Science Needs to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint

Science is worth something. Many researchers think the answer is "priceless." Technology gives us useful things, but it's not the only thing that science has given us. Our understanding of the world around us is deepened by science. The poem "a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower" could have been written by the poet if he had thought about science. The power of natural forces is what makes science so valuable to me.

Some researchers have raised questions about the carbon footprint of science. Our current climate crisis is caused by large-scale scientific research using a lot of carbon-based energy and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases. Scientists are helping us understand the world but they are also damaging it.

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that the environmental costs of computer science are rising. A single data center using the same amount of electricity as 50,000 homes is called a carbonivore. The cloud has a higher carbon footprint than the airlines.

There is a carbon problem in research.

Big emitters are large telescopes. The world's leading astronomy observatories will produce 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the course of their lives, according to a study published in Nature Astronomy. In a news conference announcing their results, the authors said that if the world is to meet the challenge of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, astronomer will have to reduce their carbon footprint by up to a factor of 20 It's possible that building fewer big observatories will be the result. The Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) in Toulouse, France, had an average greenhouse gas emissions per person of 28 metric tons of CO 2e a year.

Scientists look at the carbon footprint of conferences. The annual meeting of the AGU is usually held in San Francisco. The travel-related carbon footprint of the AGU meeting was calculated by Milan Klwer and his colleagues. The annual output of an average person in Mexico was close to that per person output. Moving the meeting to a central U.S. city to shorten travel was one of the ideas offered by Klwer. The travel footprint could be reduced by more than 90 percent. In the future, the AGU plans to use a hybrid format.

The research that goes into astronomy and computer science enlarges the scientific carbon footprint. In a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, Emma Strubell and her colleagues concluded that the amount of energy spent training a neural network might be better used to heat a family's home. There are similar complaints about language modeling and physics.

It is difficult to see this reality. Scientists will have to find a way to do more work with less energy as time runs out to prevent a climate calamity.