Welcome back to another week, y’all! I’m finishing up my two last papers before the final quarter at RAND is over 🎉. Finishing capstone last Monday was surreal. You gotta understand that I had spent 9 months scheming and plotting over this thing. Then, in one presentation, boom it’s done! Of course, we had to submit the executive summary, report, and our slide deck which took a ton of time as well.

What now? Well, a lot of the usual AI and data center fellowships in DC are opening up again, so I will be applying to everything (lol!). Might be searching around for jobs as well out of curiosity. Finally, I got some product ideas that I’m working on so stay tuned for that!

Also, I just started a YouTube channel called Data Center Battlegrounds! A little dramatic I know… but that’s the world we live in! Posting schedule is going to be as follows (if I can sustain it lol):

If you got 5 minutes, check these articles out:

Ciao, 👋

Nate

The New Era of Sustainability: With Senior Forrester Analyst Abhijit Sunil (AI & Policy/ESG): Host Tammy Soares interviews Abhijit Sunil, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, on how sustainability connects to business optimization and AI as a democratizing force, including how optimizing systems for efficiency inherently makes them more sustainable.

Are Data Centres the New NIMBY Frontier? ft. David Coletto | Culture Lab (AI & Data Centers/Hardware): Data scientists and pollsters Kyla Ronellenfitsch and Gabe De Roche put a loaded question under the microscope each week. This episode digs into data centers becoming the new NIMBY frontier.

The Week in Green Software: Watts That Smell (AI & Energy): Adi and Valeria explore whether sustainability can be built directly into the software development process, from identifying 'energy smells' in code to making energy efficiency as visible as performance or security, plus the growing debate around AI's environmental impact.

Can AI Weather Models Predict Beyond Two Weeks? A Quantitative Benchmark and Analysis of Long Rollouts (AI & Climate Science): Through year-long rollouts of nine state-of-the-art AI weather models, this benchmark categorizes long-horizon failures into three regimes: blow-up, drift, and loss of seasonality, finding that stability hinges on how models treat small spatio-temporal scales. Authors: Lehmann et al. Journal: arXiv.

Eco-Translation Practice in Resisting AI's Ecological Harms: Towards a Preliminary Action Framework (AI & Environment): Matthew Riemland examines how translation professionals can confront the environmental costs of AI, arguing these harms stem from structural power imbalances rather than individual choices, and proposes vocational and structural strategies of resistance. Authors: Matthew Riemland. Journal: Encounters in Translation.

From Computation to Environmental Cost: The Resource Burden of Artificial Intelligence (AI & Environment): Using life cycle assessment and elemental composition analysis of AI hardware (the Nvidia A100 GPU), this study links computational demand in FLOPs to material consumption, demonstrating that incremental AI performance gains come at disproportionately high material costs. Authors: Falk et al. Journal: Nature.

Promoting Advanced AI Innovation and Security (AI Policy & Governance): An Executive Order (EO) asking leading AI developers to voluntarily submit their most capable ​models for government cybersecurity tests before releasing them to the ‌public. Authoring Body: The White House.

Water Use and Community Trust: Key Components of Data Centers' Social License to Operate (AI & Water Resources): A paper examining how water use and community trust shape whether data centers earn their social license to operate. Authoring Body: Deep Tech Duke University.

Data Center Development and Local Governance Guidelines for Community Centered Outcomes (AI & Infrastructure): Guidelines for local governance of data center development aimed at community-centered outcomes. Authoring Body: Deep Tech Duke University.

Google Keynote | Luke Barrington | Director of Earth AI at Google | #SDSC26 (AI & Multiple Applications): Luke Barrington reveals how Google applies foundational AI models to geospatial data, exploring three pillars of Earth AI: state-of-the-art weather and hurricane forecasting with MetNet, natural-language search across 300 million satellite images, and mapping population dynamics to predict socioeconomic trends and disease outbreaks.

The Real Story on Data Centers feat. Data Center Coalition CEO Josh Levi (AI & Multiple Applications): Chris Curtis of Prologis and Josh Levi of the Data Center Coalition break down the important role data centers play in our world.

Fatih Birol on Energy Security, AI Electricity Demand & Clean Power | WRI Polsky Energy Summit (AI & Energy): IEA Executive Director Dr. Fatih Birol joins the WRI Polsky Energy Summit to discuss global energy security, surging electricity demand, AI, renewables, nuclear power and the future of clean power, with a keynote from Chris Stark CBE on the UK's push to deliver clean power by 2030.

Opna (AI & Energy): Building the market infrastructure that the next century of energy will run on, serving as the coordination, verification and financing layer for critical power equipment. Location: United Kingdom.

Stabiliti (AI & Environment): Building the infrastructure to embed nature funding into our core economy, making it simple for everyone to fund nature restoration through everyday transactions. Location: United Kingdom.

Carbonfuture (AI & Environment): The digital Trust Infrastructure for durable carbon removal, connecting carbon removal supply with demand through its MRV+ and Marketplace products while ensuring integrity with a rigorous, data-driven approach. Location: Europe.

Surge Forecast (AI & Energy): Open, probabilistic day-ahead load forecasts for the US power grid. Chronos-2 fine-tuned on 7 years of EIA-930 data across all 53 reporting balancing authorities. Price: FREE.

Flood Forecasting (AI & Disaster Response): Open-source replication of Google's global flood-forecasting models, aiming to foster transparency, enable in-house integration in production systems, and accelerate academic research. Price: FREE.

FireScope AI (AI & Disaster Response): The first public high-resolution map of wildfire risk for Europe, with human-friendly explanations. Price: FREE

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I found this one on r/datacenter (lol), but it is a trend that I am seeing with a combo of 1984 Orwellian surveillance and data centers!

Thanks for reading the 44th issue of The Climate Code! It means a lot to me and we have more coming in the future, so definitely stick around! 💚

Nate

P.S.

New here? Check out the AI & Environment Resource Hub if you have no idea what it is. 😆