Sure, but if you can find an air-cooled VW bus that's still running in this decade they're probably asking $30k for it.

And the ability to know where the heat is being dissipated too.

Surface area of the fin stack matters. An air cooler will always be limited by the space available around the CPU. A water cooling radiator has more flexibility to be placed in around the case.

That said, having less than a 360mm AIO is probably a waste. Also, higher end Intel chips these days are so power hungry that they can't be physically cooled properly with the surface area available on the package.

Porsche used to agree, until 1998.

It depends on which part of the environment the heat is being exchanged with - if your watercooling system is releasing heat to the ground under your house or a somebody else suggested (which is even more effective) a river next to your house, it's not at all equivalent to air cooling.

Further, the heat storage capacity of a material depends on both the kind of material and its mass, so almost all liquids have a higher heat sforage capacity per unit of volume than air (certainly water does) and solids even more (much more, given their much higher density) so even in the big scheme of things (i.e. were will most of that heat end up in given enough time), even heat released by a watercoolong system to the air will mostly end up in tne Earth's crust and oceans and only a tiny fraction of it will remain in the athmosphere.