This is Not Cool

Above, AI uber-critic Ed Zitron interviewed by ABC News.

Zitron has been a sharp dissenting voice in the recent storm of apocalyptic ideations following the so-called Hugging Face attack, where AI agents escaped containment and broke into corporate computer systems.

Zitron’s sharpest warnings, however, are on the financial side. In a new post, he has some lacerating prose spiked with concerning data.

Ed Zitron – Hater’s Guide to AI Debt:

To reiterate what I’ve been saying for a while, big tech has a few issues with the AI buildout:

• AI chips are extremely expensive.
• AI data centers take a great deal of time to build and energize.
• AI services are expensive to run.
• AI services do not appear to generate much revenue.

Continue reading “Can Clean Energy Solve Big AI’s Financial and Power Problems?”

So glad PBS is somehow keeping it together to continue these invaluable weather and climate explainers.

MIT’s Kerry Emanuel joins here in a narrative that includes:

Yet another visualization of the Coriolis effect – I for one, can never have enough because it continues to boggle me.

Which country is the most exposed to cyclone risks?

What can one extreme outlier storm tell us about hurricanes?

What will storms do in the future?

Meanwhile, tropical storm Isaias is shaping up to be a strong Cat 2 storm, the first of this quiet season. In a warmer world, even a run of mill storm has access to a lot more moisture, so good to keep an eye on this.

Continue reading “As Season’s First Hurricane Gathers, PBS has Good New Storm Explainer”

It’s called “Conserv-voltaics”, and I’m seeing more examples every week.

Go Wild with Annette on X:

Ecologists walked matching 200-meter transects across solar farms planted for wildlife in England’s East Anglian Fens and counted 35 birds on each solar pass against 12 on the cropland beside it, corn buntings and yellowhammers among the birds now working the rows between the panels

Solar farms designed for wildlife are harboring nearly three times more birds than the conventional crops they replaced, challenging long-held assumptions about renewable energy and nature.

Journal of Arid Environments – Desert kit foxes use solar energy facilities in southern California:

Our results show that the desert kit foxes we tracked ranged into solar facilities and used habitats there extensively, even daily, both during and post-construction. Thus, solar energy development may be compatible with conservation for this subspecies. Active management of solar facilities that increases their accessibility to wildlife may produce further conservation benefits for desert kit foxes.

Yahoo:

In addition to supplying clean energy, solar panels have a surprisingly positive impact on degraded land and local wildlife. The panels block the sun, allowing the soil to retain more moisture to the point where China’s largest solar farm is changing the desert around it, turning a once dry landscape green with plant life. Animals can also benefit from solar farms, including the San Joaquin kit fox, an endangered species that lives in central California, whose population faces many threats, including habitat loss and predators.

Continue reading “Conserv-Voltaics Another Benefit of Solar”

Not just the War, not just fossil fuel greed, not just supply chains and shortage of fertilizers, climate adds further pressure to food prices, affecting the most vulnerable.

Bloomberg:

Analysts at Zero Carbon Analytics, an international research firm, mapped food price spikes between 2022 and 2026, tracing them to extreme weather events they say are tied to climate change.

The findings are part of the growing body of research into how climate change is reshaping inflation, a phenomenon some economists dub “climateflation.”

“Climateflation represents a permanent rise in everyday living costs driven by fossil fuel dependency and extreme weather destruction, locking in persistent inflation that strains household budgets worldwide,” Joanne Bentley-McKune, a climate scientist and lead author of the Zero Carbon Analytics briefing, said in a state

CNN:

US consumers are likely to face steeper prices for their morning latte, thanks to the near-record strong super El Niño still strengthening in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño is expected to combine with preexisting supply chain pressures around the world to increase prices on tropical products such as coffee, chocolate and palm oil.

Continue reading “War, Climate-Flation Hitting Food Worldwide”

You can’t solve your AI anxiety by blocking the Data Center nearby.

They’ll just build it in the next county, the next State, in Tierra del Fuego, under the Ocean, or in Space.

This week, a first test bed satellite was launched to begin solving problems related to space based Data Centers. Google thinks they will be economically viable in the mid 2030s.

And don’t think that they’re just going to make humanity extinct in 5 years. We’re not getting off that easy.

We’re going to have to step up and figure this problem out with the right kind of guard rails and international agreements, and the path to doing that starts in next month’s election.

TechCrunch:

Google’s prototype of its orbital compute satellite took off today onboard a SpaceX rocket launched from California — the first time the tech giant has sent one of its advanced chips into space.

Continue reading “Google Launches Space Data Center Test”

I have many questions on the whole Air Taxi idea, some of which were addressed here, noise, and flight safety in particular.

Could be in service around New York City later this year. Hope this isn’t just one more way for Billionaires to soar above the peasants and become even more disconnected from actual humans.

Good interview above with Nick Potter, President of Equinor Natural Gas. A bit of a companion piece to the survey of energy executives I posted about nearby on this page.

This is a bit of a Rosetta Stone for understanding what gas markets will be doing. Potter uses soothing euphemisms, citing “what’s going on” in the MidEast and Russia. He obviously hopes that gas will be a big part of fueling Data Centers, which may be only partially true. As has been pointed out on these pages, it’s a big assumption that gas pipeline capacity will be available for AI in every case.

I’ve posted Jigar Shah’s warning to the AI bros about counting on Natural gas supplies.

There are now some indications that Jigar’s cautionary note has merit.

Continue reading “Americans Should Brace for Natural Gas Price Jump”

Rare event related to the El Niño cycle and global hydrology is happening again.

In 2011, rains fell so intensely across Australia and South America that ocean levels actually fell temporarily, as massive amounts of water moved from ocean onto land.

Science Daily November 19, 2012:

In August 2011, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Colorado in Boulder reported that global sea level rise had hit a speed bump.

The researchers found that between early 2010 and summer 2011, global sea level fell sharply, by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter. Using data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft, they showed that the drop was caused by the very strong La Niña that began in late 2010. This periodic Pacific Ocean climate phenomenon changed rainfall patterns all over our planet, moving huge amounts of Earth’s water from the ocean to the continents, primarily to Australia, northern South America and Southeast Asia.

—

It might be happening again.

Meteorologist Ryan Hall flagged this on his YouTube channel.

Continue reading “Could Polo’s Massive Moisture Plume be Large Enough to Impact Sea Level?”

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas issues quarterly anonymous surveys of oil executives to gauge current sentiment in the industry, and anticipate future trends.

The current just-released survey indicates an expectation widely shared expectations that high diesel prices are baked in for at least a year.

Continue reading “Oil Tycoons – High Diesel, Nat Gas to Last”