Excessive memes and reply-all emails are harming the climate, researcher warns

When "Can I have a cheezburger?" became one of the first Internet memes to blow our minds, it's unlikely that anyone was concerned about how much energy it was consuming.

However, research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is "dark data", meaning it is used once and then never revisited. That means all the memes, jokes, and movies we love to share with friends and family—from "All Your Base Belongs to Us" to Ryan Gosling saying "Hey Girl" to Tim Walz with a piggy bank—are out. it's sitting in a data center somewhere, consuming power. By 2030, National Grid predicts that data centers will account for almost 6 % of total UK electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis. (Helena Hortonová, more at theguardian.com)