Cloudflare Claims Migration to Their Services Can Reduce Network CO2 by 78-96% | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare Claims Migration to Their Services Can Reduce Network CO2 by 78-96%

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12 pointsrbanffy10 comments

The datacenter and internet revolution has made no observable difference to CO2 levels whatsoever, in fact you can't see signs of any specific events in graphs of CO2:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/climate-change?facet=no...

The rise of China, the internet, nuclear power, green power, the growth of air travel, the endless global conferences. There just aren't any inflections in that graph to link to human decisions.

Every company in the world could switch off its networking equipment tomorrow and it'd not make the blindest bit of difference. So this looks like a pretty icky attempt to claim that people have a moral responsibility to give Cloudflare money. Companies should not engage in such marketing.

Are you saying that human activity is not related to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or are you saying that the totality of human activity is responsible for a large part of the CO2 increase, and reducing the emissions of one small part won't make a big difference?

I won't address the former which is a ridiculous claim. For the latter, the truth is that we need to reduce emissions everywhere. If there was exactly one sector responsible for the CO2 emissions, it would not be a big problem: we could just stop it. The reason it is a hard problem is that the whole modern human activity is responsible. And changing everything is hard.

> So this looks like a pretty icky attempt to claim that people have a moral responsibility to give Cloudflare money.

Agreed here. Greenwashing is greenwashing.

I don't think the right interpretation of the CO2 measurement data is obvious or clear tbh. Naively, one would read that graph to mean there has been a constant level of emissions since records began. Concentration in the atmosphere just goes up by the same amount year in, year out. Yet accounting of per-country emissions doesn't show that, it shows huge increases in the rate of emissions over time:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

Which implies, what? I dunno. These two graphs do not reconcile. You could argue several different causes for that.

> Naively, one would read that graph to mean there has been a constant level of emissions since records began. Concentration in the atmosphere just goes up by the same amount year in, year out.

> Which implies, what? I dunno. These two graphs do not reconcile.

Did you actually look at the numbers? The CO2 levels in your first link are not growing linearly. Of course you can quickly look at the graph, and "naively" say that to you, it looks like a line.

That doesn't change the fact that it is not a line, and when it is about your survival in the next few decades, you may want to do something more than throwing "naive" interpretations like this out there.

For instance: https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/8/5/61

If the trend is so tiny it's invisible to the naked eye, that's another way of saying that human activity is having no perceptible impact on CO2 levels, which isn't meant to be the case is it.

BTW your paper is a bit of an odd citation, could you explain further? It itself states that its own conclusions are "unintuitive" and that they need a complex model in which there are vast non-linear sinks absorbing human emissions, as otherwise they face problems explaining the data. Also, that "measured atmospheric CO2 concentration values continue a steady decline as one moves backward in time from about 1925 to 1750". So CO2 concentrations were steadily rising during this time that climatologists usually call "pre industrial", where was it coming from?

> If the trend is so tiny it's invisible to the naked eye

You cannot say "we emit more CO2 every year, though the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases linearly, that's weird", and then when someone tells you it's not increasing linearly, say "oh but when I quickly look at that one graph there, to me it looks like a line, so that proves that it is a line".

Agree with you regarding the underlying data and the reality it presents.

Disagree with your view on marketing: companies engage in whatever marketing delivers dollars in revenue and profit to the bottom line.

If people are dumb enough to blindly believe the green bs then companies are dumb enough to take their money.

"Monopolies can reduce network CO2"

Monopolies are also incredibly efficient at delivering shareholder value while minimising CO2 release.

And Cloudflare is able to deliver the highest mass surveillance per watt in the industry.

I read that as "big organizations can make significant contributions to reduce CO2 emissions", which makes sense to me.

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