'You're paying for something you'll never use again'
A new study has found that the over-sharing of memes, photos and 'reply all' emails online is bad for the climate. When internet memes first captured our imaginations, hardly anyone was worried about how much energy they were using. But now experts are worried.
Photo: Pixabay.com.
Researchers have found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data,” meaning it’s used once and then never accessed again. That means, The Guardian reports, that all the memes, jokes, and movies we love to share with friends and family are sitting out there in a data center, wasting energy.
National Grid predicts that data centers will account for just under 6% of total UK electricity consumption by 2030, so tackling unwanted data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.
Professor Ian Hodgkinson from the University Loughborough is studying the impact of dark data on climate and how to reduce it.
“I actually started a couple of years ago trying to understand the negative impact of digital data on the environment,” he says. – At first glance, the answer to this question may be quite simple, but in reality it turns out that everything is much more complicated. But, of course, data has a negative impact on the environment.”
A scientist found that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and believes personal data tells the same story.
Hodgkinson notes that if you look at individuals and society as a whole, many people still think that data is carbon neutral, but every piece of data, whether it's an image, a social media post, whatever it is, has a carbon footprint.
«So,» he concludes, «when we store data in the cloud, we think of a white fluffy cloud, but the reality is that these data centres are incredibly hot, incredibly noisy, they use a lot of energy.»
Of course, one funny meme won't destroy the planet, but the millions of unused photos stored in people's cameras do make an impact, Hodgkinson explained: “One photo isn't going to have a dramatic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and look at all the old photos you have collectively, it's going to be pretty impressive in terms of power consumption.”
At cloud providers and tech companies there is a financial incentive to prevent users from deleting unnecessary data, since the more data is stored, the more people pay to use their systems, writes The Guardian.
“You’re essentially paying for something you’re never going to use again because you don’t even know it’s there,” Hodgkinson says. “And if we think about the significant financial costs that this entails, as well as the environmental costs, the bigger picture is that we’re not on track to get to net zero by 2050.”
There may be other big contributors to greenhouse gas emissions that may not have been identified yet, he says: “And we could certainly argue that data is one of them, and it’s going to get bigger and bigger, especially when you think about this huge explosion, but we also know from projections that in the next year or two, if we used all the renewable energy in the world, it wouldn’t be enough to meet the amount of energy data that’s required. So that’s quite a scary thought.”
One thing people can do to stem the data deluge, Hodgkinson says, is to send fewer pointless emails: every standard email emits about 4g of carbon. “If we then think about the amount of what we mostly call ‘legacy data’ that we hold, for example if we think about all the digital photographs we have, then we get the cumulative effect.”
Steps we can take to reduce our carbon footprint include ditching the “dreaded ‘send to all’ button,” Hodgkinson added.
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