this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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Climate

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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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Why the energy transition looks like an energy addition | The energy addition framing has a point. But it draws the wrong conclusions. (janrosenow.substack.com)
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[–] growsomethinggood@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think you've misunderstood my point here. I'm not saying that data centers care about renewable energy, quite the opposite. I'm saying that the buildout of renewables has lead to enough surplus energy (in the intention to replace fossil fuels) such that tech companies said, what if we use that cheap power instead, and built up the demand for that power such that fossil fuels are not decommissioned but even increased like you pointed out. Off-grid power for data centers is because this demand is outstripping even the excess supply right now because everyone is demanding a piece of the pie. It's wholly unsustainable and when it hits a wall it is going to be ugly.

[–] Chaf@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Then I misunderstood that, but I still don't agree. The "surplus energy" of the renewables is not really there. Granted, in some regions (not really sure about the USA, though, I don't have data on that), renewables can provide > 100% of the required electricity for a few hours per day, but that's not really a lot of surplus energy. If it was, they wouldn't have to build power plants just for the data centers.

You even kind of mention that with

because this demand is outstripping even the excess supply

Electricity price definitely is a factor for data centers, but having electricity 24/7 is even more important to them. Also, what made AI feasible was the usage of GPUs or even more specialized hardware, that is tailored to those tasks. Machine learning as a concept has been around since the 1980s or even earlier, not just the last 20 years. Paradoxically, that increase in efficiency caused a drastic increase in total power consumption for AI.

[–] growsomethinggood@reddthat.com 1 points 1 month ago

I don't think you're reading what I'm writing, so I'm going to leave this here. Have a good one!