Climate Change and AI's rising carbon footprint

AI has been dominating the news for the past week, ever since DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, shook up the AI ecosystem—and the US stock markets—by producing an advanced and highly competent AI assistant model seemingly out of nowhere, and effectively starting an AI arms race.

Training an AI LLM (large language model) is an extremely cost intensive process. This is the stage at which the model is “taught" using vast amounts of data scraped from the internet. The next stage—called “inference"—is where the AI generates responses to queries. DeepSeek’s R1 model’s biggest success is the fact that its performance is at least as good as that of Open AI’s latest 01 model for ChatGPT, or of Meta’s Llama 3.1 model, at a fraction of the cost.

The DeepSeek AI model supposedly cost only $6m to develop, while OpenAI and the other US AI giants have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to train their models. American AI companies seek to retain their cutting edge by simply throwing more data and computing power—at higher costs—at the problem, while making more demands on energy.

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While there isn’t any corroborated data on this as yet, DeepSeek’s low-budget success might mean that AI doesn’t necessarily need what OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and Google and the rest have been claiming: more data centres, more computing power, more money, more electricity.

This is important because AI is an energy burden on the planet, putting additional pressure on an already fragile transition to renewable energy. American tech giants are looking for massive investments from the US and other western governments, while remaining almost entirely opaque about the energy intensity of training and running their AI models.

The little data that is in the public domain is quite worrying. In early July last year, Google admitted in a statement that its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have grown by over 48% in the previous five years. Both Google and Microsoft’s goals of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2030 have taken a backseat as a result of their AI investments. According to a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2022, data centres globally consumed about 460 terra-watt hours (TWh) of electricity. This is forecast to rise to over 1,000 TWh by 2026, which is roughly the same as the energy consumption of Japan.

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Researchers fear that as AI gets more competitive and more efficient, tech firms will, as researcher Alex de Vries says, “just keep adding more computational resources, and as soon as models or hardware becomes more efficient, people will make those models even bigger than before." This would come at a steep cost, where AI may need .5% of the global electricity consumption pie by 2027.

In this respect, DeepSeek’s shoestring success gives a measure of hope that US AI giants will scale down their decadent, energy-guzzling ways to make AI more user-friendly, open sourced, cheap for businesses, and less of an emissions burden.

State of the Climate

The sudden and steep rise in global temperatures due to climate change has led to planetary carbon sinks increasingly becoming net emitters of CO2. Earth’s forests, oceans, soils, marshlands, ice caps all lock in carbon deposits, and have been doing so for thousands of years. They have also absorbed 56% of all CO2 emitted by human activity each year for the past six decades.

But now, these carbon sinks are reaching breaking point. A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the Arctic-Boreal Tundra is rapidly warming, and as a result, over 30% of the region has now become a source of CO2 emissions. This figure rises to 40% if wildfires in the region was included.

A preliminary study found that in 2023, the second warmest year on record, there was a massive—if temporary—breakdown in carbon sinks around the world. The sheer amount of emissions that year overwhelmed the capacity of forests, soil and plants to absorb CO2. Nor was this a purely land-based phenomenon. The storage of carbon on the ocean floor was also disrupted by the melting of Greenland glaciers and Antarctic ice sheets.

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There is much talk about developing technologies that capture and store carbon from the atmosphere. However, such technologies are in their infancy, and the only real alternative are natural carbon sinks. In fact, the emissions reductions targets of most nations, including India, depend on forests and soils to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. If these systems start collapsing, then the world’s carbon budget will become even smaller.

The news in brief

-One of the first things that Donald Trump did after becoming US President was to withdraw the US—the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the world’s biggest historical emitter—from the Paris Agreement on climate change. In my column for Mint, I discuss why this makes 2025 a do-or-die year for meaningful climate action.

-North India has experienced quite a mild winter, and February is likely to be warmer than normal as well, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) announced last week. The IMD director-general Mrutyunjay Mohapatra also said that there will be below average rainfall and fewer colder days than usual. This will certainly have an adverse effect on yields of crops like wheat, chickpeas and rapeseed.

-Did you know that older trees sequester more carbon than younger trees? In this fascinating piece, scientists talk about the importance for ancient life-forms, be they trees that are a 1,000 years old, or 200-year-old whales or 10,000-year-old sea sponges.

Climate Change Tracker

A hotter, sicker India

Apart from withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, Trump has begun the process of US withdrawal from the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO). He is also at the forefront of concentrated effort in the US to discredit vaccination, and also funding for medical research, including that for monitoring and countering possible pandemic outbreaks.

The US is a major funder for the WHO, and its withdrawal will certainly be a blow against the body’s effective performance. And this couldn’t possibly come at a worse time, since climate change is making the possibility of new pandemic outbreaks even more likely.

A 2022 study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that 58% of known human pathogenic diseases (diseases caused by viruses, bacteria or fungi) were aggravated by various climate hazards, including warming, floods, intense rainfall and draughts. Another study, also from 2022, warned that “10,000virus species have the ability to infect humans but, at present, the vast majority are circulating silently in wild mammals". However, with changes in the climate and in land-use, the chances of these viruses crossing over to humans (just like the virus that caused covid-19 crossed over from bats to humans) will massively increase.

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A tropical country like India, already beset with a plethora of climate impacts, will be at the forefront of this, since the spread of diseases like malaria, dengue, chikungunya and cholera is going to increase. All the more reason why India needs to have a warning system for possible disease outbreaks due to extreme weather.

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An initial step towards developing such a system was the publication of a new study looking at the increased dangers of increased dengue cases due to climate change, using data from Pune. The study warns that if the world heats up by 1.5 degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels, a city like Pune will experience additional 13% of dengue deaths over the next 20 years. If global warming isn’t brought under control, then this will lead to up to a 112% increase in deaths by the end of the century.

Authored by a team of scientists led by Yacob Sophia and Roxy Mathew Koll of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, the study is something of a pilot project for a longer-term monitoring of the relationship between rising diseases and climate change in India.

Know Your Jargon

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Coral Bleaching

As marine heatwaves multiply due to an overheated global ocean, the world’s coral reefs are at risk of dying out completely. Reef systems actually account for a minute part of the ocean—only about .01%—but they support 25% of the marine ecosystem. If they collapse, ocean ecology gets seriously imperilled.

Coral death occurs by way of coral bleaching, when entire reefs become white, as the coral organisms die due to excessive heat. And while they might recover if a marine heatwave subsides, that is increasingly not happening.

The world’s most famous coral reef, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR), has been in the throes of a massive bleaching episode over the past year. Scientists monitoring reef colonies around the tourist-favourite One Tree Island in the GBR’s southern section, found that 40% are dead due to intensely hot marine conditions. The area is now being called a coral graveyard.

According to a comprehensive study on climate change and the world’s oceans published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if global temperatures rise by more than 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100, 90% of the world’s reefs would die out. The world is currently on a path to 3.2 degrees of heating by 2100.

Prime Number

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While it is correct to say that climate change is caused by human activities, not all people have an equal role to play. The world’s richest 1% people are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the world poorest 66%. This startling statistic was revealed in a report published by the charitable organisation Oxfam in late 2023. The study, titled, Equality: A Planet For The 99%, found that the super-rich 1% were responsible for 16% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the same as the poorest 66% (which is about 5 billion people).

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It further noted that since the 1990s, the world’s richest people have burned through twice as much of the carbon budget (the amount of GHG emissions that can be emitted and still keep the world from heating up dangerously) as the poorest.

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This is in line with other findings that show how the wealthy countries of the global north have been responsible for 92% of historical emissions, and that 70% of all industrial emissions from 1998 onwards have been caused by just 100 oil, gas and coal producers.

The figures speak for themselves: European private jets emitted 5.3m tonnes of CO2 in 2020-2023; the lifestyle emissions of 20 billionaires produced an average of 8,000 tonnes of CO2 in one year; and that by 2030, the per capita consumption emissions of the 1% will be 22 times higher than the level required to keep the world from overheating.

Book of the Month

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The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story Of The Future by David Wallace-Wells

While watching the news on the devastating wildfires laying waste to vast swathes of Los Angeles, I was reminded of journalist David Wallace-Wells’ hard-hitting 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth. Wallace-Wells was one of the first writers to take the threat of multi-dimensional climate change seriously enough to do some digging about what the future may hold. What he found was devastating, as the title suggests.

While derided by many as being needlessly sensationalistic, it is frightening just how soon the predictions he listed in the book are coming to pass. From economic collapse to wildfires and wilder storms and disease outbreaks, Wallace-Wells pulls no punches about our bleak climate future, unless we act now. A must-read.

So that’s it for this edition of Climate Change And You, dear reader. See you again in a fortnight, when Sayantan will be writing the newsletter.

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