Link tags: carbon

CSS { In Real Life } | Greenwashing and the COP28 Website

Maybe when I wrote about performative performance? Michelle has a prime example:

The low carbon toggle does absolutely nothing.

In fact, worse than nothing. It doesn’t prevent images being downloaded. It doesn’t switch the site to dark mode, or prevent autoplaying animations (e.g. the hero carousel), or reduce resources transferred in other way. All it does is overlay an extra element with a background gradient on top of the large images on the site to give the appearance that those images being prevented from loading.

How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions - BBC News

Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?

Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.

The climate cost of the AI revolution • Wim Vanderbauwhede

As a society we need to treat AI resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal AI.

6, 97: Why scorpions?

A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.

Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer

A Creative Commons licensed web book that you can read online.

Carbon dioxide removal at a climate-significant scale is one of the most complex endeavors we can imagine, interlocking technologies, social systems, economies, transportation systems, agricultural systems, and, of course, the political economy required to fund it. This primer aims to lower the learning curve for action by putting as many facts as possible in the hands of the people who will take on this challenge. This book can eliminate much uncertainty and fear, and, we hope, speed the process of getting real solutions into the field.

A World We Built to Burn | emptywheel

The climate crisis as technical debt:

What we’re dealing with is hundreds of years of something that software world calls technical debt. Technical debt is the shortcuts and trade-offs engineers use to get something done either cheaper or in less time, which inevitably creates the need to fix systems later, often at great cost or difficulty.

Some technical debt is understood up front, some comes from builders being ignorant of the system they are working in. Most of our planet’s infrastructure is mired in huge amounts of technical debt, most of which we didn’t know we were signing up for at the time, some of which we’re just incurring recklessly as we go along, unable to face the scale of the problem and pushing it off on the next generation.

To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution | Technology | The Guardian

Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.

Website Carbon Calculator – Calculate your websites carbon emissions

Get an idea of how much your website is contributing to the climate crisis.

In total, the internet produces 2% of global carbon emissions, roughly the same as that bad boy of climate change, the aviation industry.

Carbon

This service could be quite handy if you’re making a presentation that involves showing code—it generates syntax-highlighted images of code.

Terraforming on Vimeo

There’s that Acheulean hand ax again.

The first ever object to be designed by man 1.7 million years ago was a flint hand axe. Flint has the same molecular structure as a crystal and they both consist of silica. The project juxtaposes the flint hand axe with the latest crystal technology; Xero chaton the world’s smallest precision cut crystal measuring 0.6mm in diameter, smaller than a grain of sand.

CO2 emissions, birth & death rates by country, simulated real-time

A visual real-time simulation that displays the carbon dioxide (co2) emissions, birth rates, and death rates of every country in the world.

Nanotech Used 2000 Years Ago to Make History's Sharpest Swords | Wired Science from Wired.com

Could it be that swords made of wootz steel—as described in The Baroque Cycle—were so sharp because their blades contained fullerenes?