Parts of the world are literally on fire but the US is redirecting money to halt renewables and towards gas.
The demand for energy is higher than ever due to AI data centers, but I guess the next model is more important than a habitable environment.
The demand for energy is higher than ever due to AI data centers, but I guess the next model is more important than a habitable environment.
Parts of the US are literally on fire.
* https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/usfs/map/#d:24hrs;@-100...
These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.
... while an offshore wind farm was once in DT's sight in Scotland.
The coordination between them is amazing - being able to pull this off in multiple European countries, the US and Canada at the same time.
So it might be correct to say that fires can be healthy for forests, but "supposed to" is more difficult to assert.
I just finished limbing, brush clearing, and preparing burn piles from a section of my forest because removing fuel is good, but most forests in America are young planted forests. They have smaller trees, less diversity, higher than typical density, and small trees that can cause fires to climb to crowns (where they then become deleterious rather than helpful.)
If we were to return to indigenous practices of regular burning, we would likely see healthier forests. But I'm not sure we'd see as much timber production from them. Since that's what most forests are held for... I don't see practices moving away from trying to maximize timber while minimizing cost any time soon.
I'm standing by my claims. However understand that I am in no way contradicting anything you said.
Indigenous practices changed which trees grew, for instance the Gary oak was much more prevalent in areas they tended. But old growth was predominantly removed by settlers.
If you want to specifically hike through the old-growth forests, Olympic Peninsula in WA is the best option.
Humans were modifying the Earth on the continent-wide scale long before the industrial age.
I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.
Yes, and that's a fancy way of saying "used periodic burns" to remove the vegetation to make the land more hospitable for grazers. Meaning more animals to hunt, this was arguably a form of agriculture and also served to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
> I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.
Then you should actually learn about the history, and not its Disneyified version.
Not that you shouldn't be careful, you can get yourself hurt in a natural fire (but it shouldn't be such a large fire that it kills you). Leave no trace should be your goal. Even if fire itself is something that doesn't matter, there are lots of other parts of leave no trace that that will also result in less fires.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/doe-data-centers-...
also - 1 year is a lot, if we actually act diligently to stave the warming crisis and to prepare for some of the effects through changes to construction & infrastructure.
Still, I would agree that Data Centers are just one particular aspect of the struggle against global warming.
We are seeing stuff like AMD buying Taalas, with their Llama 3 8B on a chip, being able to push 17.000 tokens / second.
Generated in 0,033s • 14.212 tok/s ...
People need to understand, that even AI companies do not like to build datacenters and the high energy needs. It cost them money and they are also looking at ways to develop better hardware / solutions that gives them more inference for cheaper (what means less power draw / heat generated).
Climate change is real, caused by humans, and the fires were seeing are absolutely exacerbated by the effects of the climate.
However this is the _least_ on fire the world has been for a while because it's usually Asian and Africa that are rampantly burning and they're improving land management techniques enough that it's tamping down on the worst of the burns.
Progress isn't evenly distributed
"Annual climate-disaster deaths averaged around 77,000 per year in the 1960s–70s, dropped to about 33,000/year in the 1980s–90s, and fell further to roughly 27,000/year in 2000–2019 even as the number of recorded climate disasters rose from about 1,171 to 3,656 to 6,641 across those same periods."
If you're optimising for human life, then "drill baby drill", as more energy = more wealth. More wealth = better infrastructure, health care, dealing with extreme weather conditions.
I'm assuming that we can drive our environment to that kind of state, maybe there's an upper limit on how bad the environment can get. I'm not a climate scientist and don't have the curiosity to look into if there's a limit to climate change.
2. Energy does not require damaging the environment through drilling. We can get it straight from our star, for example.
3. Dealing with the consequences of something is always more expensive than preventing it in the first place.
2. We need to choose the cheapest energy option at the time. If renewables are cheaper then great, but making the poor even poorer to make is rich people feel better is not a good solution.
3. The consequences of making the world poorer is more people will die from climate related disasters.