The record-breaking UK heatwave has been claiming victims left, right, and center. Reports have it that it did not even spare the Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud data centers.
As a precautionary step, both Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud shut down their servers for some time, leading to an outage.
On Tuesday, Google admitted that the rising temperatures had darkened its data centers in the UK. “This caused a partial failure of capacity in that zone, leading to VM (virtual machine) terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers. Customers can launch virtual machines (VMs) in all zones of europe-west2. A small number of HDD backed Persistent Disk volumes are still experiencing impact and will exhibit IO errors.”
Oracle also blamed the heatwave for disrupting Oracle Cloud operations, as reports about roads melting and citizens falling ill made headlines across much of Europe. After working on the outage, Oracle issued a statement, “We have confirmed data center cooling infrastructure has been restored and temperatures have returned to normal operating levels. All services and customer resources have been restored.” Both companies reported that they are working to maintain cooling systems online.
On July 19, the UK heatwave sent temperatures soaring to over 40 degrees Celsius, as the country battled this unexpected catastrophe. It was made even worse as homes in the UK do not have air conditioning and are built to retain heat.
The UK’s infrastructure is not equipped to deal with the rising temperatures brought on by climate change. As the mercury kept rising, it also affected the storage and computing services of other tech firms, including BigQuery, SQL, and Kubernetes.
Climate Change and Catastrophes
The news is saturated with reports of wildfires across much of Europe and Africa. Hundreds have died in Spain and Portugal as the intense heat and wildfires take a toll on the countryside.
According to an ongoing temperature analysis led by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius since 1880. Global temperature anomalies in 2021 made it the sixth hottest year on record, a warning of the times to come. GISS states that global warming does not mean that temperatures will rise equally in all places. While temperatures might rise by five degrees in one region, it might drop by three degrees in another. NASA predicts that the global climate will continue to warm throughout this century and beyond. One severe side effect of warming temperatures is the unmanageable wildfires raging across the West.
Having temperatures rise even by one degree is scary as it takes an enormous amount of heat to warm up the oceans, the atmosphere, and all of land mass. History has shown us that a one-to two-degree drop resulted in the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop pretty much submerged a big part of North America under ice 20,000 years ago. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change – temperatures are slated to rise in the coming years, mainly due to greenhouse gasses.
Conclusion
The severity of climate change will depend on how we tackle the crisis, before the planet blows up in our faces.
To tackle this impending catastrophe, the United Nations had united countries over the Paris Agreement. In the Paris Agreement member nations set goals to keep global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees. To achieve this, emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
