I studied chemical engineering in university and they had a very strong emphasis on environmental thinking. Here are the most useful heuristics that help me reason about environmental problems:
- Mass and energy are conserved
- Anything can be a pollutant
- Everything is connected
The upshot of all of this is that there is something called a [Life Cycle Assessment](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment). It is a process built on these basic principles, and is used by environmental engineers to get a full and total picture of the environmental impact of something. If you want to have smarter opinions about environmental impact of some kind of energy or some product incorporating an interesting material, then just google 'Life Cycle Analysis of ...' and try to find a good research paper. The rest of this effortpost is my attempt to elucidate the basic principles that inform LCAs, so that you can at least do an intuitive LCA if you don't want to or can't find a research paper.
Mass and Energy are conserved
The conservation of mass and energy say that nothing just 'comes out of nowhere' and nothing just 'goes away'. It's a very unintuitive way of thinking because we didn't evolve for that. Most people have studied it, but they don't really appreciate what it means. A Life Cycle Analysis is a process of trying to ask yourself where something came from and where it will end up.
For example, let's say you think metal straws are better than plastic straws. To answer that, we first have to figure out the steps the straw took to get to you. Metal straws are manufactured from steel. That steel is refined from iron ore (and some carbon). That iron ore comes from a mine somewhere, as does the carbon. Conservation of mass tells us that nothing just 'appears' out of nowhere - it forces us to go back to the mine where the iron ore had been sitting for centuries. We could keep going back further, but we usually stop where the substance first encounters human hands.
Now, conservation of energy is useful if you think of energy as just being the 'cost of change'. So conservation of energy just means 'change is not free'. This is engineering, not physics. Forget the woo-woo definitions of energy from modern physics. Energy is just the common unit we use to express different types of change - from chemical to mechanical to electrical. Now, ask yourself what the difference is between the metal straw in
... keep reading on reddit ➡Capitalism has outlived it's usefulness and is destroying our environment. It's time to leave this old system behind and establish socialist peoples republics instead.
Socialism or mass extinction.
this is a serious post for brainstorming and discussion
Be as creative, optimistic or hopeful as you want, please keep this thread serious and on topic, thanks
Amazing how little energy Algorand uses.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/11/algorand-tries-to-solve-bitcoins-environmental-problem/
I'm trying to avoid signing up for any sort of class or subscription service in order to study for the exam.
What are the best books/practice exams/practice problem books that have questions similar in difficulty to the actual exam?
On the same note, which ones are overly difficult and avoid? It seems like a lot of the resources out there have reviews stating the problems are much too difficult.
Hi everyone, I'm a grad student with expertise in statistics and machine learning. I wish to contribute to research on environmental science but I am not sure where to start and I don't even know if any of my current skills are relevant/important for any of the research topics that are focused on in environmental science.
Can someone please give me some relevant (to my expertise) references to look at to get started? Please note that by statistics, I am not particularly keen on applying the basic statistical tools like M-estimation and hypothesis testing. I'm hoping to use more advanced skills in order to contribute to my fullest.
I see face masks littered everywhere. Sometimes even thrown in the ocean.
Unfortunately, few people want to mention this. Including people who want to ban plastic straws.
Here’s an article about it.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210310122431.htm
https://forms.gle/2jMo7zbH9CAJHPyt5
Hello! This survey is about how you travel to and from school/work and how you think about the environment/environmental issues (Environmental Value System). The results from this will be used in my Internal Assessment in Environmental Systems and Societies (ESS). Anyone can answer, you don't need know much about environmental issues.
Please answer truthfully! Thank you!
Understanding data centers
With the growth of Cloud Services and AI, data centers have become the backbone of the digital world, and their importance will only increase in the foreseeable future. Data centers are, in essence, the engine behind any service that requires compute – think of everyday entertainment such as media streaming, cloud-gaming or movie-rendering, but also consider climate research, Machine Learning/AI and even exploration (but to name a few). All these activities require vast amounts of computing power not normally available in a domestic setting and rely on clusters of supercomputers (HPC) in data centers. Even if you are not familiar with supercomputers or data centers, you have probably seen them in movies or documentaries: large rooms filled with hundreds of big cabinets and lots of flashing lights letting us know that they are doing something complex and important. Not many of us however consider the potential environmental impact of these services nor do we think about the efficiency of the data centers from which we are consuming the services.
Just as your home PC or laptop uses powered fans to cool the hardworking, media-streaming, heat-producing electronics, these big boys require the equivalent exponentially larger infrastructure to operate efficiently and to avoid becoming one big pile of molten metal and plastic. Your laptop consumes between 20 and 50 Watts per hour (with 5-15% of that consumption coming from fans) and a typical HPC server (of which there are hundreds or thousands in a cluster) easily consumes over 2kW/hour. The easiest way to understand the heat issue is to accept that electricity used produces heat: 1kW . h = 1kW . 3600s = 3600kWs = 3600kJ = 3600000J. One kilowatt-hour corresponds to the heat required to evaporate 1.58 kg of liquid water at 100°C. A PC rated at 100 watts operating for 10 hours continuously uses one kilowatt hour.
How regular data centers are a burden on our environment
In a typical air-cooled data center, an average of 38% of the energy is used to actively cool, leaving only 62% to perform the actual computation. Invariably, data centers consider this heat as waste and simply release it into the atmosphere in the form of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent). To give you an idea of what this means for the environment in a traditional data center setting, let’s look at some numbers from HPC workloads.
One training run of a particular model for neural architecture search would,
... keep reading on reddit ➡https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/11/algorand-tries-to-solve-bitcoins-environmental-problem/
Understanding data centers
With the growth of Cloud Services and AI, data centers have become the backbone of the digital world, and their importance will only increase in the foreseeable future. Data centers are, in essence, the engine behind any service that requires compute – think of everyday entertainment such as media streaming, cloud-gaming or movie-rendering, but also consider climate research, Machine Learning/AI and even exploration (but to name a few). All these activities require vast amounts of computing power not normally available in a domestic setting and rely on clusters of supercomputers (HPC) in data centers. Even if you are not familiar with supercomputers or data centers, you have probably seen them in movies or documentaries: large rooms filled with hundreds of big cabinets and lots of flashing lights letting us know that they are doing something complex and important. Not many of us however consider the potential environmental impact of these services nor do we think about the efficiency of the data centers from which we are consuming the services.
Just as your home PC or laptop uses powered fans to cool the hardworking, media-streaming, heat-producing electronics, these big boys require the equivalent exponentially larger infrastructure to operate efficiently and to avoid becoming one big pile of molten metal and plastic. Your laptop consumes between 20 and 50 Watts per hour (with 5-15% of that consumption coming from fans) and a typical HPC server (of which there are hundreds or thousands in a cluster) easily consumes over 2kW/hour. The easiest way to understand the heat issue is to accept that electricity used produces heat: 1kW . h = 1kW . 3600s = 3600kWs = 3600kJ = 3600000J. One kilowatt-hour corresponds to the heat required to evaporate 1.58 kg of liquid water at 100°C. A PC rated at 100 watts operating for 10 hours continuously uses one kilowatt hour.
How regular data centers are a burden on our environment
In a typical air-cooled data center, an average of 38% of the energy is used to actively cool, leaving only 62% to perform the actual computation. Invariably, data centers consider this heat as waste and simply release it into the atmosphere in the form of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent). To give you an idea of what this means for the environment in a traditional data center setting, let’s look at some numbers from HPC workloads.
One training run of a particular model for neural architecture search would,
... keep reading on reddit ➡Understanding data centers
With the growth of Cloud Services and AI, data centers have become the backbone of the digital world, and their importance will only increase in the foreseeable future. Data centers are, in essence, the engine behind any service that requires compute – think of everyday entertainment such as media streaming, cloud-gaming or movie-rendering, but also consider climate research, Machine Learning/AI and even exploration (but to name a few). All these activities require vast amounts of computing power not normally available in a domestic setting and rely on clusters of supercomputers (HPC) in data centers. Even if you are not familiar with supercomputers or data centers, you have probably seen them in movies or documentaries: large rooms filled with hundreds of big cabinets and lots of flashing lights letting us know that they are doing something complex and important. Not many of us however consider the potential environmental impact of these services nor do we think about the efficiency of the data centers from which we are consuming the services.
Just as your home PC or laptop uses powered fans to cool the hardworking, media-streaming, heat-producing electronics, these big boys require the equivalent exponentially larger infrastructure to operate efficiently and to avoid becoming one big pile of molten metal and plastic. Your laptop consumes between 20 and 50 Watts per hour (with 5-15% of that consumption coming from fans) and a typical HPC server (of which there are hundreds or thousands in a cluster) easily consumes over 2kW/hour. The easiest way to understand the heat issue is to accept that electricity used produces heat: 1kW . h = 1kW . 3600s = 3600kWs = 3600kJ = 3600000J. One kilowatt-hour corresponds to the heat required to evaporate 1.58 kg of liquid water at 100°C. A PC rated at 100 watts operating for 10 hours continuously uses one kilowatt hour.
How regular data centers are a burden on our environment
In a typical air-cooled data center, an average of 38% of the energy is used to actively cool, leaving only 62% to perform the actual computation. Invariably, data centers consider this heat as waste and simply release it into the atmosphere in the form of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent). To give you an idea of what this means for the environment in a traditional data center setting, let’s look at some numbers from HPC workloads.
One training run of a particular model for neural architecture search would,
... keep reading on reddit ➡