Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Climate Emergency”

That is why the second avenue of “doing something”, composed of “the rest of us”, is so important. Chaudhary advocates for “leftwing climate realism”, which accepts the science, not because it’s a discipline “beyond impugning” but because it’s quite clear that there are ecological limits on this planet. We need a slower life, he argues; a circular economic system, where firms compete for the same amount of finite profit and the state dominates certain sectors. This will be good for the planet and for people, producing “a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion”.

Emerging research indicates vast amounts of energy and water are being consumed by the data centres powering these large language models. However, discussions around these concerns are often obscured by the ongoing promotion of AI as a progressive too – especially when related to human ingenuity and originality. It seems an opportune time to ask one of these language models, in this case Bing Copilot, powered by GPT-4, about its own perceived environmental impact.

However, in recognition that a singular query contributes approximately 4.32g of CO₂, compared to Google queries which generate approximately 0.2g of CO₂, these questions were kept to a fair minimum.

Indeed, it’s striking, even to a skeptic, that every culture in human history has used rituals to shape and entrench its norms. Equally, it is clear that arguments alone are not convincing us to live within the bounds of the Earth’s resources. Few manage to make the lifestyle changes necessary to slow climate change, rein in habitat loss or minimise pollution (and we authors are not among those few). So that Sunday morning we resolved to find out whether rituals could help us to close the gap between what we actually do and what we ought to do.

Instead they will inhabit a world progressively poorer, less stable, more violent, a world where hundreds of millions and possibly billions of people are likely to die from the effects of global heating and environmental collapse by the end of the century. They will endure fear, chaos and deprivation. Their future lives will not be better but significantly worse than their lives now. Because like Wile E. Coyote running in the air, not yet aware the ground beneath his feet is gone, we have already stepped out into the void; all that remains is the fall.

What Surrender does offer, though, is an engaged and full-on exploration of pretty hardcore re-wilding and pro-wilderness groups, as well as a personal discussion of menopause, ageing and the fallacy and emptiness at the heart of the nuclear family model and its absence of viability when confronted with the reality of irrevocable environmental collapse.

Taken all this into account, it is possible that the emissions from a ChatGPT query are more than a hundred times that of a conventional search query. But as I don't have enough data to back this up, I will keep the conservative estimates from above (50x - 90x; 60x most likely).