Aussie Data Centres Brace For Dust Storm Barrage

An anonymous reader writes "Data centers and telcos in the Australian cities of Sydney and Brisbane have shut off external ventilation systems, restricted loading dock access and attended false alarms after a major dust storm choked the cities today. The storm is said to be the worst of its type ever recorded in Australia. Macquarie Telecom disengaged automatic deployment of fire-prevention gas from the fire alarm to prevent gas being released on a false alarm. Other major data center operators reported clogged air filters and heat exchangers and said they would be performing cleaning and maintenance operations this week."

Comments

Re:hehehehe

[Kokuyo]

How do you shoot down a simple argument of logic?

It's been this bad 70 years ago.
70 years ago we didn't pollute ANYWHERE as much as we do today.
If our polluting nature is supposed to be the cause for climate change, which would then lead to, say, DUSTSTORMS, how come the same thing happened when we had barely begun the polluting?

Climate change is real. It happened since the beginning of this dirtball. The question is, how much of what we see today is natural and how much is man-made. Considering that they also found that CO2 rises came after our atmosphere warming up and not before, I'd like for you to give me a few examples of shut down points in favour of us not having much to do with the situation.

It's easy to say "Everyone KNOWS that your arguments won't hold up". But have the common decency to prove it instead of making blanket statements about our intelligence.

I am fucking fed up with this behaviour. Time and again, people had to lower their eyes in shame after they had made fun of others for their outrageously unpopular statements and then being proven wrong after all. How can any sane and halfway intelligent being continue doing that when none of us have any kind of insight into the bigger picture? Have you ever checked which scientists have proclaimed human induced climate change? Have you checked their work? Have you checked their numbers? Their conclusions? Have you checked whether their institutes are low on cash and just freaking needed the publicity?

Same goes for any opponents of human induced climate change, by the way. Same rules for all of us. The difference between you and me is that I don't call you stupid just because you have a different opinion than I have. All I call you is frickin' rude.

Re:The Energy of Global Warming

[TapeCutter]

"As I understand it, that reduces the heat radiated to space and raises the temperature at ground level by a small amount."

Roughly one in every four CO2 molecules in the atmosphere has been put there by humans since the start of the industrial revolution, most of it in the last 50yrs.

CO2 absorbs IR radiated from the Earth and converts it into kinetic energy, after a certain time it will remit the energy as a phioton and slow down again.

This means that in the stratosphere where molecules are widely spaced the CO2 has a high chance of either escaping to space or remmiting a photon that escapes to space. Models (Hansen late 80's) predicted this would cause a cooling stratosphere and indeed sattelite mesurements have confirmed the predictions.

However in the bottom 5Km of atmosphere, where our weather takes place, the molecules are packed tighter and the CO2 is more likely to lose the kinetic energy by transfering it in a random collision with another molecule.

It's common for psuedo-skeptics such as Bob Carter to conflate the startosphere measurements with ground measurements in order to dishonestly push their adgenda.

"I haven't heard that the temperature increase over the past few centuries is sufficient enough to cause dramatically more energetic weather. Natural variation is instead probably responsible for these extremes. Well that and the media's sudden interest in extreme weather phenomena."

The jury is still out on observations of more severe weather but fundementally more heat means more turbulence. I don't think anyone knows how significant that extra turbulence might turn out to be but natural variation on top of the AGW trend is almost certainly feeding the seemingly constant rewriting of record books.