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am honestly scared for the future. what are we supposed to do?
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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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This is a chaotic system with a lot of contributing factors and creating correlation from causation would be difficult to impossible, but I wonder how much AI datacenters are contributing to this. Thermal pollution is actually a huge deal, and if take into account the amount of thermal energy put out by, say, global air travel, than global temperature deltas should be much greater than they are. Datacenters have been proven to be quite efficient at creating thermal pollution, so it stands to reason that creating more thermal pollution could be responsible for much of the temperature delta.
This also holds a bit of hope for us: not all of global warming is caused by green house gases (yes, most of it is, but not all), but rather some of it is simply caused by thermal pollution from burning fuels or even using electric heaters. Because of this, climate change is likely, to some extent, partially reversible if only by stopping the mass-scale dumping of thermal energy into the atmosphere. Again, it's realistically impossible to draw causation from the data, but "rebellions are built on hope."
we are doomed to uncertainty is what you are saying?
Yeah, pretty much.
Am I missing something or does this completely miss the first law of thermodynamics?
All energy generated is 'thermal pollution', whether you use it to run a heater, move a boat, or dig a hole in the ground.
That's actually exactly my point. I once went through and estimated how much the atmospheric temperature would increase by burning kerosene for jet fuel. It wasn't accurate and I didn't take a lot of variables into account, but it was a very noticeable increase. The point is, dumping mass amounts of heat into the surroundings can have a noticeable effect on ambient conditions, hens my question, "how much of this is caused by data centers?"
humanspiral@lemmy.ca is correct, this is a minuscule effect in comparison to solar warming. At the end of the day, the problem with global warming is pretty simple. A body in space can only remove thermal energy by radiating it out (black body radiation). This is a fixed value and quite easy to calculate for a sphere. However, parts of the atmosphere absorbs and re-radiates some of that black body radiation back to earth, this is what keeps it at a livable temperature and not significantly below the freezing point of water. Co2 and methane are two gases that absorb and re-radiate that energy back to the ground, hens the concern surrounding them. But the system is more or less fixed, and adding thermal energy will result in a change to the system's overall energy state.
If you approach the problem from this stand point, your goals shift slightly from "reduce emissions" to "reduce energy usage." However, that's not profitable.
Solar heating input is 10000 times larger than all energy consumption. Solar energy is also net 0 thermal emissions, and less net thermal gain at low albedo solar capture, than fuel based energy. The problem with GHG emissions is that they reduce the heat loss of the planet. Albedo (white roofs and ice caps) help with global cooling too.