Al Gore: Stop using the atmosphere as 'an open sewer According to former US vice president and climate activist Al Gore, the world faces "a climate crisis of unprecedented proportions," and the data center industry can – and should – make a tremendous contribution towards averting climate-change disaster. Speaking at Google's "How Green Is the Internet? Summit" at the company's …
1) Pick up phone to the Mr. Hopey Changey who happens to be in the same bleeding heart party.
2) Talk to him about cutting the military budget by 50% like Ike did and to get his White Burdened Community Organizer-cum-Lawyer Controlfreak Arse out of sandy lands
3) ????
4) Instant savings on Global CO_2 production, not to mention enfeeblement of the crony capitalists.
"It's a way we had over here with living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies." [Cap. Willard]
Military activities may be exempt from emissions trading schemes therefore no planet saving profit to be made there. Those who suffer murder death kill at the hands of the globalists do not go on to consume, pollute or breed so war may be carbon negative if looked at over the longer term. However, Al's focus is the rest of us; those who are not yet scheduled to die in some pointless activity for banker profit and who still have a few coins left after all the other shake downs. A net worth of ~$300M is just not enough for some people and we need to rally around Al and others like him to show our support to these unfortunate individuals who suffer poverty amidst so much wealth. So Mister D.A. Monsters, ask not what Al could do for himself but what you can do for Al. Just $10M may help Al to buy a more efficient corporate jet or another property a little bit closer to his next speaking engagement or shares in a water company to bring privatised water to people who might otherwise get it for free. It all adds up and we help to save the planet at the same time.
I don't know how fast mister Gore is driving on the highway, but assuming a normal 60 mph, it would take nearly an hour to get out of the atmosphere and into "space". (Depending on your definition of "the atmosphere", it could take significantly longer, or 10 minutes if you make a really weird definition)
Claiming that greening data centers is going to do much to halt the CO2 exhaust is kind of missing the point. It's small potatoes compared to MANY MANY other poluters and probably not worth the effort. (And more importantly, most companies don't need an extra incentive to "green" their datacenter as lowering power consumption is a goal in and of itself.
"It's small potatoes compared to MANY MANY other poluters and probably not worth the effort. "
Your right, i won't switch of my light bulbs when not in use, and I'll leave the taps running when cleaning my teeth, after all, I hadly make a difference. While I'm at it, i'll chuck litter on the floor and piss in alleyways, it won't make a difference, I'm only a tiny part of the probelm.
Butteflies and all that.
AC at 08:09
There is a very good reason for you NOT to do any of those things and its exactly the same incentive the data center guys have. Lowering your utility bills. If you want to keep the tap running, be my guest,most of the UK won't run out of water soon. Especially not if it's just your little pipe that's leaking a bit. (Compared to most industrial users, even at full blast, your home tap uses a TINY amount of water)
If you really think people keeping a 60 watt light bulb burning is going to matter much in the grand scheme of things then go ahead and ignore the industrial complexes whose consumption is measured in MegaWatts running 24/7/365 for several decades.
It WILL make a difference to you as a person. Your electricity and water bills will be through the roof. Which is exactly the RIGHT incentive to get people to use less resources.
Though I'm in favour of everyone playing their small part, ultimately it won't make a difference to your utility bill. Now matter how little we use, the utility companies keep putting the bills up to retain their profit levels, er, cover increased costs I mean..
"...If you want to keep the tap running, be my guest,most of the UK won't run out of water soon. Especially not if it's just your little pipe that's leaking a bit. (Compared to most industrial users, even at full blast, your home tap uses a TINY amount of water)..."
This statement betrays a complete lack of knowledge of the water cycle, and resources generally.
The UK won't EVER 'run out of water'. Even if everyone turns on their taps full blast all the time. It might run out of storage and processing capacity if people did that, but the water isn't lost and will be there to be re-used again and again.
Thinking that resources such as energy will somehow 'run out' and that we must cut back on usage is a green fallacy, intended to get us to de-industrialise. What we need to do is consider what resources we need, how to provide them most cheaply and effectively, and how to mitigate any downsides of that provision. What we must NOT do is pretend that using resources is evil, and we must give it up, or cut back on them for no apparent reason and punish those who do use them...
There's always a balance to be head. Consider the water in your taps; it has already gone through all the energy consuming processes of storing, cleaning and pumping it back for delivery. If it is there right behind the valve in the tap, surely it is just as wasteful not to use some as it is to use it to excess?!
Where were you last summer, during the summers of the last several years, when the UK went into hosepipe lockdown due to lack of water??
Your individual tap may only leak a tiny amount of water, but you're overlooking that there are over 60 million people in this country, and between them they own/use an awful lot of taps. If only a fraction of them leave taps running, that still amounts to very significant amounts of wasted water.
Oh I'm sorry I forgot, I'm supposed to be thinking ME! ME! ME! in the current climate of enlightened thinking ... silly me.
"Claiming that greening data centers is going to do much to halt the CO2 exhaust is kind of missing the point. It's small potatoes compared to MANY MANY other poluters"
Perhaps, but he was speaking at Google's 'How Green is the internet?' summit so I can see why he wasn't talking about cement plants or whatever.
"He went on to describe such recent extreme weather events as the current 500-year flood in southern Germany and fatal flooding in Prague's city center, flooding in the US states of Illinois and Missouri, storm surges in New York as a result of Hurricane Sandy that added to the $110bn in climate-related US disasters last year, recent floods in Pakistan that displaced 20 million people, and a storm in Queensland, Australia, that dropped 48 inches of rain in "24 hours or thereabouts," he said."
Cmon you guys all together now- 'weather is not climate!'
I expect to hear it as clear and as loud as when anyone makes a weather observation countering the theory. To be honest I would have assumed people would start laughing as soon as this guy gets on stage assuming that he is the entertainment for the night.
"weather is not climate!'
Only applies to "deniers". For fully paid up AGW subscribers, weather is climate. Remember how at the time of Katrina, the same people promised us a decade of worsening hurricanes? Instead it's been pretty quiet. Ahh, then that must be caused by global warming.
The floods are happening because a longer than usual winter and cold spring has prevented any early snow melt. Instead of the snow melt occurring over March and April you are now getting March, April and May's snow melt happening at once.
Combine this with the traditional spring rains and what you get is bigger than usual floods.
So the cold has caused this "global warming event"
"The floods are happening because a longer than usual winter and cold spring has prevented any early snow melt. Instead of the snow melt occurring over March and April you are now getting March, April and May's snow melt happening at once."
What, every year for most of the last decade ... and also in countries which don't even have snow ... ?
Floods in Europe 1995:
21-Jan Central and NW France
01-Feb Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemboug, UK, Ireland
27-Feb SW France
05-Mar Dagestan
25-Apr NW Italy
24-May Romania
02-Jun SW Germany, SE Norway
22-Sep NE Albania
13-Oct Azerbaijan
28-Dec E,N,NW Romania
Spring and Summer floods are normal in Europe. I picked 1995, but you could pick any year you want and it would be the same.
Just because it is called a 500-year flood does not mean that it last occurred 500 years ago.
The 500-year flood is a statistical estimate that a flood has a 1 in 500 chance of occurring. This estimate is only as good as the underlying data and the understanding of all the factors involved.
The 500-year estimate is always calculated after the fact. There are enough different events and enough different places in the world that you can probably guarantee that at least one 500-year event happens every year.
"Wow, every day in July had exactly average temperature! That is a one in 10,000 year event!!"
"Remember how at the time of Katrina, the same people promised us a decade of worsening hurricanes? Instead it's been pretty quiet."
Uh... I'm assuming you don't actually live in Murica, because you may recall this little thing called Sandy that leveled fucking New Jersey, which is rather unusual.
Mr. Gore,
If you are going to scream, yell, moan, present and expect compliance on your initiative, you should quite wearing petroleum based products in your hair and just get a hair cut and be done.
You're walking around with chemicals seething out of your hair polluting my air.
Colossal Fail!
Yes, lets cut that awful CO2!
After all, our great enemies the plants breath it in. They already have hardly enough. If we can completely eradicate it they will all die!
Ah, but there is a problem. The total human output of CO2 is rather small compared to that of microbes and insects. In fact, together, they put out about 100 times more than we do. Never mind - kill all the microbes and insects as well....
He was indeed dropped as a baby - which is why he's a dodgy old geezer now, like those others scientific illieterates who seem to believe that any increase in the level of carbon dioxide would necessarily be of benefit to the plants on which we depend. They probably also believe that increasing the proportion of molecular oxygen in our atmosphere by 25 % or more would help us to breathe....
Henri
This guy is pretty smart, but he is losing his edge. He was always borderline superficial, yet he could be a good listen. It's clear that he doesn't understand how it reads when he speaks, anymore. He needs to think more and speak/wite more judiciously. He will be missed when he is done.
Large Diesel Engines on Ships, Trains, Heavy Trucks put toxic particles in lungs of living people. Burning LNG in Diesel engines eliminates particulates and the toxic petroleum byproducts from the lungs of people living near ports, rail hubs, rail lines, heavy truck routes. Save the people now, not in 500 years.
It's hard to trust anyone who stands to make so much money from scaremongering:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/6491195/Al-Gore-could-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html
Don't get me wrong, it's good practice to avoid pollution when you can, and try and save resources. But that is of course not Al Gore's real agenda....
"It's worth remembering that on a daily basis we now put 90 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet every single day"
Is that what daily means?
" He went on to describe such recent extreme weather events..."
I'm more worried about our impact on rerouting rivers, damming them up, and draining marsh lands have on flooding. Realistically though all the damage we could do will have only minor long term (in the millions of years) effect on the planet in comparison to the effects on us.
Within seven years there will be 50 billion intelligent devices connected to the internet... Those devices will, of course, require their own data infrastructure, pollution from data centers will increase...
How does that follow? A significant portion of the predicted growth in the number of devices are of a different class than currently call for big data centers. Sure, there will be more mobile phones, tablets and smart watches. However, a larger proportion of growth is likely to come from smart appliances. Even if they do connect to the cloud in some manner (which may not hold true), there is no reason to assume at this point that they will require the same amount of support at the data center level. A browser running on a smart phone is a lot more demanding than a fridge putting out a heartbeat every hour.
Al is getting out of touch. Even the blow/diehards on the climate disaster side are talking about much reduced and delayed warming, and unexplained lack of any warming for 20 years.
It appears that Gaia understands us better than we do, so the world is actually not on the edge of imminent extinction. So Al is just looking for donations or something (once a politician always a politician!) Maybe he's hoping Jeb Bush runs in 2016 so he can oppose and beat him! The only thing Al would win right now is a weigh-in!
and the good news, too, is that Al is going to help make it all better for a price, of course. What a liar. What a huckster, flim-flam man, snake-oil salesman, denier....he's a denier of his own sickness. How does he address that water vapor makes up almost all of the necessary greenhouse gases we require to survive and man made CO2 amounts to only about .001% of all CO2? That's why it's a trace gas. Wake up, people of the world, read the science. It is scientifically impossible that .001% CO2 made by man is the driving force of every other variable that makes up the earth's climate. In other words, it overrides solar storms, subatomic particulate matter in the atmosphere, various ocean currents that have their cyclical patterns, El Nina and El Nino, overrides all of nature's negative effects and has only positive effects. You should also do some reading about the IPCC being rife with conflict of interest. Lovely how Pachauri runs a campus golf course and sells memberships when the land was given to his group for public purposes, lives like a king in a mansion in India, and leaves a personal carbon foorprint the size of a crater!
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