Tag Archives: climate change

Rebranding Climate Change

As I look out of the window at yet another rainy day, it occurs to me that we missed an opportunity to get climate change taken seriously.  Here in Britain, ‘global warming’ often sounds rather nice. An opportunity to improve domestic vineyards, perhaps, and make wines here like the Romans used to do.  Or to save on air fares to the south of France… I know some have argued that ‘global heating’ is a better phrase, for just that reason: it’s a bit less cozy. 

But since, for many people, warmer temperatures will mean increased precipitation, I think we should also consider names like ‘Global Drenching’ or ‘Universal Drizzle’.  That sounds more like something we would want to avoid in the home counties, and might spur people to action.

Right.  Action.  I’m off to buy shares in Gore-Tex…

Watt’s the cost?

A few years ago, I came across a really useful rule-of-thumb for calculating electricity cost:

A 1-watt device costs £1/year, if it’s running 24×7.

At the time, this was almost exactly right for most people in the UK, and it made it very easy to estimate the impact of, say, using that old 200W PC as a server for the next three years rather than getting a more modern low-power one.

Sadly, for most of us, energy costs are going up a lot at the moment, and the above is probably rather optimistic now, so you might want to do the calculation for yourself. For example, I currently have a big Synology NAS server here at home storing lots of my data and backups. Once you’ve bought such a device, how do the running costs compare with storing your data in the cloud?

So here’s my exciting new highly-sophisticated web application, which is designed to answer this simple question:

Watt’s The Cost?

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