[The UK government recently issued a report outlining the impacts of climate change on the Internet.
While the report largely focuses on the impact on Wifi, climate change is going to seriously impact Internet in a number of aspects. Many climate researchers including President Obama’s National Science Advisor stress that we now must put equal emphasis on adaptability as opposed to sustainability in terms of planning for the future. Unfortunately, most Internet engineers and researchers are still focused on sustainability such as virtualization, energy efficiency and lower PUEs.
While the report largely focuses on the impact on Wifi, climate change is going to seriously impact Internet in a number of aspects. Many climate researchers including President Obama’s National Science Advisor stress that we now must put equal emphasis on adaptability as opposed to sustainability in terms of planning for the future. Unfortunately, most Internet engineers and researchers are still focused on sustainability such as virtualization, energy efficiency and lower PUEs.
But we need to quickly change our direction of research to adaptability. We have already seen the impact of major flooding have had on research networks such as AARnet in Queensland –whose primary network links were knocked out for several days and it took a number of weeks to restore full service. Climate models predict that within the next decade most of central and southern Europe and Western US will experience droughts on a greater scale then is experienced in Sahara today. But, at the same time the Benelux and Nordic countries are expected to suffer severe floods on a greater scale then we are witnessing today in Mississippi and Australia. On one hand power plants in parts of Europe may run out of cooling water as happened in France last year, while at the same time electrical distribution infrastructure in other parts of Europe may be under water causing a severe strain on the electrical distribution network in Europe. Combined with the shutdown of nuclear plants in Germany, rolling brownouts or blackouts may be a common feature in the coming decade. But networks and eInfrastructure will even be more critical than ever in such emergencies for supporting critical modeling and emergency services. We have to start redesigning the Internet, and most importantly the research network to survive climate change , of which the most important aspect will be to build networks that can function solely with unpredictable and unreliable renewable energy as for example the Greenstar Network and European Mantychore. Integrated North American cyber-infrastructure, or Europen eInfarstructure where computation and network facilities are located at sources of clean renewable power will be essential. Open Lightpath Exchanges and facilities like GLIF will critical for interconnecting these facilities to researchers around the world. Mary Jander, of Internet Evolution, will be hosting a live session on this topic on Monday (see below) and Cisco will also be holding a 2 day session on this topic at the Terena Network Conference next week. This is a very important topic and one that needs to be understood by network engineers and researchers. It also represents a huge new business opportunity for IT companies on a scale orders of magnitude greater than the year 2000 scare. I must applaud Quebec government and PROMPT as being the first jurisdiction in the world to recognize this opportunity and help support their IT industry in moving in this direction – BSA]
Mary Jander Blog on Green IT
Smart and Green Infrastructure Symposium 2011
Climate Change could ruin the Internet
Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
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