Re:Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigat...
by seszett on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @03:59AM
(#17245207)
> I'm not saying there is a problem with your calculations, but if you were just one order of magnitude off, then after 10 years that would be 1°C, which is a colossal amount.
That is assuming that all the electricity produced on Earth is used to heat the oceans, which is not realistic. Oceanic datacenters are not likely to ever amount to more than a few percent (and even that is unlikely) of the total human electric consumption.
For reference, apparently datacenters used 416 TWh in 2015, which is 0,002% of the total electricity usage.
That's why I'm confident that there is a lot of margin in my calculation.
Re:Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigat...
by quietbritishjim on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @07:25AM
(#17246075)
> all the electricity produced on Earth
Oops, I misread your comment, sorry. I thought you were talking about all electricity used in data centres worldwide.
Re:Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigat...
by optimuspaul on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @02:29PM
(#17249714)
> then after 10 years that would be 1°C,
or 1000 years if off in the other direction
I'm not saying there is a problem with your calculations, but if you were just one order of magnitude off, then after 10 years that would be 1°C, which is a colossal amount. The main problem with global warming, as I understand it, is that 1 or 2 degrees change to the atmosphere would melt a huge amount of polar ice. I imagine that if the sea were increase in temperature by that amount, given that water has better thermal conductivity than air and that's kinda where the polar ice mostly is, the effects would be at least as bad (?)
Edit: given that some of the heat would dissipate into the atmosphere and sea bed, maybe it would need to be more than one order of magnitude higher to have this effect.