Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce that Marco Tedesco will deliver our October research seminar, “Environmental, social and energy impacts of data centers from epistemological and observational perspectives,” on Tuesday, October 6, from 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM in Hogan Hall A-level Conference Room, at 2910 Broadway.
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list. Light refreshments will be served.
Abstract: Data centers are at the center of a growing debate that will only intensify over the next decade. On the one hand, they are considered crucial elements of the digital infrastructure necessary for AI to continue growing and supporting the solutions and addressing the challenges associated with climate and sustainability. On the other, they are currently unsustainable from an energy point of view and are associated with large environmental and social injustices.
In this presentation, Marco will report the results of their work at the Laboratory on AI, Climate and Society, focusing on understanding the impact of AI growth on social and climate issues as well as on energy. He will first discuss results on the spatial distribution of data centers and their relationship to power outage records for the continental United States from 2014 onward, indicating that data center hosting counties experience customer-hours of interruption at roughly twice the rate of counties without them. Joining those records to the Community Vulnerability Index at tract level moves the question from where the load lands to who absorbs it, and the overlap is not random. Here, he will discuss which social groups are more or less exposed to data centers and how they are distributed. Lastly, Marco will dive into the results of a specific case focusing on Seneca Lake, where a cryptocurrency facility (that has been requested to be upgraded to a 200 MW data center) has been releasing large amounts of hot water into the lake as part of its cooling mechanism, with consequences for the lake temperature and concern from the citizens living in the surrounding areas.
Bio: Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and Founder and Director of the Laboratory on AI, Climate and Society. He is also an adjunct scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the Data Science Institute. He is the founding member of the AI Lamont Working Group, is the Lamont AI representative, and he is also a member of the Columbia-wide AI Cross Working Group. He then spent five years as a postdoc and research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He moved to CCNY in 2008 as an Assistant Professor where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. During his time at CCNY, he founded and directed the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory and was a rotating Program Manage at the National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2015. In January 2016, he joined Columbia University. Dr. Tedesco’s research focuses on the dynamics of seasonal snowpack, ice sheet surface properties, high latitude fieldwork, dendrochronology, global climate change, its implications on the economy and real estate and climate justice.
