Hurricane Milton, The Uninhabitable Earth, AI, and (yes) the Suffragettes

I did my secretarial O Grade on a manual typewriter. Now, in post-menopausal middle-age, faced with the prospect of climate change and an après-Covid world that looks to artificial intelligence for its solutions, I admit to feeling a bit left behind. Tippex, anyone? 

I’ve watched a stream of YouTube videos featuring tech overlords who claim AI will be at the helm of a utopian future where humans lounge on chaise longues eating AI farmed grapes, never again having to clean the oven, sweep the roads or do a single day’s work. It all sounds like the extension of a colonialist mindset – our eyes searching beyond the stars for resources we can exploit, instead of preserving what we have here on earth.

Other videos paint apocalyptic scenarios where AI spells the doom of mankind, the coming of the ‘singularity’: the moment where an AI model becomes self-aware and decides to do away with its creator – an inadvertently damning autobiography of humanity if ever I heard one. What worries me is the feverish detachment displayed by these Silicon Valley AI rockstars, their disconnection from any kind of earthly roots that makes me trust neither the optimists nor the pessimists.

Perhaps you should get your education from somewhere other than YouTube, I hear you say. Two months ago, I watched Al Jazeera’s Inside Story – ‘How to Manage AI’s Energy Demand?’  The issue may not be as seductive as science fiction or as sexy as some of the magical-thinking geoengineering solutions to climate change that are currently being proposed (which I will outline shortly). The question of how to manage AI’s energy demand is an unglamorous reality. Not only does it poke a great big hole in our blind faith in technology’s ability to save us, it also exposes our blatant unwillingness to do anything realistic to save ourselves.

The truth is that AI has crept into our lives in such a banal fashion we never thought to question it: AI generated responses to Google searches; biometric data like Apple’s Face ID; digital voice assistants, Siri and Alexa; smart thermostats; smart fridges; travel apps; anti-virus software; spam filters; behind-the-scenes checks and verifications for online banking and shopping; personalised recommendations for everything from Netflix to Amazon and Instagram. I won’t even go into the dark side of AI, where low-wage workers are employed in shocking conditions to screen and tag all the upsetting images that won’t make it onto your feed because of their criminal and sexually exploitative content. Someone is paying the price so we don’t have to see that.

The point is that, even if we choose not to purchase AI software, such as Sudowrite, where writers can sign up to get AI generated feedback to their stories and characters (no, I didn’t buy it), we can’t escape AI. It’s in our lives whether we like it or not. What no one told me, until I watched Inside Story, is that AI uses copious amounts of electricity, far more than traditional Google searches and streaming, and its use is advancing so fast that no country in the world is likely to meet the current climate target of a minimum of two degrees warming by 2100 as set out by the Paris Agreement. 

So what, you might say – what does that even mean? I was just as confused. In order to find out what would happen to the earth at different stages of warming I did some research, away from YouTube. I read an actual book – okay, a digital book, on Kindle: The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), by David Wallace-Wells. If you haven’t read it, you really should, or at least the New York Magazine (July 2017) article of the same name that preceded it, for the mere fact that it’s the most read article in the history of the magazine. There are issues where David Wallace-Wells and I disagree (I’m sure he’ll be devastated), and I will come to those as they link back to the issue of how to manage energy demand. But for the most part, this is a well-researched eye-opener of a book. Wallace-Wells often quotes research by Michael Mann, director of the Penn Centre for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has his own book, Our Fragile Moment (2023). In a December 2023 article in the National Geographic, ‘What’s the Big Deal About Earth Getting 2°C Hotter,’ Mann says: ‘It’s more a somewhat objective definition of where we move from ‘bad’ into ‘really bad’ territory. Two degrees Celsius is a reasonable dividing line where we cross into the ‘red’ across all areas of concern… It’s really a question of how bad we’re willing to let it get. 1.5°C would be bad, two degrees really bad, and three degrees is perhaps… civilisation ending.’

Currently, we are at just over 1.2°C warming compared to pre-industrial levels. Our present pace has us on a best-case track for a 2.7°C rise by 2100. Though the IPCC has warned of a median prediction of over 4°C should current emissions continue.

Mann warns that the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees could have devastating consequences: ‘the loss of Arctic sea-ice, three times as much extreme heat, far greater levels of extinction and the possible loss of coral reefs across the planet. It would take us closer to the tipping point for loss of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets (and the metres of sea level rise that go with it). Pretty stark stuff.’

In The Uninhabitable Earth, Wallace-Wells painstakingly gathers data that accounts for all scenarios, comparing temperature data with that from earth’s five previous great extinctions (Snowball Earth to the Great Dying to the Jurassic extinction), to illustrate what we are likely looking at. A 4°C rise means no ice at either pole. At 3°C warming, sea level will rise 260ft. At only 170ft, the following places will flood: Amsterdam, Bangkok, Brussels, Copenhagen, Doha, Dubai, Dublin, Florida, Helsinki, Houston, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Kolkata, London, Manaus, Montreal, Mumbai, New York, Philadelphia, Riga, Sacramento, Saint Petersburg, San Francisco, Seattle, Shanghai, Stockholm. 

Some of it, quite frankly, we are already witnessing at a worse rate than what the book suggests: asphalt-melting heatwaves across east and southeast Asia; catastrophic flooding in the UAE, Brazil, Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, Europe and Bangladesh; uncontrollable wildfires in Canada; heatwaves that forced France to shut down nuclear power due to dried up water supplies; devastating ‘once in five hundred years’ hurricanes across North Carolina, Tennessee and, most recently, Hurricane Milton in Florida. And that’s only in 2024. Even in Scotland, any gardener can’t have failed to notice the unseasonable frosts and stormy weather that decimates early veg and contributes to vanishing pollinator populations. 

Wallace-Wells examines climate change’s feedback loops region by region, as well as its political and human consequences: less agricultural yields leading to global food deficits; more mosquito borne diseases; cognitive defects due to increased heat; new theatres of conflict as the Arctic melts; mass migration; more inequality leading to ‘a wave of fascism, authoritarianism and genocide’. All of this affecting not only our own species, but all life on the planet.

Wallace-Wells is not catastrophising. In fact, he demonstrates copious blind faith in a miracle cure. The book does not account for the rise of AI and the increased energy it uses. Instead, Wallace-Wells favours technological solutions to problems that could more easily be solved through less energy-guzzling means e.g. eating less meat, reforestation. His argument against natural approaches is painfully thin and lacks credible sources, suggesting that to succeed they would ‘require a third of the world’s farmable land.’ At the same time, he champions carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, ‘large-scale plantations nearly everywhere on earth’, devices costing at least $30,000 each that ‘To reduce the level of carbon by 20 parts per million per year… would require one billion of them.’ Not to mention the massive amounts of electricity to power them. But if that doesn’t work, there are always other geoengineering solutions such as ‘a red sulphur umbrella’ or giant dome of sulphur dioxide particles that pollute the air on purpose to keep it cooler. Wallace-Wells believes this ‘climate deus ex machina,’ as he calls it, will save us. But at what cost? 

Less destructive ideas such as eating less meat are treated with scorn: ‘I’m not about to go vegan. I tend to think when you’re at the top of the food chain it’s okay to flaunt it, because I don’t see anything complicated about drawing a moral boundary between us and other animals, and in fact find it offensive to women and people of colour that all of a sudden there’s talk of extending human-right-like legal protections to chimps, apes and octopuses, just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-male monopoly on legal personhood.’ 

I can’t speak for the black community but, as a woman who supports octopus and women’s rights, I’d like to say, don’t be offended on my account. Let’s rewind to 4 April 1908 when forty Suffragists marched, led by a brass band, on their release from Holloway Prison, to the Eustace Miles restaurant for a celebratory vegetarian breakfast. Many Suffragettes were vegetarians as well as pacifists e.g. Charlotte Despard, head of the Women’s Freedom League. The WFL operated the Minerva Café in High Holborn, one of 35 vegetarian restaurants in London at the time. They were popular places for activists and radicals to meet and organise, as well as for women to simply eat vegetarian meals and enjoy activities such as chess in an alcohol-free environment away from men, or at least with like-minded men.

In her book, Rumbles, A Curious History of the Gut, author Elsa Richardson makes the point that the adoption of a meat-free diet was seen ‘as a cause for progressive women, alongside sexual reform, anti-vivisection, rational dress and higher education.’ Richardson quotes an article by Edith Ward, taken from an early feminist journal, Shafts (weird name, but hey), that ‘the oppression of women and the exploitation of non-human animals result from the same system of power’ and to address the gender hierarchy, one must also address ‘species-based inequities.’ Seen this way, the force-feeding of Suffragettes with meat-based products such as Bovril takes on another layer of meaning. To quote Richardson, ‘Political histories have been shaped by what we choose to consume and not consume.’ I would argue that there is no better illustration of this than in our attitudes to climate change today.

Given the pressures of climate change and overpopulation, one of those choices is whether to have children. Wallace-Wells criticises the novelist, Sheila Heti, who compared reproducing to the egoism of colonialism. At the same time, he engages in mental gymnastics to justify his own choices: ‘I know there are climate horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children… but I don’t believe the appropriate response to that challenge is… surrender… I am excited for everything she [his daughter] will see… she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat… quite literally the greatest story ever told.’

Move over Don Quixote. I can’t think of a better example of toxic masculinity than seeing climate change as a kind of Old Testament battle, a medieval dual that the knight errant must win at all costs, even if it means sacrificing their children on the field.  

It’s possible that Wallace-Wells is positioning himself as the average climate-sceptic-NIMBY-white-westerner in order to appeal to that demographic, ‘I am like every other American… wilfully deluded.’ He’s also honest about his thinking, and unapologetic in his scathing critique of no-holds-barred capitalism, ‘the promise of growth has been the justification for inequality, injustice and exploitation… climate change promises no global growth… in fact, negative growth.’ 

This brings me back to energy demand and AI. If you know your tech, you’ll be aware that Ireland is home to the European headquarters of tech giants such as Google, Intel and Meta. Like an anachronistic movie set, massive data centres packed with row upon row of monolithic servers squat on Irish farmland alongside some of Europe’s oldest prehistoric monuments. A single traditional data centre can consume the equivalent amount of electricity as a small city. But an AI server consumes fifty times more energy than a traditional server, and use of AI is advancing so rapidly that the International Energy Agency estimates that within two years, AI technologies will consume as much energy as the whole of Japan. Whether you believe in a utopian future full of driverless cars, or whether you smell Soylent Green, the fact is AI is an energy sucker.

Fortunately, there is a solution. What, I hear you say? Build more nuclear power stations (Hinkley Point C has overrun £46 billion, has a working life of only 60 years, and a toxic waste life of millions)? Tax the companies that own the data centres and invest the money in renewables? Go out more instead of staring at screens? Revert to living in caves? According to the Irish government, it’s much simpler. Kill the cows. Yes. They plan to offset emissions by killing 65,000 cows over the next three years at a cost of nearly £100 million per year. Sorry, cull. A word that’s less look-over-here-we’ve-all-gone-crazy. More let’s-be-clear-I’m-a-policy-maker-and-I’m-being-reasonable. 

It’s not a new idea. New Zealand proposed something similar and called it the Burp Tax. Cows contribute to global warming by producing methane, a by-product of their digestive system. Hence the reason, along with major deforestation, that factory farming is one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters. Heaven forbid we should change our consumption habits when we can kill cows instead – that way we can still have chatbots and Netflix – yeah, kill the cows – great idea – very logical. I want to make it clear that my intention is not to mock Ireland, who is simply in the unfortunate position of playing host to granny’s old email that says, ‘am I in the internet now?’, the Word 95 documents with your early poems about sex and death, and the ones you wrote last weekend about, well, just death.

If you’ve ever watched The Daily Show (it’s on fecking YouTube), you’ll know that dramatic effect Jon Stewart does in response to political absurdity – he stops, opens his mouth, stares at the camera, then makes as if to say something – stops – starts, ‘Ah – Ehm,’ then stops. As if to say, there are no words…

That’s how I feel right now: ‘But – ehm – couldn’t we – ahem – reforest – stop subsidising – fossil fuels – ahem – eat less meat – maybe – couldn’t we – surely – couldn’t w… –?’

So, what’s my point, I hear you say? What – is – my – point? (sigh, I wish I knew). Firstly, I have no solution. All I can say is read The Uninhabitable Earth no matter what criticisms I have (I’m sure you’ll have some of your own). Read it for the facts. And when you’ve read it, remember that it’s NON-FICTION. Not a novel, not sci-fi, not even that most annoying of forms (eugh) the lyrical essay. IT’S REAL, FOLKS. Secondly, remember the radical women (and men) of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the activists and pacificists who cared about species-based inequities and who wanted to (and did) change the world, and take a leaf from their book. Thirdly, ask questions. Fourth, be kind and don’t give up being kind (to all species). Oh yeah, and if you’re really radical, and I mean 100% hardcore – give away your devices and buy a manual typewriter. I dare you… 

Okay, I’m done, I’ll get my second-hand, natural fibre coat…