Delete Old Emails To Save Water? Despite UK News, It Probably Won't Help.

UK environmental officials advocated for people to
delete old emails to save water, as data centers'
use a lot of water. Technology experts 
questioned whether this would help much.

 I'm terrible at deleting old and unwanted emails. 

It's just such a tedious pain to do, as I keep getting deluged with junk. If you try to get off email lists, it just creates a larger tidal wave of this junk.  

Does that make me a person that wastes water?

I know you wouldn't think a full email box means I make droughts worse somehow, but apparently that's a thing. Or at least some people think so. 

Via The Verge, here's an excerpt form a press release from Helen Wakeham, UK Environmental Agency Director of Water: "Simple, everyday choices - such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails - also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife."

Your accumulated emails supposedly make drought worse because data centers use a lot of water to keep power servers cool, which is necessary to allow them to work properly.  According to The Verge,    a small data center can use more than 25 milliliters of water per year, if it uses old-school methods of allowing water to evaporate.

But there are a lot of reasons why the UK Environment Agency's worries about accumulated email might be misplaced, at least in terms of water usage. Tech companies are using new cooling methods to try and limit the amount of water they use.

That in itself might be a losing battle, since surging AI technology uses enormous amounts of water due to the big elaborate data centers AI and other technologies demand. 

But several other sources say deleting your emails, which might improve your efficiency a bit, might not help much at all with limiting water usage. 

 According to ZME Science:

"Most cloud data, especially your old photos and emails, lives on  high-density, low-power hard drives or archive tape. These use very little energy, and in some cases, almost none at all when idle. Secondly deletion isn't immediate. Files persist for weeks or months after deletion, usually (in a) system  similar to a "recycle bin." Only when data is overwritten, and only if it leads to hardware decommissioning is any energy (or water) actually saved."

Additionally, says ZME Science, 

"Perhaps most importantly, it's the 'flows' of data that use up the most resources, not the 'stocks.'  In other words, the real environmental cost of digital life comes not from what you keep, but what you do

Watching an episode of a Netflix show uses as much energy as storing 50 GB of photos for a year. Using AI tools, video conferencing, TikTok scrolling - these 'live' activities are far more resource-intensive."

So, if you want to be environmentally friendly, and save water in a drought, there are things you can to that are much more effective than deleting old junk emails from some clothing company you bought a scarf from umpteen years ago. 

Up here in Vermont, we're gotten into a burgeoning drought. It's not severe, at least not yet.  So, we're trying not to take long showers, making sure faucets are shut tight. When I can, I let what little rainfall we get accumulate in containers and use that water to soak down plants a little bit. 

I could spend my day deleting the zillions of old emails I have. But that's boring. So, I'll take my chances. I don't think those old emails will drain Lake Champlain 

 

 

 

UK water managers also don't appear to know how much water deleting emails would save,

"The Environment Agency didn't immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge about how much water it thought deleting files might save, nor how much water data centers that store files or train AI use in the UK's drought-affected areas."

  

Extreme Western Drought Might Solve A Few Old Murder Cases

Lake Mead along the Colorado River has receded so
much from drought that a body was found in a barrel.
Police suspect the murder happened in the late 1970s
or early 1980s. The lake has gotten so low the 
barrel has only now been discovered 
Photo from KLSA 

UPDATE:

Sure enough, as Lake Mead's water continues to recede in that extreme western drought, another body has been discovered. 

A couple of women paddling in the low lake found the skeletal remains on a sand bar. 

Unlike the previous find, officials don't think this one involves foul play. Still it will be investigated.

If the lake keeps receding, I wonder how many more long lost bodies/people will be found?

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That punishing drought in the West has brought storied Lake Mead to its lowest levels on record.  Possible water shortages loom for large portions of the West Coast, the southern and central Rockies and the Desert Southwest as no real drought relief seems to be in the offing. 

It'll be a long, hot and rather scary summer in this area.

f you're stretching for any hint of a bright side to this drought, here's one.  It's possible low water levels could held solve some cold murder cases.

For instance, the water recently receded so much that a rusted barrel emerged from the water. Inside were the skeletal remains of a murder victim.  Police said judging from clothing and other evidence, the person was murdered and dumped into Lake Mead sometimes during the 1980s Las Vegas Metro Police homicide Lt. Ray Spencer told television station KLAS.  

"'It's going to be a very difficult case,' Spencer said. 'I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains.'

That, unfortunately makes sense. Lake Mead is only 40 miles or so from Las Vegas.  That city is famous for lots of things, including gambling murders and mob hits.   Lake Mead would be an incredibly convenient place to dump a body, never to be seen again.

Unless the region were hit by the worst drought in at least1,200 years, which is exactly what is happening now.  Yep, I said 1,200 years. The last time it was this bad in the west was around the year 1000.

This mega-drought, defined as a drought lasting a couple to a few decades is influence by climate change. 

As Scientific American reports, there probably would be a drought going on now in the West without climate change, but the burning of fossil fuels has made things much worse than they otherwise would be.

"'It probably wouldn't even be a continuous drought,' said Benjamin Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the new study, published in Nature Climate Change. 'We still would have had a drought. It sill would have been reasonably bad. But it would be nowhere near the record-breaking even that we're seeing right now.'"

Back in the Colorado River basin, which includes Lake Mead, 98.3 percent of the basin is currently in drought and 26.6 percent of it is in extreme or exceptional drought. More than 80 percent of the basin has been in drought since July, 2020, according to NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System.

Which means this will soon turn into a crisis far worse than discovered homicide victims in receding lakes.