With enough data centres like these, all the excess heat will go straight into the sea, further contributing to climate change. The only place these data centres wouldn’t contribute further to climate change is if they were buried deep down in earth’s crust but then cooling would be an issue.
I think I prefer the idea of city center data centres where the excess heat is put to use for central heating systems
Thermodynamics fail.
Global warming is not caused by humans creating heat. There is nothing humans could do that would produce even the tiniest fraction of the thermal energy that reaches the Earth from the sun.
Global warming is caused by GHG which increase the percentage of the thermal energy from the sun which is trapped. The sun is so off the charts powerful compared to anything heat sources produced by humans that even the tiniest increase in the greenhouse effect can raise global temperatures.
This got me curious, so I did a bit of googling and some arithmetic. 2015 global energy consumption was about 575 x 10^15 BTU, or roughly 2 x 10^14 kWh. Meanwhile, averaged over the entire globe, insolation is about 6 kWh/m^2 per day, or globally about 1 x 10^18 kWh per year. If I haven't screwed anything up, that would make human energy consumption the equivalent of 0.02% of Earth's annual insolation. Personally I'd call that "within the tiniest fraction," but your point remains well taken; human energy consumption is a drop in the bucket compared to insolation.
Not to mention that a whole bunch of the energy produced by humans would have been dissipated in the environment anyway, even if we didn't use it for something useful:
- Hydro (The water would have evaporated anyway)
- Wind (The wind would have blown just the same)
- Solar (The light would have heated the ground instead)
- Nuclear Fission (the atoms would have decayed anyway)
- Geothermal (the atoms would have decayed anyway, and tidal forces would have occurred anyway)
Then only thing that is left is really fossil fuels, where for which the solar energy was stored a long time ago, and we are releasing it now, adding heat to the current atmosphere.
