Clouds can move at up to 100 miles an hour if they’re high altitude, average closer to 25 miles an hour for regular cumulus clouds. You pump that vapor into the air and it’s off to the races. If it forms a cumulonimbus cloud those last. What, 5 days? (Can fact check me here, I’m going off my memory of facts from a weather obsessed kid I knew).
5 days x 24 hours in a day x 20 miles per hour = 3000 miles.
So vapor from a datacenter in California might potentially come down in North Carolina or something. For the sake of those Californians, that’s gone.
Sure maybe not all hits high enough in the atmosphere, and some might travel in a circle and fall back around the datacenter, but not all. I guarantee not all.
BussyCat@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
The problem is the rate that it leaves the local system is faster than the rate it returns so in the long term the local systems lose water. If you want to look at it even deeper it’s actually sooo much worse as it also causes local droughts which kill flora which then cause less water to be stored in the local system which then kills more flora and so on as you get desertification and then by pumping down aquifers those aquifers can collapse and never hold the same water that they used to hold
So yes it does fall back to the ground but that’s an explanation for a 10 year old learning about the water cycle. An adult should be aware of how much more damaging it is