and more. Far from despair, I felt flooded with the sense that everything mattered, from meticulous descriptions of individual works of art to kissing the forehead of a passed-out intern to analyzing our political language to documenting the sensual details of our daily lives to bagging dried mangoes to the creation of the book I was holding in my hand to my deciding to spend time writing a review of it. “The earth is beautiful beyond all change,” Lerner repeats in 10:04, quoting the poet William Bronk. The inspired and inspiring accomplishment of his novel makes me want to say that sometimes, art is too. And maybe—if incredibly—so might we be, ourselves.

— Maggie Nelson, from “Beyond All Change. On Ben Lerner’s 10:04” in “Like Love: Essays and Conversations..” (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

Notes:

  • Photo: DK 5:11 am this morning at Cove Island Park. For more photos from this morning, click here for birds and here for landscape.
  • Thursday Posts inspired by Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
  • Book Review from The Guardian: “Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship“