Ireland is famous for its picturesque green landscapes. However, climatologists think that our beautiful landscape may be under serious threat if the world continues to be profligate in its carbon emissions.
Ireland’s rich, green scenery may fade to brown, its potato crop may again whither, and the island’s classic soft rains may turn harsh if climate change continues unabated. Heavy rains in some parts of the island could lead to serious erosion. And bog bursts – when masses of peat slide down slopes like a California mudslide – are expected to be more common.
The report was put together by The Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units (ICARUS) - the leading centre for climate change research in Ireland and was funded by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Henry P. Kendall Foundation and the Rockefeller Family Fund.
The report is not downbeat in tone and suggests
Those who wish to keep Ireland green have a role to play, and it starts with making our own green choices – at home, at work, in our communities and when we vote.
CO2 doesn’t recognise national boundaries.
A new site at irishclimate.org has been setup to highlight this and to publicise the report.
Technology Review published an interesting article the other day on some of the innovations Microsoft is rolling out to save energy in its data centres.
Microsoft Research’s Networked Embedded Computing group have developed small sensors sensitive to heat and humidity. The sensors are web-enabled and can be networked and made compatible with Web services.
In Microsoft’s case, what they hope to do is use the sensors to give an accurate heat and humidity map of the data center. Then they will algorithmically decide how many servers they need to keep running, and start putting into sleep mode the servers in the hottest parts of the data center. This reduces the power required for servers, reduces the amount of heat being produced by servers and therefore the amount of cooling the air conditioning needs to do.
This solution will work particularly well for Microsoft, where there may be a lot of duplication amongst server roles but in more typical commercial data centers, you can’t go putting your customer’s servers into sleep mode!
Consequently in Cork Internet eXchange (CIX), the hyper energy-efficient data center which I co-founded we have had to take other innovative approaches to increasing our energy efficiency. I will outline those steps in subsequent posts on this blog.
In the meantime, kudos to Microsoft for coming up with these innovations. How much will it save them?
The group ran simulations using data from the IM service Windows Live Messenger and found that the system could produce about 30 percent in energy savings, depending on the physical structure of the data center and on how the system is configured
We all know that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is affecting the planet’s climate. We also are all painfully aware that if we somehow stopped injecting CO2 into the air today that the climate would still continue to be affected for decades to come by the levels of CO2 already there.
And yet we discuss reducing the amount of CO2 back to year 2000 levels? Over the next 12 years? We talk about buying more fuel efficient cars (some of us!) and turning off TV’s at night.
It has always concerned me that there is no talk of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, as opposed to merely putting less CO2 into the air.
a low-risk, transformational concept, called Green Freedom™, for large-scale production of carbon-neutral, sulfur-free fuels and organic chemicals from air and water… At the heart of the technology is a new process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making it available for fuel production using a new form of electrochemical separation.
If this were anyone other than Los Alamos I’d be saying asking if this process were being powered by cold fusion or a perpetual motion engine!
But because this is Los Alamos, we have to take it seriously.
They are announcing a technology to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and use it to fuel transportation? Sounds like two birds, one stone to me.
I gave a talk the other day for the it@cork Green IT event where I went through some of the innovations we rolled out in the design of the Cork Internet eXchange (CIX) data centre to make it a hyper energy-efficient data center.
This is the slide deck I used - I will go through some of the slides I used in more detail in subsequent posts
.
There are some fascinating quotes attributed to him such as
There are two kinds of micropower. One is co-gen and combined heat and power. That was about two-thirds of the new capacity and three-quarters of the new electricity last year. The rest was distributed or decentralized renewables, which was a $38 billion U.S. global market last year for selling equipment. That’s wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro and biomass…. Micropower surpassed nuclear power in worldwide installed capacity in 2002, and surpassed nuclear in electricity generated per year just in the last few months.
and
…new nuclear plants are simply unfinanceable in the private capital market, and the technology will continue to die of an incurable attack of market forces—all the faster in competitive markets. This is true not just in the U.S., where the last order was in 1978 and all orders since 1973 were cancelled, but globally
In 2005 he gave the following fantastic talk at the TED conference:
The only thing I can’t understand is, if what he says is true, why aren’t we all driving around in composite cars now?
While many people tend to see ‘going green’ as a fad, and one which will cost time and money, in fact, the opposite generally holds true. Being green is all about reducing waste and being more efficient. Typically this leads to reduced expenditure and cost savings.
In this video, Brently Davis, Intel IT Data Center Efficiency Communications Manager, discusses how Intel is cutting back to using 8 global data center hubs through the use of consolidation, virtualization and standardization. The initiative is expected to save Intel $1.8Bn by project completion.
I have been blogging about tech-related stuff for several years now but recently because I am doing a lot of work in the ‘Green IT’ area, I decided to start a blog more focussed on this area.
If you read this blog, bear with me, I am far from an expert in this area but will try to add interesting posts to this blog.
Tom Raftery is a communicator, blogger, podcaster and social media consultant.
More recently Tom is a co-founder and director of Cork Internet eXchange - a hyper energy-efficient data center.
Tom is currently on the lookout for a new challenge. Interested? Check out his cv.
