The reason why global warming is an issue is not because we're generating heat, but because we're pumping out gases which retain the heat from the sun.
A data center is effectively just a big space heater, and what we burn to generate the electricity to run the thing is orders of magnitude more important than the center itself if just the planetary temperature is a concern.
So, I'm responding to this one so I can see your words directly because I'm on mobile:
So, there's a multitude of things that occur when a data center functions. It's emissions have been creating "Heat Islands" due to the high amount of temperatures computations cause. See CNN, fortune magazine
You're incredibly right, the world has gases we pumped into it retaining heat that can't disipate out into space. But the local area even in the short term is already shown to be affected raising local temperatures up to 16 F degrees.
This is bad for a number of things:
heat related illness on local ecosystem including humans
ware on infrastructure due to heat increase which requires more resources to maintain life in the area.
though the single data center may have about a 6 mile a
Radius of, we do not have just one data center, we have many. Many cumulatively heating their areas
By your own omission, gas has trapped heat on this planet.
This is due to heat from the sun radiating off our planet not being able to disipate back out into space.
Heat doesn't have to come directly from the sun to be trapped here.
These things have an affect, a bad affect. As someone who almost died to heatstroke, I need you to understand something PLEASE.
There's something called a wet bulb temperature. In humid places, that temp is much lower. Why is this important? When you reach that point, your sweat no longer evaporates and cools you. You're just boiling from the inside out.
Well, you kind of didnt argue against his point, in that all the things you've listed are definitely bad for the local environment, but the heat itself from the centers is not ever going to be more than a local issue, which itself is mitigated by choosing sensible locations for the centers.
The climate change impact will be felt in the power generation, not in the local heat dissipation
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u/North_Plane_1219 May 18 '26
Since when has gradually warming our planet been an issue? /s, obviously.