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Data centers' heat exhaust is not raising the land temperature around them

6 points by loeg 7mo ago

SocialHearth 7mo ago
[dead]
SilverElfin 7mo ago
Overly long rambling article by a consistently pro AI effective altruist. Not sure why this is interesting. It’s a very low information density post that doesn’t refute the claim that ground surface temperature increased around these data centers.
- eleventen 7mo ago
  I'm not sure how you arrive at this conclusion. If you read the paper being criticized, the authors clearly intend to claim that heat exhaust is the cause. > "The electronic components in AI hyperscalers are characterized by extremely high-power densities, often reaching magnitudes on the order of 107 W/m^2 That's an actual passage from the paper. Masley shows that AI, data centers, and computation writ large have nothing to do with the effects measured. All they discovered was that parking lots and roofs were hot. None of your priors, or mine, or any of the authors, matter here. If Masley is correct, the paper is junk science.
- rmunn 7mo ago
  Except the post does explicitly refute the claim. Direct quote from the [blog post][1]: [1]: https://blog.andymasley.com/i/192671089/my-core-claim-this-is-literally-just-measuring-hot-surfaces-of-new-buildings-and-the-soil-and-land-around-those-new-buildings-probably-hasnt-changed-temperature-at-all https://blog.andymasley.com/i/192671089/my-core-claim-this-i... "My argument here is going to be that this paper is just measuring the fact that buildings are hotter than grass. The land around the data center that isn’t either buildings or road has probably not warmed. It doesn’t matter at all that this study is about data centers. I’d expect similar measurements for Wal Marts. If you build a building, whether it’s a data center or Wal Mart or house or Starbucks, and you point a NASA satellite at the building, you are going to measure a warmer surface temperature exclusively caused by the material the building made of, not any heat exhaust from what’s happening inside the building." He goes on to get into the math of his claim. It's possible, of course, that his math could be wrong, in which case his refutation would be incorrect. But he very specifically refutes the claim you said he doesn't refute.

6 points by loeg 7mo ago

[dead]

Overly long rambling article by a consistently pro AI effective altruist. Not sure why this is interesting. It’s a very low information density post that doesn’t refute the claim that ground surface temperature increased around these data centers.

eleventen 7mo ago
I'm not sure how you arrive at this conclusion. If you read the paper being criticized, the authors clearly intend to claim that heat exhaust is the cause. > "The electronic components in AI hyperscalers are characterized by extremely high-power densities, often reaching magnitudes on the order of 107 W/m^2 That's an actual passage from the paper. Masley shows that AI, data centers, and computation writ large have nothing to do with the effects measured. All they discovered was that parking lots and roofs were hot. None of your priors, or mine, or any of the authors, matter here. If Masley is correct, the paper is junk science.
rmunn 7mo ago
Except the post does explicitly refute the claim. Direct quote from the [blog post][1]: [1]: https://blog.andymasley.com/i/192671089/my-core-claim-this-is-literally-just-measuring-hot-surfaces-of-new-buildings-and-the-soil-and-land-around-those-new-buildings-probably-hasnt-changed-temperature-at-all https://blog.andymasley.com/i/192671089/my-core-claim-this-i... "My argument here is going to be that this paper is just measuring the fact that buildings are hotter than grass. The land around the data center that isn’t either buildings or road has probably not warmed. It doesn’t matter at all that this study is about data centers. I’d expect similar measurements for Wal Marts. If you build a building, whether it’s a data center or Wal Mart or house or Starbucks, and you point a NASA satellite at the building, you are going to measure a warmer surface temperature exclusively caused by the material the building made of, not any heat exhaust from what’s happening inside the building." He goes on to get into the math of his claim. It's possible, of course, that his math could be wrong, in which case his refutation would be incorrect. But he very specifically refutes the claim you said he doesn't refute.