The Kelvin Limit

I have been a small part of the chorus of voices critiquing the AI bubble that I described in Portents Of Doom. But what if we're wrong? What if the overwhelming demand for AI sin't the result of the AI platforms massively subsidizing their products, but because the world needs more and more non-consensual sex images, slop web pages, agentic ransomware attacks, students cheating on exams, hallucinated lawsuits, and all the other benefits of this transformative technology?

Please suspend disbelief and follow me below the fold as I look into a fascinating examination of the implications of the exponential growth in the data centers needed to provide these benefits.

Chatbots vs. Ozone

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Back in February I posted The Kessler Syndrome, which also included a brief section mentioning the impacts of the proposed megaconstellations on the environment, specifically global warming from CO2 and black carbon, and depletion of the ozone layer. Three months earlier Anton Petrov had examined the last of these in Risk of Ozone Layer Destruction from Internet Satellite Swarms and Rocket Fuel. He has now followed up with SpaceX Is Conducting a Giant Chemical Experiment on Our Atmosphere Without Realizing. Below the fold I survey the papers Petrov cited and a few others.

The Kessler Syndrome

LEO in 2019 (NASA)

In 1978 Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais published Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt. Wikipedia notes that:

It describes a situation in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes so high due to space pollution that collisions between these objects cascade, exponentially increasing the amount of space debris over time.

This became known as the Kessler Syndrome. Three decades later, shortly after Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collided at 11.6km/s, Kessler published The Kessler Syndrome, writing that the original paper:

predicted that around the year 2000 the population of catalogued debris in orbit around the Earth would become so dense that catalogued objects would begin breaking up as a result of random collisions with other catalogued objects and become an important source of future debris.

And that:

Modeling results supported by data from USAF tests, as well as by a number of independent scientists, have concluded that the current debris environment is “unstable”, or above a critical threshold, such that any attempt to achieve a growth-free small debris environment by eliminating sources of past debris will likely fail because fragments from future collisions will be generated faster than atmospheric drag will remove them.

Below the fold I look into the current situation.

Going Out With A Bang

In 1.5C Here We Come I criticized people like Eric Schmidt who said that:

the artificial intelligence boom was too powerful, and had too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.

Schmidt, somewhat fatalistically, said that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway,”

Salomé Balthus
Uwe Hauth, CC BY-SA 4.0

In January for a Daily Mail article, Miriam Kuepper interviewed Salomé Balthus a "high-end escort and author from Berlin" who works the World Economic Forum. Balthus reported attitudes that clarify why "3C Here We Come" is more likely. The article's full title is:

What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors - and how wealthy 'know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang'

Below the fold I look into a wide range of evidence that Balthus' clients were telling her the truth.

1.5C Here We Come

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John Timmer's With four more years like 2023, carbon emissions will blow past 1.5° limit is based on the United Nations' Environmental Programme's report Emissions Gap Report 2024. The "emissions gap" is:

the difference between where we're heading and where we'd need to be to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. It makes for some pretty grim reading. Given last year's greenhouse gas emissions, we can afford fewer than four similar years before we would exceed the total emissions compatible with limiting the planet's warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions.
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The report ascribes this situation to two distinct emissions gaps: between the goals of the Paris Agreement and what countries have pledged to do and between their pledges and the policies they've actually put in place.

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Back in 2021 in my TTI/Vanguard talk I examined one of these gaps, the one between the crypto-bros' energy consumption:

The leading source for estimating Bitcoin's electricity consumption is the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, whose current central estimate is 117TWh/year.

Adjusting Christian Stoll et al's 2018 estimate of Bitcoin's carbon footprint to the current CBECI estimate gives a range of about 50.4 to 125.7 MtCO2/yr for Bitcoin's opex emissions, or between Portugal and Myanmar.

and their rhetoric:

Cryptocurrencies assume that society is committed to this waste of energy and hardware forever. Their response is frantic greenwashing, such as claiming that because Bitcoin mining allows an obsolete, uncompetitive coal-burning plant near St. Louis to continue burning coal it is somehow good for the environment.

But, they argue, mining can use renewable energy. First, at present it doesn't. For example, Luxxfolio implemented their commitment to 100% renewable energy by buying 15 megawatts of coal-fired power from the Navajo Nation!.

Second, even if it were true that cryptocurrencies ran on renewable power, the idea that it is OK for speculation to waste vast amounts of renewable power assumes that doing so doesn't compete with more socially valuable uses for renewables, or indeed for power in general.

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Note that the current CBECI estimate shows that Bitcoin's energy consumption has increased 43% since 2021, a 12.7%/yr increase.

Follow me below the fold for more details of the frantic greenwashing, not just from the crypto-bros but from the giants of the tech industry that aims to ensure that:

Following existing policies out to the turn of the century would leave us facing over 3° C of warming.