this post was submitted on 24 Feb 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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Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret (www.nature.com)
submitted 8 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[–] spaduf@slrpnk.net 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

To address the article a little more directly: it's notable that the article begins with Sam Altman's take on the subject. His feelings are based on two fundamentally flawed premises:

  1. These models MUST get bigger for the improvements that their users DEMAND.
  2. The only solution to any environmental criticism is FUSION. A technology that Altman has personally invested in.

2 is ridiculous just on the face of it, but I think folks may have a harder time understanding why 1 is problematic. It is true that OpenAIs business model essentializes the idea that these models can't ever be run locally, but the incentive to use their cloud services are quickly diminishing as smaller, local models catch up. This cycle will likely continue until local models are good enough to serve the needs of the vast majority of people, especially as specialized hardware makes it's way into more and more consumer devices.

[–] wildcherry@slrpnk.net 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah I don't think me using llama on my 10 years old cpu will do any harm :3