this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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:

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

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[–] SHITPOSTING_ACCOUNT@feddit.de 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Bullshit article/study:

These numbers are estimates based on the assumption that the Bitcoin mines run on water-dependent cooling systems typical in large data centers.

So they took the typical datacenter water consumption per MW, applied that to some estimate of Bitcoin power consumption (wouldn't be surprised if they did the usual "use current output rates and multiply with power-per-output numbers of long obsolete hardware", often seen in "studies" "showing" how tech X is horrible for the environment), and assumed that would be it.

All pictures of Bitcoin mines I've seen used (direct) free cooling which doesn't use water. That has changed now, but simply assuming it's the same as for normal data centers is an obviously questionable assumption.

Fun experiment: look up the CO2 intensity of electricity, look up prices for industrial electricity, look up claims of "CO2 emission per Netflix movie streamed", then compare with the cost of your Netflix subscription and wonder whether Netflix would really be profitable if streaming was that power hungry.

(Also, the author misunderstood how this system works: "However, some data centers and crypto mines use a different system that keeps computers cool and cuts down water consumption by immersing them in a non-conductive liquid." Now that DC has a hot liquid, which they could cool in a number of different ways, some using water some not. Which system they use to get the heat from the chip to the cooling system doesn't matter if they aren't freecooling)

[–] kbal@fedia.io 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Okay, but it's not as if electricity consumption isn't more than enough by itself to prove bitcoin a worse than useless idea.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee -5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

It's fine if it's renewable electricity

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That energy could still be going somewhere else or used to make hydrogen. Plus making the cards is pretty material and energy intensive.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why is making hydrogen useful? The universe is 99% hydrogen.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The atmosphere of earth is 0.000055% hydrogen, so it's not common here. But it's useful because it's an easily transportable energy storage medium.

[–] Starglasses@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 11 months ago

What doea bitcoin do for the world?

[–] sour@kbin.social 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

is use by cryptobro

[–] AEMarling@slrpnk.net 7 points 11 months ago

Crypto is a Ponzi scheme that burns the world. Tech bros froth at the idea of greenwashing their scam by saying it is solarpunk. No.