This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Once upon a time, there was something thrilling in record-breaking events like Babe Ruth's 60th home run of the 1927 season. But today, maybe not. After all, we've just lived through the hottest summer on record globally and, though we've only made it to September, this year, too, could (like last year) set a new global heat record. It's already setting them locally, that's for sure. Take Phoenix, Arizona. With a record-breaking heat wave continuing across the American West, that city only recently set a new record of its own: 100 straight days (yes, you read that right!) of temperatures of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher (and still going strong as I write this). Phoenix also shattered another record, experiencing the 56th day in which the temperature reached 110 degrees. (I have a feeling I should be putting exclamation points after both of those records, although count on one thing: in the years to come, they'll undoubtedly be broken again -- and again and again!)
This is the planet that we're now on. And it's a world that should, in every sense, take your breath away. It's a place where, increasingly, nothing will be unaffected by climate change. And yet, with all that (and more) in mind (or do I mean out of our minds?) on a planet ever more clearly in trouble, we simply can't stop making war and it matters not at all that war-making has a special ability to toss yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In other words, the human response to climate change is, in significant part, to ignore it or even add to its horrors. And war isn't the only way we have of doing that, as TomDispatch regular Stan Cox makes strikingly clear today.
In fact, with all of that in mind, let him take you into another world -- the universe of noise pollution and how it's related to this (over)heating planet of ours. Cover your ears and read on. Tom
We're Getting Sick of Noise Pollution
Keeping Our World Cooler Will Also Make It Quieter
By Stan Cox
The most pressing environmental crisis of these times, our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we're also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world -- and it's not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.
Noise pollution, a longstanding menace, is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term "data centers," are making growing numbers of people miserable.
Residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, the nation's data-center epicenter, have filed dozens of complaints about an especially loud facility located in the town of Leesburg. People living as much as three miles from the center compared the noise from its giant cooling fans to the sounds of an airplane engine, a freight train, a huge leaf blower, or a helicopter hovering overhead, day and night.
Attorneys representing a group of Williston, North Dakota, homeowners argued last December that noise pollution from the nearby Atlas Power Data Center "is a continual invasion of their homes, their health, and their North Dakota way of life. They are now virtually shut-ins in the slice of North Dakota they once called their own." In April, Gladys Anderson of Bono, Arkansas, told reporters that a nearby cryptocurrency-mining data center was "like torture, like a form of military-grade torture." Her neighbor complained, "It's caused problems for me with my hearing, my blood pressure, with the sweetheart where she gets migraine headaches."
Chicago-based airline pilot Joshua Zhang -- someone who (I'm betting) knows a thing or two about loud noise -- told CBS News in 2021 that a new data center in his Printers' Row neighborhood whined like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that never shuts off. "I try to fly as much as I can to stay away from here," he said. "I can't really sleep well" and I have to operate a flight." In other words, the data center's ear-splitting noise was so bad that it drove Mr. Zhang to seek refuge at" O'Hare Airport.
Noise Makes Us Sick and We're Sick of Noise
The recent, rapid proliferation of data centers has been due, at least in part, to the similarly rapid growth of two types of enterprises: cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI). Those voracious wasters of electricity were unasked-for inventions that filled largely nonexistent human needs. And they're amplifying the very real problem of noise pollution.
Crypto and AI illustrate a larger issue. An all-out effort to curb climate change will require deep reductions in the use of fossil fuels, which will, in turn, require more frugal use of all forms of energy. And if that happens (as it should), it will have profound repercussions throughout society. As one of the more welcome consequences, our now-cacophonous world is likely to become easier on the ears.
With every AI project abandoned, every bitcoin not mined, every pickup truck not sold, every jet fighter not flown, people somewhere will get relief. With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.
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