This paper's been going around, but its got serious methodological flaws. Couple major errors I've seen:

- They calculate pop exposure wrong. They measure based on residents r = 10km of each site to measure population, but don't check for overlaps. eg so for data centers in like Loudoun which have 200 sites in 30sq miles, things are going to be 85x overstated. Which means the global population ends explicit deduplication.

- The land use confound is also serious. They don't check the post-start LST jump against operational waste heat or land conversion directly, which makes it wildly overstated.

- Excluding dense urban cores can make things worse too. Like those are also the places with highest pre and post temp delta, because of greenfield to industrial conversion. It needs to be controlled for.

- Many of the numbers don't match. It says it uses a dataset but reference doesn't match. Population numbers don't match. Temp increase stated vs graphs don't match. It confuses measurements for rings vs disks.

It's frustrating as hell to see half baked papers with these kinds of errors show up regularly, especially poisoned to pollute the commons with ideas about how data centers are worsening the world.