[Hurricane Sandy has been a badly needed wake up call for
the Internet community as to the threat of climate change.
Although most people
have forgotten, Sandy is the second hurricane to hit New York in as many years
with Irene last August and a third tropical depression headed to New York at the
time of this writing. Two, supposedly once
in a hundred year storms, within such a short time frame should even make the
most die-hard denialist that something’s afoot.
Although the networks and data centers in New York and New
Jersey survived relatively unscathed, with only a handful suffering significant
outages, most of the data centers and network facilities in and around New York
had to be powered by diesel backup
generators for several days. Fortunately
none of the nearby refineries were seriously affected by the storm so fuel
deliveries for the generators were not seriously delayed. It is expected that some data centers,
especially in lower Manhattan may have to be powered by their diesel generators
for sometime as it will take the electrical utility days if not weeks to
replace much of the flooded electrical infrastructure. But imagine the consequences if those
refineries were also seriously damaged and there was no fuel to power the
backup generators for the data centers and networks.
Flooding from storms like Sandy, and droughts, are forecast to
increase significantly in the coming decade. As Jim Hansen, the famous NASA climate
scientist has pointed out, simple statistics show that the probability severe
weather is going to increase exponentially with increasing global temperatures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8
Unfortunately most research and development efforts with
respect to the Internet, or any other aspect of climate change, are still
focused on energy efficiency or measuring energy consumption. People still don’t
realize that we have already lost the battle to prevent the planet from getting
warmer. We now need to focus on how we will survive climate change.
Hurricane Sandy has shown us the consequences of severe
weather as a result of climate change. Energy efficiency, or measuring energy
consumption is irrelevant if you are sitting in the dark without power. By now most of us seen the pictures of
citizens of New York scrambling to find
sites where they can re-charge their cell phones, or struggling to find a cell
phone signal.
As I have written many times in the past, the Internet and
cyber-infrastructure are going to be critical for society to survive future severe
weather patterns. Rather than focusing on energy efficiency, in the vain and forlorn
hope that making the Internet more energy efficient will somehow change the
direction we are headed, we need to focus on how to build an Internet and
cyber-infrastructure eco-system that can survive climate change. Solar powered Wifi sites, open access wifi,
ad hoc wireless networks, solar powered optical networks, building highly distributed
clouds with renewable power ( and low cost) computational devices like the Raspberry
Pi built on the Greenstar network architecture are examples of such approaches.
Some pointers:
Sandy
Prompts Louder Calls For Free Wi-Fi http://t.co/PJSTniEv
Greenstar
network – www.greenstarnetwork.com
--BSA]
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.
email:
Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog:
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro