Jen is interested in environmental footprinting as a way of analysing environmental costs and benefits of various lifestyles.

Along the same lines, BLDGBLOG has an interesting essay today on the topic of the carbon footprint of internet servers. This is something I haven’t really thought about before, but it is true that even a small server room can pump out a lot of heat. Of course all this heat, and the energy to run the massive cooling systems that have to move it outside, come from electricity which has a fairly high carbon footprint.

One server (particulars not specified) is apparently equivalent to an SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. One data farm (particulars not specified) uses up to a small city’s worth of power, primarily for cooling. Makes you think about what benefit we are getting for the costs.

ETA: In other news, it turns out that divorce is bad too (for the environment that is).

 › environment     2007-12-03 17:45   ...2 comments

It’s kind of surreal. Beekeepers all over the world are reporting that their bees are dying. They are calling it Colony Collapse Disorder. There is no accepted explanation for this phenomenon, but apart from a few back-page stories in the paper there has not been much discussion of this.

A bee pollinating, from pdphoto.org

An article in the Independent today has two interesting aspects to it. First it presents work related to electromagnetic disturbance of bee navigation. This is relevant to mobile phones because it’s been shown that bees won’t return to a hive if there’s a cell phone nearby. In colony collapse disorder the bees seem to die alone, far from home, so anything that has appeared recently that would confuse their navigation seems relevant.

The second interesting thing is that Bees provide huge amounts of our pollination services in commercial agriculture. According to Wikipedia “the largest managed pollination event in the world is in Californian almond orchards, where nearly half (about one million hives) of the US honey bees are trucked to the almond orchards each spring. New York’s apple crop requires about 30,000 hives; Maine’s blueberry crop uses about 50,000 hives each year.”

The Independant article reminds us that Einstein said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

 › environment     2007-04-17 10:50   ...1 comment

Someone pinch me. G8 heads on brink of climate agreement.

Apparently the G8 are going to agree that science tells us that the climate is changing and that fossil fuels are a big part of it. Bush is claiming to be doing something. I know I am tired but this is a weird hallucination.

There must be a catch in all of this, right?

ETA: “My hope is — and I think the hope of Tony Blair is — to move beyond the Kyoto debate and to collaborate on new technologies that will enable the United States and other countries to diversify away from fossil fuels so that the air will be cleaner and that we have the economic and national security that comes from less dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Bush said.

So it’s pie in the sky then…

 › environment     2005-07-03 22:59   ...0 comments