The climate change debate continues.

[nomadpete]

Well the Pacific Ocean has had a historic quiet winter - regarding hurricanes.

 

However there is now a very big patch of warm water making it's way across toward us. We'll see what that does to our weather.

 

Meanwhile, at last there has been some improvement in tracking methane plumes coming from the 'natural' gas industry. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, trapping around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide and has been ignored for too long. Burning gas might produce less CO2 but there is lots of methane escaping into the atmosphere before the gas gets burned.

 

No wonder the place is warming up.

 

Blaming cow farts looks like a convenient diversion from the gas industry. 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/14/us-companies-methane-pollution-rankings

[facthunter]

Methane is shorter term effect than CO2, but they FLAME it off at Refineries.?? It's not cow farts but they belch. CO2 causes sea acidification that affects little sea critters. Nev

[pmccarthy]

The same people who wanted to put masks on cows now want us to build AI centres. By the same people, I mean loonies.

[facthunter]

How would you verify that? Nev

[Marty_d]

31 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

The same people who wanted to put masks on cows now want us to build AI centres. By the same people, I mean loonies.

Anyone who cares about the environment wants to STOP the building of data centres, so I'm not sure where you get your information.

[Siso]

Looks like the data centre at Bundy in SA is going to be close looped cooled. Going to use about 800MW of which is about a quarter of the states Maximum demand. Bundy is half way between Morgan and Burra in station country.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-19/proposed-data-centre-in-south-australia-dividing-locals/106810776

[Jerry_Atrick]

200 ongoing jobs seems a bit high unless they include indirect employment. The compute side can be remotely managed; there would need to be a number of hardware and network engineers - probably in the order of 20; 180 maintenance and security people with a few admin staff seems high.. but i guess they are large sites

Edited 3 hours ago by Jerry_Atrick

[old man emu]

28 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

200 ongoing jobs seems a bit high

Don't forget that these centres run 24/7, so basically you need the number of employees per shift multiplied by three. Then you have to add in for holiday and sick leave and other approved leave. The imgaes that are sometimes posted of one or two people walking through rows of servers probably hide the real numbers on site.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Good point.. that still provides 66 per shift... which still seems high. Hardware doesn't fail that often and it will have fail over redundancy; and can later be swapped out.. so i was still being generous with 20 hardware and network engineers.. 

 

In  addition, if there is a catastrophic failure, requests will be handled by other sites.

 

And of course what is the balance of full time v part time.

 

I still think 200 full time employees is on the high side to be directly employed at the site to give the region the boost it claims to.

 

I have been to data centres and there aren't many people around

Edited 2 hours ago by Jerry_Atrick

[nomadpete]

2 hours ago, facthunter said:

Methane is shorter term effect than CO2, but they FLAME it off at Refineries.?? It's not cow farts but they belch. CO2 causes sea acidification that affects little sea critters. Nev

Two problems with industrial methane.

 

1. The processing plants periodically vent very large amounts directly to atmosphere.

 

2. the tens of thousands of gas 'wells' all have continuous leakage around the bore pipes. Called fugitive emissions.

 

Read the Guardian article to get an idea of the amounts.

[nomadpete]

Also, I have seen each new well burns off waste gas until they get gas clean enough to process. This can take up to a month, producing lots of CO2. It's only the final use of the gas that looks good - as long as nobody counts all the methane and CO2 lost before the gas gets to a user.

[Siso]

We had 6 people for a 140MW windfarm plus an admin. They always seem to exaggerate the amount of people it will employ. Better publicity I suppose

[nomadpete]

I hear that Tasmania is fast tracking a data centre on the Tamar river.

 

Not sure whether they plan to build a nuclear reactor to power it, or maybe just dam another pristine river for more hydro. We don't have a lot of coal or gas to burn.

[Litespeed]

I think the 200 number would be ..

 

including the offshore and big city lawyers\finacial engineers to ensure no laws are followed and no tax is ever paid.

[nomadpete]

32 minutes ago, Litespeed said:

I think the 200 number would be ..

 

including the offshore and big city lawyers\finacial engineers to ensure no laws are followed and no tax is ever paid.

 

Cynic!