Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

It's time for an exciting round of "What's changing the climate today?"

Our featured contestant is Professor Ian Hodgkinson from Loughborough University.

So, Professor Hodgkinson, what is changing the climate today?

... all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family - from 'All your base are belong to us,' through Ryan Gosling saying 'Hey Girl,' to Tim Walz with a piglet - are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy.

Oh no!

Are our memes killing the environment?

Hodgkinson says dark data, or the data that is viewed once or twice and then forever stored in a data warehouse somewhere, is killing the environment.

If we think about individuals and society more broadly, what we found is that many still assume that data is carbon neutral, but every piece of data, whether it be an image, an Instagram post, or whatever it is, has a carbon footprint attached to it.

So when we store things in the cloud, we think about the white fluffy clouds, but the reality is, these data centres are incredibly hot and noisy, and they consume a large amount of energy.

One picture isn't going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption.

So what kind of damage are we talking about here?

One [figure] that often does the rounds is that for every standard email, it equates to about 4g of carbon. If we then think about the amount of 'legacy data' that we hold, such as all the digital photos that we have, there will be a cumulative impact.

One email equals 4 grams of carbon pumped into the atmosphere?

4 grams?

For reference, that's almost the weight of an entire pencil.

If that number is correct, it would use less carbon to literally write a letter with a pencil and paper than to send an email.

All the politicians and spammers sending me mountains of emails are killing the planet!

But sending an email takes a little more energy than just storing data, right? Nope - not if that data is constantly being crawled by AI to feed large language models.

And so when we think about the likes of different analytics, we think about things like ChatGPT, for instance. Again, for many individuals, they believe that to be carbon neutral, but it isn't.

In the end, though, Hodgkinson didn't offer any experimental data to back up any of his claims, so it's probably just climate hysteria.

You know what that means.

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