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by gruturo 956 days ago
The heat we directly dump into the environment, except where it affects the local ecosystem directly (e.g. warm rivers killing local wildlife, algae blooms) is a quite laughable portion of the global warming problem - greenhouse gases are multiple orders of magnitude more effective (at being part of the problem).

Oceans are insanely large (citation needed) heat sinks.
2 comments
itishappy 956 days ago
> Oceans are insanely large (citation needed) heat sinks.

If my math is right (hopefully), and assuming there's no cooling (hopefully not), it would take 790 billion years for Microsoft's datacenter to raise the temperature of the ocean by 1 degree.

(1.426e21 kg * 4184 J/kg) / (240000 J/s * 31536000 s/yr)

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dmd 956 days ago
Fortunately, we have ZFS for that!

https://web.archive.org/web/20180223071740/https://blogs.ora...

"Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans."

- straight from the horse's mouth (that's Jeff Bonwick, who created ZFS).

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NoMoreNicksLeft 956 days ago
You claim this, but my own simulations show the oceans boiling away to nothingness in just a few billion. Are you certain you did the math correctly?
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ortusdux 956 days ago
I think it is disingenuous to pretend that I am making an argument on logistical, thermodynamic, oceanographic, etc. grounds. I claimed one thing - bad optics, bad public relations.

Sea surface temps are in the environmentalist spotlight at the moment. Between when Microsoft started their pilot program in 2018 and now, surface temps have changed dramatically. Some experts believe this change has made storms more energetic and less predictable.

Salt-water cooled power plants along with desalination plants have been getting pushback from environmentalists for years because of the negative effects of their heated effluent. This will only intensify.

For Microsoft, public relations have a documented cost. My claim is that their PR team would say that right now the cost of a large phase II deployment would outweigh the savings.

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specialist 955 days ago
Yes and: Some localized heating is very consequential.
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