[ExI] benefits of climate change

[Keith Henson]

Spike, you are out of your fern.

Tens of thousands of people died in the heat wave in the EU a few weeks
ago. It is not something that will be measured in the US because the people
in power don't give a hoot about causing mega deaths.

My guess is that the excess heat within a few years will cause a million
deaths a year in the US, and far more in other places. A large power
failure in Phoenix during a heat wave would kill at least a million.

The other thing heat will do is wreck farming and cause famines. Heat
combined with fertilizer and fuel disruptions may do that this year.

Your idea of desalinating water in California and pumping it to Nevada is
just silly. Talk to any of the AIs about that. I published on this problem
years ago and know what I am talking about


Keith


On Fri, Aug 7, 2026 at 1:09 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
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> Damn.  Seems like every time I get too busy, I get an idea storm, and have
> no time to mess with them.  Consider this short post a reminder for later.
>
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> There is a concern I keep seeing about AI data centers guzzling the
> available groundwater for cooling, but desalination doesn’t take as much
> energy as one might think.  As I recall it is about 0.7 calories per gram
> if we go with reverse osmosis, less if we can tolerate some remaining
> dissolved solids.
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> In the states, wind generally blows west to east.  So if we put our data
> centers out west close enough to pipe in water from the sea but far enough
> east to escape California taxes (such as on the Nevada side of the
> stateline) then a prole could generate power in Nevada using nuclear or
> coal, filter seawater for cooling, catalyze and scrub the exhaust if coal,
> dump the water into the atmosphere, where it will be a net environmental
> benefit.  Each gram of seawater requires 0.7 calories to filter to fresh
> and carries away 540 calories of waste heat.
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> The even better part of the deal is that all that water goes up where it
> may form clouds where it blocks some of the scorching sun and subsequently
> falls back as rain on the thirsty desert, perhaps resulting in massive
> super-blooms and greening.
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> If scaled up sufficiently, that whole process could cause climate change,
> but it looks like the beneficial kind of change (assuming one is not a
> tarantula or a rattlesnake.)
>
>
>
> spike
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