'Elegant and important' paper warns of worse to come

A new paper described as “elegant and important” warns that the world is bound for temperature increases at the high end of past global warming estimates.

Penn State University climate scientist, Michael Mann, who wrote the book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines” praised the new report.

In its story headed: “Climate: Cloud mixing means extra global warming”, National Geographic explains that global warming will mix growing amounts of higher, drier air with ocean clouds over the course of the century, thinning out the clouds and reducing their cooling effect.

The unintended consequences of everything we do

Everything we do has an unintended consequence.

Beyond that and to further complicate matters, the language we use suggests innocence when in fact the reality is quite different.

Images created by the digital world seem harmless and even friendly with such metaphors as “cloud computing” engendering images of beautiful, fluffy, white clouds drifting across the sky demanding nothing of earth’s physical resources.

The image of cloud computing
 - green grass and fluffy, white
 and harmless clouds.

The reality, however, is quite different.

Those “clouds” are not fluffy, white and harmless, they are like the dark, black and intense clouds of a violent storm, in fact warehouses full of computer servers that devour a frighteningly amount of electricity; electricity generated by power plants fuelled almost exclusive by the villain of climate change, coal.

The New York Times in a story headed: “Power, Pollution and the Internet”, tells the alarming story about the realities of “cloud computing” and the impact our seemingly friendly digital world is having on the real world, the world we actually live in.