A new worry

I mentioned my disapproval of the gratuitous growing of cows in the last post, a disapproval grounded in the considerable contribution of cows to global warming, with a lot of that contribution being expressed in the form of methane being pumped into the upper atmosphere.

In fairness, I mention a new worry. That is to say all the gratuitous computation that goes on, computation which burns up large amounts of electricity, electricity still mostly generated by global warming activities such as burning coal. Not to mention the fact that all this electricity eventually winds up as heat, warming the atmosphere in a more direct way.

I have yet to see any figures, to know whether cows and computations generate roughly the same amount of global warming, but I have read that the consumption of films on telephones and the mining for Bitcoins in data centres are two big culprits.

Films on telephones because they require a great deal of energy to be pumped into the Internet to support transmission of large amounts of data from data centre to telephone, mining for Bitcoins because of the huge numbers of sums that have to be done, requiring a great deal of energy to be pumped into a very large computer.

It is all going to have to stop.