this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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I don't think people mean literally boil the ocean. Just increasing it by few Celsius degrees can be world ending.
The specific heat capacity of water is 4200J/kg. Raising the temperature of ocean water by quite a few degrees is also very improbable.
That's true, but I still don't think we can raise ocean temperatures through direct cooling and renewable sources the way that the greenhouse effect can. Water can absorb a lot of heat energy without changing temperature, and that is why regions close to oceans have a more temperate climate.
While I don't have enough knowledge in this field to be making any definitive statements, my logic is as follows:
So we would need to get energy from off planet, use nuclear fission/fusion, or cover enough of the land area in wind and solar farms in order to redirect the sun's energy over to the oceans.
I think the bigger concern, when it comes to heating the ocean, is that manufacturing, construction, and transport related to the data centers still releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Those gases trap the sun's energy within our atmosphere and that WILL heat up the earth. Way more than direct cooling using ocean water.
I'm a scuba diver and you can definitely harm regions of ocean with water pumps. It's already happening in place where nuclear is being cooled. It's already happening in ship yards.
It's hard to speculate how it would happen at scale though because ocean science is real fucking hard and each location is vastly different. In populated places the damage would be very noticeable if not eventually catastrophic as ocean issues compound real fast as the ecosystem is much more fluid.
That being said I imagine there would be ways to deploy this safely (ocean is big, lots of boring dead space) but I dont have trust in us to find this way.
If every data centre was passively cooled in the ocean it wouldn't change temps by even 0.01 degrees. The Sun blasts an entire half of the planet with an absurd amount of energy every day. Energy, which technically originated from the sun, is just converted and being utilized to do work.
Not the same thing. The sun doesn't concentrate the power in already hifhly populated gulfs and bays where these would be. We're not building something in the middle of Atlantic Ocean.