Stop streaming! (it enlarges your C02 footprint)

[Bobster.]

https://nypost.com/2019/10/28/why-climate-change-activists-are-coming-for-your-binge-watch/
 

For me this is an interesting aspect. Somethings we do actually use a lot of juice, generate a lot of emissions, but because we've just tapped in an app on our phone we don't even think about these costs.

[viceroy]

Wonder how the likes of Google (Youtube), Amazon, Microsoft, etc who have massive cloud-centric data centres compare to the likes of Netflix in terms of data transfers.

[Bobster.]

13 minutes ago, viceroy said:

Wonder how the likes of Google (Youtube), Amazon, Microsoft, etc who have massive cloud-centric data centres compare to the likes of Netflix in terms of data transfers.

Netflix is an easy target because they transfer HD video  - which is large.  ShowMax, iTunes and etc are also doing the same - storing lots of data and making it available via streaming - to various degrees (audio will be less bulky than video).

Plain text is a different matter. That's much more easily compressed by routers before transmission.

For sure Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and several others are keeping large data centers, available 24-365, with multiple instances for redundancy and load balancing. I do recall seeing a news insert about one such company (can't remember which one) who kept their data centers in Iceland where they need less cooling and where they could be run off of geothermally generated power.

Personally I seldom stream - though I suppose watching youtube should be included. My online purchases are mostly music, and invariably I buy an entire album and download it. Once. Then copy it onto backup devices and onto my phone.

But generally all these nice things on the Internet are chewing up lots of power on the back end, and we don't see so we tend to not consider it. I've read somewhere that block chain (BitCoin etc) actually need lots of computer resources and thus lots of power across the world.

[PaulinNorthcliff]

The "Climate Scientists" they reference are known to us by other names... charlatans, conmen, shysters, crooks, liars, and other less pleasant epithets.

The entire anthropogenic global warming hoax is about as scientific as ducking witches to see if they float.

Meh!

[PJJ]

1 hour ago, PaulinNorthcliff said:

The "Climate Scientists" they reference are known to us by other names... charlatans, conmen, shysters, crooks, liars, and other less pleasant epithets.

Let me guess you prefer you get your real climate science facts from online blogs? 

I am not going to start a massive debate or anything, but chances are if you have that strong of a conviction that climate change proponents are all wrong, you have probably been reading from a biased source.

If you don't mind me asking: Where would you navigate to if you wanted some climate related news/research?

[pspspeed]

If you want to stop climate change, go vegan - cows are the culprit - http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2/

..and no. I'm not vegan

Edited January 10, 2020 by pspspeed

[PJJ]

20 minutes ago, pspspeed said:

If you want to stop climate change, go vegan - cows are the culprit - http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2/

..and no. I'm not vegan

The problem is there is basically almost no human activity that doesn't produce some form of greenhouse gas.

Driving your ICE car : CO2

Mixing concrete : CO2

Eating meat : Methane 

Even going Vegan albeit much lower on the methane there is still CO2 released in the farming practices required to make your greens.

Turning on your aircon : HFC's

 

So I guess trying to reduce your greenhouse gas footprint is a "best effort service" whereby you try to avoid the obvious big polluting items, but going "zero emissions" is borderline impossible. 

[PaulinNorthcliff]

12 hours ago, PJJ said:

Let me guess you prefer you get your real climate science facts from online blogs? 

I am not going to start a massive debate or anything, but chances are if you have that strong of a conviction that climate change proponents are all wrong, you have probably been reading from a biased source.

If you don't mind me asking: Where would you navigate to if you wanted some climate related news/research?

Climate 'Science', as we have it today, has become a multi-billion dollar industry. The climate has ALWAYS changed, and will continue to always change, regardless of puny human activity. Climate change predates the appearance of humans on this planet by millennia. The notion that we have a discernible effect on the periodic warming and cooling cycles that the earth experiences is presumptuous and preposterous. All the 'real' scientists (actual scientists, not those who had a choice between studying 'climate science' or gender studies at varsity) scoff and disregard the 'evidence' of anthropogenic global warming. Facts are that the glaciers are still glaciers. The Arctic and Antartic ice sheets are growing and there's more polar bears now that there ever have been before. And Epstein didn't kill himself.

'Global warming' is a religion and I won't venture any further into religious debates.

[netstrider]

Honestly,

Even if "the globe is warming", which it does, in the 70s they also warned everyone of an impending "ice-age", what can you do about it?

Really, what can you actually do about it? Do you think sticking a solar panel on the roof or some wind generator will reverse what the rest of ~8Bn people do?

No, it will not. Best not to fret about it. The world is supposed to end, if it ends it ends.

People make such big fuss over things that are possibly very natural occurrences. This here suggests people know the earth has climate cycles:

" The River Thames frost fairs^[1] were held on the tideway of the River Thames in London, England in some winters, starting at least as early as the late 7th century^[2] all the way until the early 19th century. Most were held between the early 17th and early 19th centuries during the period known as the Little Ice Age, when the river froze over most frequently. During that time the British winter was more severe than it is now, and the river was wider and slower, further impeded by the medieval Old London Bridge. "

[PJJ]

Ok, so despite me saying this wasn't going to turn into a debate, I sadly can't help myself.

3 minutes ago, PaulinNorthcliff said:

Climate 'Science', as we have it today, has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

Uhm no, it hasn't, the IPCC for instance makes due with tons of volunteers and donations from various nations, their annual budget is just over 4.3M USD (The US usually chips in half so around 2M USD P.A this is important remember this number).

It is however threatening a trillion dollar industry : Oil and gas. Global oil and gas revenue is around : 1.6T USD (that's 1 600 000M USD) depending on who you ask.

Lets stick some numbers on this, and then I will ask you again, where you got your news from, because I have on more than one occasion had someone that didn't believe in climate change that loved reading their climate research from online blogs that where funded by oil money.

The US has annual oil revenue of about 183B USD, so 2M USD for the IPCC equates to about : 0.00109% of oil revenue.

However.

If recommendations from the IPCC cause the US to produce just 1% less revenue, the value to oil companies lost would be : 1830M USD

So, in terms of economic incentives, who do you think has the bigger incentive to spread some fake news?

1 hour ago, PaulinNorthcliff said:

regardless of puny human activity. Climate change predates the appearance of humans on this planet by millennia.

Indeed it does, but what you don't take into consideration is time scales, climate change is littered with positive and negative feedbacks so more often than not massive changes happen over centuries thanks to chains of events all feeding off one another.

 

1 hour ago, PaulinNorthcliff said:

The notion that we have a discernible effect on the periodic warming and cooling cycles that the earth experiences is presumptuous and preposterous. All the 'real' scientists (actual scientists, not those who had a choice between studying 'climate science' or gender studies at varsity) scoff and disregard the 'evidence' of anthropogenic global warming.

Care to name a few?

If you cite me a single paper published in Nature (a respected scientific journal) denouncing anthropocentric climate change I would be suitably impressed.

1 hour ago, PaulinNorthcliff said:

Facts are that the glaciers are still glaciers. The Arctic and Antartic ice sheets are growing and there's more polar bears now that there ever have been before

No, that's very much not the case.

As usual there would be some cherry picking involved, wherever you read that statement, they probably said from year X + 1 the sheets where growing!

What they probably omitted to say that over any longer time window you would see a strong decline in ice sheet minimum extend.

NASA  has a nice time lapse of the Arctic ice sheet as well: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/

 

1 hour ago, PaulinNorthcliff said:

'Global warming' is a religion and I won't venture any further into religious debates.

What I find interesting about this is, its usually skeptics that treat climate change like a religion, if they are confronted with any evidence that contradicts their world view they disregard it and simply say the other side is wrong.

There is nothing wrong in being a skeptic, but then you have to be skeptical of everything.

That second last quote you had reminded me of a video Steven Crowder made "Climate change myths" where he to mentioned polar bears.

Here is a video dissecting it :  

 

I hope you watch it, in fact if you want to prove that you only believe in the scientific method, you would definitely watch it. 

 

I want to keep this civil, I do not believe hurling insults would get us anywhere.

[netstrider]

I'm going to take a stab at this once more.

"Climate change", should be measured over millennia., not years or decades.

I object to some degree that anything *not* published in Nature is false, because if there is an "agenda", then certainly truth will be discarded for that journal. A lot, if not most, of the so-called scientific "research" is done in service of the UN.

Of course the oil conglomerates run the financial system, at least partly.

Oil is freely available, it is not made up of dinosaur fossils or whatever you have been taught at school, it is a gas that surfaces from below.

If it was a fossil then surely the dinosaur and fish and other life will have long been used up by now. It is most likely, if not more renewable than any other energy source out there, it is most likely to never run out, it is most likely that the world has been deceived to believe it is scarce, much like diamonds which are also everywhere and not scarce at all. The distribution thereof is being limited so as to simulate scarceness so they may drive up the price.

[PJJ]

6 hours ago, netstrider said:

"Climate change", should be measured over millennia., not years or decades.

And yet in a mere 70 years mankind has found a way to increase temperatures while total solar output has been lower than in 1950.

 

 

People seem to vastly underestimate the effect humans can have on the planet, especially with climate change, I think the reason why is because it happens so slow (relative to the average human's lifetime) the brunt of effects of the GHG's we release today will be felt by people 30 years from now.

7 hours ago, netstrider said:

I object to some degree that anything *not* published in Nature is false, because if there is an "agenda", then certainly truth will be discarded for that journal. A lot, if not most, of the so-called scientific "research" is done in service of the UN.

That is what makes a scientific journal so amazing, it doesn't work like a magazine where some editor decides who's opinion piece gets published.

You have to bring peer-reviewed facts to the table with results that are repeatable, that's how you get into Nature, the only bias there, is to truth.

Also what you might not believe is even among climate change proponents there is constantly back and forth discussions around anthropocentric climate change as they want to get the science right, that is what research is all about, constantly grinding away at a problem and getting closer and closer to the truth.

Let me give you the modus operandi for climate change skeptics:

They write a "paper" basically a blog post on some obscure website online wherein they will do some cherry picking or omission of certain key facts, you as the reader knowing no better (since who of us here are part time climatologists) mops at all up as fact, the skeptic will then tell you : But the scientists won't tell you this! Its all political! etc etc.

Skeptics operate very much like lawyers, they only look for the smallest however insignificant something that doesn't align with the theory of anthropocentric and denounce the whole thing, and just like lawyers they are paid quite handsomely for their trickery from fossil fuel companies when they need some good PR. Someone that fits the role perfectly is Patric Moore, he used to be part of Greenpeace (which I think why fossil fuel companies like using him, to the average joe he then might seem like a reasonable guy) but he would be willing to fight on your behalf for basically anything, given the right price.

10 hours ago, netstrider said:

Oil is freely available, it is not made up of dinosaur fossils or whatever you have been taught at school, it is a gas that surfaces from below.

Its not freely available, and definitely a finite resource, remember the world fossil doesn't just refer to dinosaurs, all living matter including plants, can sequester CO2 under ground.

Remember the first thing you learnt in Physics that energy can never be destroyed, it only goes from one form to another, well that's exactly what plants do, they take the light energy from the sun during the photosynthesis process, and suck the CO2 from the air, that CO2 isn't destroyed, its simply moved, do this over enough millennia and you have fossil fuels. 

We however don't have millennia to replenish our carbon addiction after the current stock runs out. 

But we still probably have another 50+ years worth of FF's the better question would be, are you sure you want to take it out?

Sequestering carbon is MUCH more expensive than consuming it, the price of capturing carbon is around 3 times the price of releasing it (at least with current technologies)

 

[Bobster.]

11 hours ago, netstrider said:

I'm going to take a stab at this once more.

"Climate change", should be measured over millennia., not years or decades.

I object to some degree that anything *not* published in Nature is false, because if there is an "agenda", then certainly truth will be discarded for that journal. A lot, if not most, of the so-called scientific "research" is done in service of the UN.

Good publications check facts as best they can before they publish. That's why, for example, you should take the New York Times more seriously than Breitbart. The first fact checks, puts personal ideology on the back burner and tests a story before it publishes. Breitbart lets the ideology in and has less rigour.

So you are right that publications MAY have bias, but they don't all.
 

11 hours ago, netstrider said:

Of course the oil conglomerates run the financial system, at least partly.

Oil is freely available, it is not made up of dinosaur fossils or whatever you have been taught at school, it is a gas that surfaces from below.

No. It is finite. There is probably more of it still to be tapped - depending on whether or not the selling price will make extraction financially attractive, but it was slowly converted over a long period of time from the dead carcasses of tiny plankton and other very small life forms (living things yes, but not dinosaurs, and any teacher saying that oil comes from dinosaur bodies would be in a dire need of a refresher course).
 

11 hours ago, netstrider said:

If it was a fossil then surely the dinosaur and fish and other life will have long been used up by now. It is most likely, if not more renewable than any other energy source out there, it is most likely to never run out, it is most likely that the world has been deceived to believe it is scarce, much like diamonds which are also everywhere and not scarce at all. The distribution thereof is being limited so as to simulate scarceness so they may drive up the price.

Do we believe that coal, say, or gold are never ending resources? There is certainly more gold in the ground, yes, but see above - is somebody going to pay you what it costs you to get it out of wherever you find it and then refine it? And the fact that there is MORE doesn't mean it's inexhaustible. The planet is finite. There can only be so much of anything come out of it.

[netstrider]

Yes, the planet and its resources are finite, what I am trying to convey is that oil may just be a gas released from the earth's core which becomes crude oil at some point. Since that geological process never stops it may be near limitless. From memory I think the Russians proved something along these (oil being gas from below) lines during the 70s.

Nevertheless, no, gold and other resources are not comparable, except diamonds where the market is dictated by the release schedules of De Beers. Diamonds are not infinite, but certainly there's more going around than what people are made to believe.