Climate change is steadily bearing down on us, and we’re still here reading about it online, watching YouTube explainers, and putting in our two cents on Twitter. And we’re probably going to keep doing that right up until the Internet goes dark.
Because that will happen, as unbelievable as it may sound. One of climate change’s early victim is going to be the Internet.
The Web is dying
After all, the world wide web was built to connect the world. At the time, we weren’t thinking about how drastically that world could change. For instance, 99 percent of Internet traffic is transmitted through undersea cables.
And these cables require maintenance stations, repeaters, and the like. The problem is, the melting icecaps are causing sea levels to rise, which in turn is making it harder to get to these cables.
Similarly, servers and data centers are the backbone of the Internet. These are at their core, multitudes of processing units working in tandem, and they required dedicated cooling. That is unfortunately becoming more and more expensive to do, thanks to rising global temperatures. It requires more power to cool them, and electricity is also getting more expensive.
In addition, we’re mostly using coal to generate our electricity, and haven’t yet made a significant switch to green energy. And that’s feeding into the cycle of degeneration of which our Internet, computers, smartphones, and more are all a part.
Then there are other things sparked by rising temperatures. We’re seeing an increasing number of wildfires and hurricanes around the world, both of which put those same cables and data centers at risk, not to mention other Internet infrastructure.
The only way out is to change the way the Internet is set up, and strengthen our infrastructure, find cleaner ways to power the world wide web machine.
Our Internet cables are drowning
Take one study published last year by researchers at the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They looked at fiber optic cables in low-lying regions, and how they’d hold up to rising sea levels. Specifically, they looked at 15 years from now, by then ocean levels are predicted to rise by a foot.
Based on that, they said at least 6,400 km of fiber optic cable in just the US would be permanently submerged. That means networks in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle would be majorly affected.
How much worse off would we be?
“Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” said researcher Paul Barford. “That surprised us. The expectation was that we’d have 50 years to plan for it. We don’t have 50 years.”
Data centers are tough to cool
And then there are the data centers. We want tech companies to set them up in India so our data can stay local. But thanks to rising temperatures, they’d have to draw a gradually increasing amount of power in order to keep them cool. That puts a major strain on local power grids, increasing the likelihood of power cuts and full-on blackouts.
Yeah, it might be a choice between everyone having power in their homes, or everyone having access to the Internet.
But it’s not like the Internet is just the victim here. It’s also plays a causal part in this cycle. None of that social media browsing and Netflix streaming happens for free, there’s an energy cost to all of it.
According to a report by The Shift Project, digital technologies are responsible for 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Additionally, it says the industry’s energy consumption is increasing by 9 percent each year.
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What goes around comes around
The entire world plays a part in this but affluent countries contribute more. When people are better off, they spend more money on data, consume more data, and therefore increase their own carbon footprint. This is only going to get worse as we switch over to more modern networks like 5G, as we start to use AI more, and as people continue to mine cryptocurrencies.
And to top it all off, there’s not consistent push, or indeed any incentive, to shift over to renewable energy.
