John stop forwarding me these articles iykyk
McKinsey & Co. predict that this total will need to reach $5.2 trillion by 2030 to keep up with the demand for AI services.
Totally not a made up number, but also imagine if this sort of money was dumped into mitigating climate change instead of exacerbating it by keeping fossil fuel generators running.
RCP 8.5 is one of the early climate change scenarios modeled by the IPCC and assumed that coal fired plants would continue to be built, leading to catastrophic levels of carbon emissions and warming. It was widely criticized for being unrealistic given that coal has been increasingly uncompetitive with cleaner sources of power generation. Looks like it might be necessary to dust it off if big tech is allowed to continue down this path.
Here’s a crude illustration of where we’re at using the graphic from the 2016 report. The green circle is approximately where 2024 emissions are estimated.
This graph only shows CO2 emissions without other greenhouse gases, which were 38.5 gigatons last year. I’m guessing you used a numbers that factors in other greenhouse gases?
It was very difficult to find a good overview of CO2 equivalent emissions together with climate change projections. Climate Action Tracker and an EU body put 2024’s total emissions at ~53.4 gigatons (similar to the area you circled). CAT says we’re currently headed for 2.5-2.9°C of warming based off this, equivalent to RCP6 rather than RCP8.5.
Looks like the figure I used was an estimate of direct emissions plus emissions from land use change, so you are correct that it would be high compared to what the IPCC graph intended to show.
That said, I don’t think we’re currently on RCP 8.5 (the RCPs aren’t even in widespread use anymore), just pointing out that the people who assumed it was unrealistic 10 years ago couldn’t have anticipated the idea that there’d be a new driver of demand for highly polluting forms of electricity generation to power a twitter-based anime waifu and that we’re still within the envelope of that allegedly unrealistic scenario. I hope the continued acceleration of renewables gets us to a plateau soon.
coughing baby?
Its half of a meme about absurd power level difference, Hydrogen Bomb vs Coughing Baby. The joke is its obvious who would “win”
thanks, I had forgotten
