Sunday, January 11, 2009

Save the planet: Stop googling

Assuming for a moment that man-made CO2 is the evil of all evils as Al Gore claims, this is still one of the stupidest things I've seen since, oh, at least yesterday.
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

[ ... ]

...A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions.
OK, so CO2 makes up a meager .038% of the atmosphere, and I'm supposed to be worried about an insignificant contribution to a tiny percentage of that?

Go hump somebody else's leg.

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