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1. Santa Noodle ☦️ (bowsacnoodle@poa.st)'s status on Saturday, 25-May-2024 00:51:35 JST Santa Noodle ☦️

   in reply to

   • sj_zero
   @sj_zero Water Consumption meme arguments are one of the reasons I became a climate change revisionist. Too many things are attributed to CO2 when a lot of it is likely ecological rebalancing. Removing water and things which contains it means you're removing that much passive natural cooling from an area, and that's ignoring things like shade and the layers of growth in a forest or shrubland.
   
   Take a single square meter, 1x1, and imagine a centimeter of rain falling on it during a spring storm, a totally reasonable amount for most temperate areas. That's 10,000 mL or 10 Liters of water. Water has an incredibly high specific heat and heat of vaporization, which is why evaporative cooling works so well. The single square meter being covered with concrete would remove this. It's easy to see how this plays out in real life looking at urban heat Island effects and seeing how areas like Minneapolis have hotter temperatures than parts of Florida. Basically everyone freaks out about carbon, but the original conservationist movements to preserve woodlands, wetlands, and open areas were always the most correct.
   • luithe likes this.
   • sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 25-May-2024 00:51:37 JST sj_zero
     I see a lot of people.talking about water consumption by data centers.
     
     Big question is whether the water is consumed or just used.
     
     Water is a renewable resource, so you can take it out if a river, run it through a heat exchanger, and return it and the water isnt consumed, it's just used and returned.
     
     It seems that one major way of cooling is evaporative cooling. So the water is evaporated into the air, and eventually will fall as rain, and whether that's consumption becomes really complicated since it depends on local weather patterns and the like.
     
     I do think there's an argument to be made that there's environmental effects from injecting Olympic swimming pools worth of water into the air every month. I would fully expect that to change the local climate.
     
     Rest assured everyone that the parts stolen from a roadside sign that run my social media empire use not a drop of water for cooling!