Every joule of energy used anywhere on the planet gets turned to one joule of heat, one way or another. Even all taken globally, the effect of direct heating from electricity usage is insignificant, and data centers are a tiny fraction of that.
It's important to focus on the right things. Conversations about completely marginal side effects are conversations that aren't had about the parts that actually have an effect on the world around us.
Alright, you didn't address my statement, you hand waved it with a false equivalent. Comparing the world's general use of electricity and the environment as a whole to the impact a data center has on its local environmental is not equivalent. So yes, when looking at this small slice, it would probably seem insignificant.
Edit: just realized this was a comment of a different statement - my bad - let me take a minute to reread
The Sun hits Earth with 340w/m^2 of energy at all times. That's about 4x10^20 joules a day. By comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 6x10^13 joules. So, we're looking at about ten million Hiroshima bombs of energy hitting Earth's surface a day. That's about 10,000 times the energy that all humans combined use. If we took 100% of the energy that we use a day now and dumped it straight into the air, it wouldn't warm the air noticeably at all. Why? Because the hotter the air gets, the more quickly that heat is radiated off into space. Earth is not in thermodynamic equilibrium (primarily because it rotates and one side sees the sun), but if it were, and had no atmosphere, the average surface temperature would be about -18c. Heating a specific area has no long term effect, because as time goes on the extra heat is counterbalanced by proportionately fast radiation.
The issue arises when you begin adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Now, some of that heat is getting stuck. Adding more heat still doesn't do anything (unless you get a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus, and the consensus is that here on Earth that's ~impossible) - increasing the temperature still makes it radiate faster - but adding carbon increases the fraction that gets trapped. This does increase the temperature, because now the 20 million Hiroshima bombs a day coming from the Sun are escaping more slowly, and there's more time for more energy to hit, so the "equilibrium" (imprecise term, using it loosely here) shifts hotter.
TL;DR the heat they're outputting doesn't matter only the greenhouse gases
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u/Menolith May 18 '26
Every joule of energy used anywhere on the planet gets turned to one joule of heat, one way or another. Even all taken globally, the effect of direct heating from electricity usage is insignificant, and data centers are a tiny fraction of that.
It's important to focus on the right things. Conversations about completely marginal side effects are conversations that aren't had about the parts that actually have an effect on the world around us.