Sorry about the "CO2" in the title. I can't quickly see a way of putting in a subscript (and the only way I can get anything resembling one in the main text is by using a smaller font). The chemist in me finds this really annoying. Nomenclature in chemisty is important with numerical subscripts, superscripts and those in normal sized fonts having different meanings. A shame on any application that doesn't allow their use. We are breeding a generation that is ignorant of the subtleties.
But that's not the subject of this post.
Mark P Mills, CEO of the Digital Power Group has recently published a report assessing the electrical demand of the global IT system. He argues that just short of 1/10th of all electrical energy usage goes on IT. This is not about the energy required to charge your smarphone or anything like that. This is all about data traffic.
Mills calculates that streaming one hour of video per week to a smartphone consumes more energy annually in the remote data network than running 2 domestic refrigerators for a year. Our "always on" data culture has spawned a huge number of energy hungry data farms and it is these that are contributing to the massive increase in energy usage that Mills writes about.
Makes you think, doesn't it? But does it stop you forever checking your rather trivial Facebook profile, sending meaningless tweets or uploading out-of-focus photographs?
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