climate and comms

  The Summer of 2022 will be remembered as the season when global temperature records were broken systematically.    When more temperature records were broken in more places than ever before.    All the way across Europe and the UK records are being shattered as wildfires wreak havoc upon the natural and the built environment.   China, India and the USA have also broken heat records and there is no let-up in sight.   (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/with-record-breaking-heat-europe-glimpses-its-climate-future/)   The environments in cities and towns are increasingly becoming hostile to human habitation and this will lead to more migration.       How has this come about?   We are living in the Anthropocene geological age  – the period in earth’s history when Man has made a significant impact on the environment.      It started (in earnest) at the time of the Indus...

I have been waiting for Jeremy Rifkin to get with the African program.   It was only a matter of time.   For those of you who don't know, he is the guy who wrote ‘ The Third Industrial Revolution’ ( http://thethirdindustrialrevolution.com/ ) which is the story of the convergence of the communication and energy revolutions.   In it he talks of the rapidly emerging trend of local power generation and the sharing of that power laterally across the grid analogously to WiFi sharing between adjacent WiFi networks.    This is very powerful because it obviates the need for large capital projects for power generation – which have the downsides of : long lead times, centralised monolithic infrastructure, large expensive and wasteful distribution networks - all well illustrated by the current Eskom debacle. It is not widely known that only about 15% of Africans have access to power.   Millions of African children are forced to read by the lig...

It is a little known fact that the Internet is one of the largest contributors of carbon emissions.    ( http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-footprint-internet ) Today 9/21/2014 [1] is a significant date in the climate change calendar,   being the largest climate march in history ( http://peoplesclimate.org )   It is a day when awareness of the impact of global warming will perhaps reach a critical mass and the decision-makers will finally wake up.   How many more Katrina’s,   Sandy’s or Haiyan’s will it take to shock the hardcore minority ( denialist’s and their patrons – i.e. the fossil fuel industry )   into realising that it can no longer be   “business as usual”.    I work in the Internet industry – building data centres.    Our work is in Africa where the potential (negative) impact of climate change could be the highest of any region in the World.    As local weather patterns chan...