On Global Warming...

Dari tumpukan file lama, entah kenapa sampai nulis beginian, tentang global warming...

A few moments ago I watched on television, a speech by a prominent economist from England. His name was Sir something Stern. Shoot, I’m terrible at remembering names.

The main point of his talk was that global climate change is a real thing, and it would cost much more to us if we don’t do anything about it than if we start to do something to reduce the effect as soon as possible. He described that the effect of global climate change will differ in many countries: in Australia it would be a severe drought, in China it would be the melting of the himalayas. Most of these effects are water related, and also not less important is the temperature change itself. By 2000 something, there will be an increase of 5 degrees celcius on average. As you might remember a few months ago there was a heat wave which striked Europe and killed several hundreds of people, mainly the elderly. This might become an ordinary phenomenon in the near future.

To tackle this global problem, each nation must cooperate and collaborate in a joint effort with the same commitment and goal to reduce gas house effects. There has been an increasing concern not only among the rich countries, but also the poor and developing countries regarding this issue. For example, Indonesia which is now number three in emiting carbondioxide in the world after the US and china due to its severe deforestation has raised concerns to fix this problem.

Global climate change is a serious problem, and it would cost less to us if we act now to stop it. Very important our “green policies” and actions and investments might seem now, but the effect will not be felt in at least 30, 50, or even 150 years. Yet this is the only viable option to do, and it can be done. Hence, in addition to efforts in reducing gas emmision, adaptation to the global climate change in the future is also equally important.

That’s a brief summary of what I can remember of his speech. This reminds me of a discussion broadcast on ABC a few weeks back, about global climate change and how it can affect Australia. As we all know, Australia has a rich source of coal, and they are exporting it to the world. This coal mining industry contributes largely in the Australian economy. It may also be a common knowledge that coal is not a clean source of energy, despite its still dominant use in the world as source of electrical power. This poses a difficult question to Australia: knowing that Australia will suffer from worse droughts in the future due to climatic change, can Australia discard coal technologies and use other energy source alternatives to make a cleaner air? And is this economically feasible?

The discussion went into a sort of a debate, one side still holding on the idea that alternative sources of energy cannot replace the conventional sources like coal, gas and petroleum to meet energy demands.

Now back to my thesis. About low power interconnects. Hang on. If you like to connect one matter to another, actually global climate change and interconnects are related in some way and another. First, heat is a common enemy in both cases. Excess heat trapped in the atmosphere is what causes trouble on earth. Similarly, excess heat caused by extremely fast clocking in integrated circuits can potentially limit chip performances, and power dissipation (you might consider this a more polite way of saying “heat”).

Secondly, both problems can be aleviated by using power more efficiently.

Because I am more interested in chips rather than the global warming of the earth (well, at least in the time being, because I’m almost dead meat here racing with time to finish up my bloody thesis), let us discuss more on this topic.

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