Slashdot Mirror
The Environmental Impact of Google Searches
paleshadows writes "The Times Online reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: 'While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g [...] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions.'" Google makes an interesting focus for such claims, but similar extrapolations have been done before about, for instance, the energy costs of sending a short email.
Were there not a Google (or internet equivalent), I wouldn't sit back in my rocking chair, exclaim "Oh, well," and have a cup or two of tea. Instead, I'd get in my car and drive to the library to look whatever it was up in a reference book, or search the catalog for a book I could borrow on the topic.
In that way, Google (or equivalent) saves energy.
Now that said, I expect Google to do their best to minimize energy consumption. Given that their electricity costs directly hit their cost of doing business, I suspect they agree with this goal.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
That explains the infinite improbability factor that gives links to pron sites from nearly every innocent search.
I find it somewhat hard to believe that this study will change anything; the number of searches are not going to decrease, and people are probably not going to stop drinking tea. So even if each search released fifteen times more CO2, would that change anything?
A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines â" about 2% of global CO2 emissions.
Oh, that's not bad. Considering how huge a positive impact the IT industry has, that honestly seems like a relatively acceptable amount. And I'd rather have two googles than a cup of tea any day.
Searching via google may have an impact. Searching booble.com most definitely causes an increase of emissions.
Let's just shut down every piece of modern technology and revert to a hunter-gatherer civilization. Will that make the enviornmentalists finally shut up? Why not stop people from breathing too, since that produces C02.
That doesn't sound right to me. Must be at least ten times that.
According to my google search history I am responsible for about 112 kg of carbon. I wonder how long I have to hold my breath to off set that.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
You insensitive clods!
In other news: Use http://blackle.com/ if you are interested in combining a search with saving power. Sure, it might run the same amount of power from the server end, but at least it's not using as much power to display the results.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I expect our shiny new government is going to start taxing us on carbon soon. They are throwing money at failing businesses by the billions, while the tax base is collapsing. They are going to need to try to replace that cash somehow.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
This kind of news leads to a CO2 (and unfortunately methane) emitting knee-jerk reaction - That study must have been payed by M$.
I'd like to see the in-depth math on this, I don't buy these numbers, its smells of environmental-shock-value reasoning... Example - if they are dividing the total power used by google by the number of searches, that would only be applicable if google were working at 100% capacity and if *all* they did was searches...
This is kinda like the Greenpeace founder who hated nuclear power till they read a freaking book. Boo.
Time to have a global boston tea party and dump all the tea into the ocean. With roughly 2-3 billion less tea drinkers in the world, think of how many more searches we can do without impacting the environment! And think of those who drink multiple glasses. It's like a critical hit against tea/energy expense. Booyah! problem solved.
Of course, clicking on the following might lead to seven more grams of carbon dioxide being generated . . ..
Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation
http://physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/QM/lloyd_nature_406_1047_00.pdf (pdf warning, obviously)
I'm on this advisory group of 6 people and we wanted to participate in a 2 day conference by flying a representative there or through video conferencing. For some reason the carbon footprint argument was used IN SUPPORT of flying because of that recent news about data-centres being polluters. There was news that IT are going to be the 2nd largest cause of pollution in a few years, and therefore flying was somehow comparably damaging to IT.
I thought that this was against common sense, but it was surprisingly difficult to understand the difference. If an ISP wanted to 'go green' what kind of carbon offset would they need to invest in, per Gig? I found a Harvard study[***] on banner ads that seems to be applicable to internet traffic in general.
It's difficult to quantify and compare the two scenarios[*] but flying to London and back releases about 4,000 kilos of CO2[**] whereas sending 10G of data (video conferencing of youtube-quality video for 16 hours to 7 people) releases about about 100 kilos of CO2[***] + 30 kilos to run 7 computers for two days. While the plane's CO2 cost is only in terms of fuel (and not airports or surrounding infrastructure) the data CO2 from the Harvard study[***] is inclusive of wider infrastructure. Also planes releasing CO2 into the upper atmosphere do more damage than CO2 being released on the ground due to Radiative forcing.
One interesting thing from the Harvard study relates to Moores Law, "we calculate that energy intensity of the internet declined by approximately an order of magnitude from 2000 to 2006. While energy use approximately doubled in that time period, data traffic grew by more than a factor of 20". Now I know that Moores Law is purely about transistor chip density so please don't misunderstand me -- I just mean that as computers and networks get faster the energy needed for 1 gig of traffic will decrease.
So it's about 4000 kilos for flying ONE PERSON vs 130 kilos of video conferencing FOR ALL PEOPLE.
[*] because of course it depends on how wide you consider the effects. Flight pollution should of course include airport pollution but how far do we go? Does it include power company polution for the power needed in the airport? It seems that a lot of IT studies are wider in scope than that of flight.
[**] http://www.cheap-parking.net/flight-carbon-emissions.php for flying half way around the world and back.
[***] Harvard Study on CO2 for data: http://www.imc2.com/Documents/CarbonEmissions.pdf
ps. In New Zealand? Sign up to http://CreativeFreedom.org.nz
I think the interesting piece to pull from this is how little impact individual industries have compared to the perceived impact.
The airlines are a good example of this effect. There are quite a few high profile environmentalists who decry airlines and the damage they are doing,.. the probably do NOT think about the enviromental impact of the computers they use or the networks they attach to.
This is probalby because people have an easier time thinking in terms of singular things with big impacts rather then lots of little tings. Airplanes are big, so they must have a big impact. Computers and networks are spread out everywhere, so people don't think about them.
And without the internet, we'd be spending a LOT more than that.
Imagine the gas wasted on trips to the bookstore, vs. aggregation of purchases through Amazon, the reduced waste thanks to Print-On-Demand... you get the idea.
Google is, for all intents and purposes, the cost of business. I'm all for reducing Google's energy consumption, but it's a lot better than the non-internet alternatives.
Authoring, editing, and distributing inane studies about the environmental impact of things like Google Searches?
I have an idea... how about all the people who are worried about it stop using their computers.... and stop breathing... then the rest of us can get on with our lives.
and every time you troll on slashdot, two kittens are broiled.
It's time to wake up and realize that energy utilization isn't going away and we need to find (read 'use') methods of generating energy that have a lower carbon footprint. Limiting google searches to reduce greenhouse gasses is about the most idiotic thing I've heard in awhile. I wonder then how much each slashdot post adds to the marginal CO2 emission.
Besides, these numbers don't seem to add up...
'Impossible' is a word that humans use far too often. -- Seven of Nine
the study compares the data to how many grams of CO2 it takes to read an, imho irrelevant, study like that when the Kyoto protocol isn't even signed.
If you mod me down I will become more powerful than you can imagine.
Fuck this hippie junk. Just because of this article I'm going go write a Perl-script to do a few hundred searches an hour.
What the hell. I'm also going to replace my CFLs with 100-watt incandescents.
"but similar extrapolations have been done before about, for instance, the energy costs of sending a short email."
Or, for instance, visiting the TimesOnline.co.uk website and having their servers waste energy delivering advertising and the article itself ;-)
I especially like the "Click here for how to reduce the footprint of the Web". I know: I won't click on it.
Here's a map of all the google data center locations... How top secret are they now? I believe the ones in OR/WA are in "The Dalles" which is close to the Bonneville dam? maybe that data center is hydroelectric powered. http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-center-locations/
they failed to account for the amount of carbon saved by searching for porn instead of having sex and potentially creating kids which release tons of carbon.
Monstar L
how about all those yellow pages, encyclopedias, dictionaries, training/research manuals, Porn magazines & catalogs that have to be printed and delivered/picked up?
some people just like to bitch...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
doesn't that apply to the Times online also?
seems they don't have room to talk
While I agree with the sentiment I cannot go so far as to be guilted into not using Google. This craziness stretches into other areas. Large plasma TVs are facing face being banned in the EU. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/giant-plasma-tvs-face-ban-in-battle-to-green-britain-1299665.html
There is talk about heavily taxing the airline industry to bring down the number of miles flown.
There seems to be no middle ground. Either its denial of global warming or banning major economic and social activity in the name of the environment.
Of course we can solve the problem. We need to use non carbon emitting sources such as nuclear power, solar and wind power. Instead the greenies on Europe want to guilt anyone who uses energy. In the end all that does is to depress the economy, raise unemployment and lower standards of living.
Its also ironic that the greenies always try to inhibit the green power they always go on about. The have stopped wind power on top of mountains in Vermont ( http://www.windaction.org/news/3653 )and filed lawsuits against solar power in the Nevada desert. http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/09/25/are-some-solar-projects-no-longer-%E2%80%98green%E2%80%99/ They even oppose wind power out at sea - Nantucket sound. http://www.nesea.org/publications/NESun/cape_controversy.html Why? Because it's development and they hate ALL development. They always have some objection.
The irony is that we cannot address global warming BECAUSE of the opposition to environmentalists. Indeed if we are to use electric cars we are going to need many more (non carbon emitting) power stations which the experimentalists fight against tooth and nail.
And then I am always amazed by how so many people seem to forge that China is the number one emitter now and that India will soon be number two. If you cannot get these countries on board you are wasting your time. So while the EU impoverishes itself trying to reduce its carbon emissions by 1% China happily adds 10 times that every year anyway.
Just reading this article and him writing it had a significant global impact according to his own report. He just created more CO2 emissions by posting his article than most people will emit during a year of Google searches. Also, this is where the climate change movement loses it's precedence.
I sure don't. I'm getting tired of this anti-everything that happens to change the environment in any way possible. I wish all of the environmentalists would commit suicide, but unfortunately the amount of carbon emissions generated from a rotting corpse are probably greater than what they generate in a day.. I hate this :(
EN TEA.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I live in an area where a lot of hydropower is generated, and it has a very definite negative environmental impact. We locals pay for it in many ways.
I marvel at how many people seem to think that hydropower is "clean and renewable", with few environmental effects. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What about the recreational opportunities we lose, and the huge potential income from same, when a river is dammed?
What about the loss of existing environment? Including drowned farms and forests.
What about loss of wildlife habitat? Salmon and waterfowl are only the tip of the iceberg. Fewer farms means fewer deer and rodents grazing the fields. Less forest means loss of habitat for those as well as a great many other species. Which all in turn means fewer top-level predators such as osprey, eagles, bear, cougar.
Which are more valuable to our overall environment? A few less cubic feet of CO2, or a few more salmon, a couple of ducks, some crayfish and a sturgeon?
People, please do some research before making assumptions about different forms of power generation. Depending on where you are, YOU might not have to live with the consequences in the short term, but we all have to live with them in the long term.
And, by the way, PLEASE do some research about the CO2-based warming model, which has so many serious flaws that its predictive capacity is actually near zero. Try paying attention to the science rather than all the hype.
Exactly how many kettles of tea does it cost to put all the texts on the internet in print and distribute them across all the libraries ?
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
with a grain of salt. About the size of a basketball.
A quick estimate shows my home PC under load uses up the same energy as heating a kettle in about 45min. The magnitude suggests that Mr. Gross used ludicrously oversimplified model such as linearly searching the entire Google index in RAM.
Also, as already pointet out, he fails to mention the costs of getting the required information by other means.
Furthermore, all this climate change hysteria is getting more and more ridiculous, especially since the Arctis recovered from almost 30 years of ice loss within two weeks.
A new study shows that using Google will destroy the planet. A typical Google search on a completely random topic such as "charlot chirch sex tape" produces enough carbon for 98 pencils or seventeen boiled kettles and brutally murders an average of two point four cute fluffy things.
"A Google search has a definite environmental impact," said Alex Wissner-Gross of Harvard University. "Instead, you should use Windows Live Search — to be renamed Windows Love Search — which produces butterflies and baby seals. That's instead of whatever you were looking for, but hey — it's for the planet."
Google is "secretive" about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. "Or at least, they told us to fuck off when we asked how many endangered species they'd killed off today. This proves their inherent malice. If you search using Google you may as well be strangling kittens. You should go to a trustworthy company of demonstrated moral fibre, like Microsoft."
A recent Gartner report said the global IT industry generates as much greenhouse gas as the airlines industry. "Primary in this is the large quantities of hot air produced by completely independent analysts to support the views of the highest bidder."
The Home Office welcomed the findings. "This proves that Internet users might as well be terrorists," said Jacqui Smith, "and so we'll treat them like they are. All Internet access in the UK will be run through Cleanfeed filters and your electronic ration book ticked off per web page used. Reading Wikipedia or the Guido Fawkes blog will, of course, be declared capital offences."
Microsoft has demonstrated its environmental credentials by recycling Vista, its huge and lumbering Hummer of an operating system, as Windows 7. "All new and yet ... old," said marketing marketer Steve Ballmer. "Save the planet with Windows 7! Requires 4 core processor 2 gigabytes memory 500 gigabyte hard disk and basement nuclear power plant. Power plant sold separately."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Before we shut down Google, we might also want to consider the benefits (both environmental and other) of the Google service.
How much carbon does it save by sparing us trips to the local or university library? Or in having books shipped to us?
How much CO2 is saved by having Google Maps give good directions, so that we don't drive around looking for our destination?
Or how about the green-energy research and procurement that's enabled by people's use of Google?
Also, consider that Google's porn search eliminates all the carbon emission needed to take a woman out to dinner and a movie.
Blackle thus exploits ignorance to get traffic and Google ad hits (ie. revenue).
Quite likely Blackle is also selling their supposed carbon saving as carbon offsets. Their "We've saved xxxx Watt hours" can be exchanged for money.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Useless research on a daily basis dwarves Google carbon footprint.
kettle = 3000w (UK/240v, 13amps) for 2 min.
Google search 1/100000th of a blade server (or whatever) at ~200w for about 0.01 seconds.
So, simple (green) maths has them almost equal...
Firstly I'd like to say I don't drink tea, coffee or other hot bereage. Therefore I am saving the environment enough energy to do my google searches.
Google makes money in spite of its electricity bill. The money comes from advertisers. If those advertisers weren't advertising on the internet, they would be sending out glossy paper adervtising which uses way more energy, and of course choppimg down trees to ,ake the paper.
What google could do is install wind turbines to help power their servers. Also if there is that much power involved then there would be a lot of hot surplus, which they could use to provide heat for nearby businesses or other institutions. (it is after all winter at the moment) Or even boil a cup of tea.
The Times Online reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea.
You mean I'm supposed to be worried about the environmental impact of drinking tea?!
If the answer is "no", then this report is absolutely pointless. If it's "yes", then taking care of the Earth has become to difficult and inconvenient and I say we just let it burn.
I read this article a few hours ago from Drudge ... and while the article may be 100% accurate and irrefutable, there was another article that was also on there, also published today:
Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age
I'm not sure if the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing ... but to me, it seems like two completely different scenarios.
Obviously, the earth has cooled before ... and it's warmed up before. Nobody is disputing this fact.
Certainly, in the past few decades, CO2 has risen. And, for the past 650,000 years, it has been fluctuating, but topped out around 360ppm. Though if you go back even further, you'll see that CO2 has been much higher (see pg 23) than recent times. One has to question what is the optimal level for the Earth? Is it now ... at 385ppm, or in pre-historic times at over 1000ppm?
By using 7g of CO2 emissions per search, the article really gives such a vague scare of global warming. By my interpretation, we should shut down that evil CO2 emitter, at least thats what they are implying. Alternatively, just create a new tax obviously, this will reduce levels ... somehow.
As far as a solution for the "global warming" problem ... I'll have to think about it while I turn up the heat in the house while I shovel snow outside.
BTW, yes I do know that Weather != Climate ... but currently, it is just fsck'n cold.
People who watch porn have now become major polluters.
Back in the days cruisin' -the act of driving a car pointlessly- used to be a pass time. How much cruisin' does google prevent?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
This is why we need to hook our computers up to brownian motion generators.
... and then they built the supercollider.
A tea kettle runs at about 1500 watts, and takes a few hundred seconds to heat the water. Google does a search in a few hundreds of a second on a few servers which consume less than 1500 watts in total, so you should get a few thousand Google searches for each tea kettle heated. If the article said you got 1,000 searches or 10,000 searches or 100,000 searches it might have been believable, even if still incorrect. But 2 just doesn't make sense, it's as if the article said driving to the supermarket to buy groceries twice used as much energy as going to Mars once.
Of course there are certain fixed cost to generating the indexes used for searches, but doing fewer searches won't help with that. The biggest environmental cost is all those employees Google has, they eat food, breathe, get on airplanes, and most damagingly live in houses. But you really have to offset those against all the time wasted by the mass of humanity to find information before internet search; when you factor, that my best guess would be that each Google search saves on average 100 tons of CO^2 emissions. Of course I just pulled that number out of nowhere, but it's backed up by more reasoning than the wild and wacky guess in the article.
FYI Water has an enormous heat capacity, it takes 4186 Joules to heat 1 liter of water 1 degree C. 1 Watt == 1 Joule/second so if your 1.5 L and 1500 Watt tea kettle were perfectly insulated and you put the electric heating element within it and heated the water from 10 C to 100 C it would take 1.5 * 90 * 4186 => 565110 Joules of energy and 565110 / 1500 = 378 seconds to heat it. Of course, most tea kettles are metal which is a great heat conductor and a terrible heat insulator, so good deal of energy is also lost to the air.
If I do enough google searches, the amount of emissions required to boil my kettle is reduced as the water is warmer to start with thanks to global warming..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
What the hell is "200 meters internet searches"?
I drink iced tea, you insensitive clod!
Got one in Council Bluffs, Ia. The local power plants are coal fired. There is vastly more environmental damage being done by deliberate actions of people everywhere. Hunting has brought many species to extinction, not to mention habitat destruction. We know that plants and animals grow bigger in warm climates, and that there are plenty of fossil skeletons of huge animals long gone. So the planet used to be must more tropical than it is now, so really global warming is helping the world return to what it is supposed to be like. I like winter stuff, but I would rather have a warmer, more humid summer and very mild temperate winters. When that happens again, all the plants will get much bigger and draw up the CO2 and people will be bitching about losing the tropical paradise to boring moderate temperatures caused by global cooling.
I wish the envirodummies could focus on acutely poisonous things in the air instead of CO2. Smog sucks. The acid rain is a serious problem that has been sort of addressed, but isn't the exciting buzzword it used to be. We still have acid rain, it does dissolve concrete/marble type stuff. It might even start to screw up the land, and give us crop issues. Or it could be just what the soil needs to make better plants. Seems more harmful than good. Getting away from emitting smoke is the answer, whether completely cleaning exhaust emmissions from power plants,factories, and cars or using non exhaust emitting energy. Spend more money cleaning the emissions, or switch to some alternative that may be marginally more expensive than burning stuff. It has to be done worldwide and enforced. Let the CO2 go up in the air, but get rid of the rest of the crap, sulfur and nitrrogen oxides, metals, phosphorus or whatever. Let plants grow big to suck up the CO2 if it matters
I don't buy these numbers. Assuming the summary is correct and one search uses as much energy as boiling half a cup of water, then the total energy dissipated is;
W=delta_T*specific_energy*mass
Which for water gives (assuming 80 degrees of temperature difference and 75g of water, or about half a small cup of tea);
80*4.18*75=25kJ
A few google searches I just did took on average 0.2 seconds each, as reported by google.
This would give a power draw of 125kW, for just running the services that handled my single request!
Now, I must say that I don't now a lot pertaining to how much power google's servers draw, and of course running the search engine servers ism't enough, google needs to update it's database and do lots of other maintanence. All in all this strikes me as far too much.
Does anyone happen to have any real knowledge about this?
1. Exposing corporations for the evil bastards they are has much less impact when you make up all the numbers.
2. In the Dalles here in Oregon, their project 02 datacenter pulls all of it's power straight from the hydro dam next door. In fact, the whole reason they built there was because of all the dark fiber underneath, and the hydroelectric dam adjacent. Google didn't get rich by making shitty decisions when it comes to power consumption.
Now lets be really pessimistic on the Google front. Suppose my search takes Google 1 second, and the search is distributed over ten 500W servers. That's 5 kJ expended. Lets double that to allow for the costs of spidering and indexing, and double again since the article mentions two searches per cup. Thats 20 kJ. Assume I spend a minute on my 30W laptop viewing the search results; thats another 2 kJ.
So We have 84 kJ verses 22 kJ.
I wonder how many google queries one would "buy" for himself by cutting short the remaning lifespan (and therefore breating span) of an environmentalist?..
I use a solar powered Kettle, you insensitive clods!
Also, wouldn't it be fairly easy for someone to find the whereabouts of all Google's datacenters?
Isn't all this stuff logged somewhere? Land bought, planning, etc.
What a horrible bunch of hogwash. Please, someone, tell me why:
1. In the 1970's, hysteria swept the globe because CO2 emissions would cause global freezing?
2. In the mid 90's and early 2000's, hysteria swept the globe because CO2 emissions would cause global warming?
3. In the last five years, the term "global warming" has been replaced by "climate change"?
4. Isn't the climate, by definition, something that changes over time, from day to day, from week to week, from season to season, from year to year, and over longer periods of time?
5. If there are no SUVs, no Google computers, and no factories on Mars, why has the temperature there been shown to change proportionally to the temperature here on Earth?
In other words, what I really want to know is this: has anyone actually shown with certainty that CO2 emissions has anything to do with the temperature outside? Or is this all just a meaningless political issue, right alongside Social Security and abortion, designed to focus people's attention away from what our politicians are really doing? I say this is a bunch of hogwash. Climate change. Such a general and vague term could mean anything. Hey, the temperature is different today than it was yesterday. See! Proof of climate change.
In fact, in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query.
From http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/
OMG, things are getting worse: Google Suggest posts searches even before you are even finishing to type your query... it's integrated in Google toolbar of most browsers and even in the Chrome address bar...
that means I used to post hundreds of useless queries every day...
I'm so sorry for you guys, I didn't know I was so harmful!
Should I bookmark pages more often instead of looking for them again and again using Google?
No, I'll do better! I'll stop using the internet now and go to have a cup of... chamomile to calm down (I won't have cups of tea either, those causes pollution!)
PS: of course I'm just kidding, i'll keep using Google as I keep breathing.
So it's about 4000 kilos for flying ONE PERSON vs 130 kilos of video conferencing FOR ALL PEOPLE.
Now, if only 31+ people decided to fly on that exact flight instead of using video conferencing, that would actually be more efficient according to your calculations. Don't forget to take the other passengers into account which would've otherwise travelled by car / train / boat / tricycle or used video conferencing.
That said, I still think video conferencing is the way to go.. Either that or the tricycle!
What are the odds the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is federally funded? Let's hope the economy will soon cut funds for wastes of time like this.
You see, you need to stop researching. Reasearch bring science, and science brings innovation. Innovation brings bad things for nature. What we need is to live in huts built from naturally dying trees and eating from personal gardens on the roof.
Xaotik Designs
I call Hyperbole Hogwash on this. Without detailed data, and significant research, producing exacting numbers is nothing more than foo... or in this case fud.
And how much CO2 did it take for researchers to come up with this.. and how much co2 does it take to have everyone read their findings?
The consensus is Google will serve couple of billion of queries, not 200M. The estimate of carbon foot is very difficult to verify. Portion of energy consumption, such as client machine, network cost between client and server are constant, regardless what user is doing. It is unreasonable to put that quote on Google.
Regarding Google side energy bill. Using SEC report, Google expense is about 10B a year. We can guess half of it is operating cost (rest are salaries), and half of it is energy bill, and half of it is related to search. So Google will spend around 1-2B for energy bill related to search. Assuming Google perform 400B queries a year, that is 1 cent cent per query. The energy cost is much less than you drive to library or buy a book or buy news paper.
I will stop farting too because that will generate too much CO2.
Yes because typing in 100 URLS manually and chewing 30 minutes of power to find a key piece of information is far more carbon friendly than using a 1 second query from google.
just saying how stupid do they think people are with this scare campaign.
The Eco nuts don't really care about saving the environment. They are basically just whiners. You'll notice that what they love to do is point out problems. Well that's easy because there is a problem with everything. EVERYTHING has a cost. Doesn't matter what it is, there is a cost, a tradeoff, to everything. So it is pretty easy to just pick out the cost of everything and scream about it. Much harder is to actually be constructive and come up with solutions. That means evaluating different options, figuring out the relative costs, including indirect costs, and then choosing the best combination. That's not what these people are interested in. They just want to hate on everything. So no matter what you do, they'll not be happy about it.
This CO2 crap has got to stop. We exhale CO2 for satan's sake! Plants BREATHE CO2 fuckers, CO2 is a life giving gas!
Maybe if they stop spraying the skies with chemicals and admit that we're in a solar system and that global warming and cooling is a NATURAL process they would not have a reason to tax us then.
FUCKING DIE YOU FUCKERS!!!
Does that air travel study take into account all the computers that the air traffic control uses on a day by day basis? What about all the electricity that two airports, if it's a direct flight, running at full capacity consume? Or at least at a high enough volume so that it can sustain it's operations enough to fly that one flight. It only seems fair that if you're taking the broad spectrum of IT energy consumption into account, then you must look at all the energy consumption that one flight relies on to simply be scheduled. Luggage handling, security, shuttling commuters, food courts, are a few more factors I came up with very quickly. Either a lot of thought was put into ignoring those part of air travel, or not a lot of thought was put into this study at all.
I'm pretty sure the GP's numbers are kilos of CO2 per person, per flight.
According to David MacKay's excellent book, an intercontinental flight uses about 12,000 kWh of Energy per passenger. Let's imagine the meeting takes about 10 hours. Unless your IT infrastructure uses 1.2 Megawatts, solely for this one video conference, there's no point in flying, CO2-wise.
Another one that thinks nuclear runs in magic beans. I don't know why the nuclear lobby isn't satisfied with saying that they have very low total carbon emissions (less than half that of natural gas and a huge amount less than coal, oil etc) instead of the outright and utterly stupid lie of zero emissions. Nuclear fuel comes from rocks that need to be dug up and have a lot done to them before you have fuel rods - I'm suprised that I have to point this out to an educated audience.
Hydro does a bit better again but it can't claim zero either since you have to actually build the things. Also a lot of energy is consumed and then extra carbon dioxide released in the processes required to make concrete.
Everyone do more Google searches!
Those Google computers are on *all day* - generating CO2 all the time!
If we all do more Google searches, they'll generate *less* CO2 per search.
I intend to double the number of Google searches I do per day, thereby generating only 7g of CO2 per search, and saving the environment!
WHO IS WITH ME?
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
Some facts as I understand them snarfed from the web - corrections welcomed...
rough cost of (wholesale) energy per kilowatt hour (kwh): ~5c
CO2 cost per kwh: ~1kg (coal power: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html)
time for my (small) 1 litre (~ 1kw) kettle to boil when full is ~ 5 minutes which compares well with the theoretical energy for a 1litre at ~350kj, or 350 seconds time for 1kw . Hence power for a small boiled kettle is a killowatt for 1/10 of an hour, or 0.1 kwh
So I get... ... the article says a kettle take 15g, which I don't get even close to; maybe clever people boil just enough to make single cups only?
Kettle boiling: costs ~.5c, and ~ 100g,
If the article was true, Google doing "more than 200m" searches a day would spend ~ $20m a day on power, or ~ $7billion a year, consuming 100,000 megawatt hours, or a continuous drain of 4,000 megawatts (about the power output of a small US state). On the authors figures, total power consumption would be ~ 650 megawatts, which is still pretty huge, and would still be spending ~ $1billion a year.
Google use cheap, mass produced low power units in gigantic numbers - estimates are hard to come by, I will estimate 200,000 based on inflating some public estimates (e.g. http://arnab.org/blog/how-many-computers-does-google-have).
Energy cost of networking is significant, but I do not believe as great as machines; I'll add 50% for good luck. Utility server machines are dropping in power (~100-200w) but also require cooling, UPSs and network etc., so let's call it 500w all up (figures are difficult to get; everyone is selling something power center wise) - so I get 100 megawatts; or 1/6th of the author's estimate, or 1/40th of the true kettle figure.
I'd say that the author is overstating the case to make a political point - if I was cynical I'd point out the author has also just launched a business to 'green your web site' by installing monitoring software, estimating the energy cost of searches to it, and then buying carbon offsets on your behalf, so it is in his interests to overestimate such usage..
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.
Proves he's a luddite.
http://www.blackle.com/
I refuse to listen to "research" from people who don't even know how to make a cup of tea.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
You fucking idiots CO2 does not cause global warming! Look at things objectively for once in your life.
There is no air travel study. I was basing this on the website linked in the footer of my post. Thanks for your comment.
Unless all of Google's servers are already pegged, highly unlikely, we need to search more. That will divide the energy their datacenters already use among more searches. This is the reason I can't stand the Climate Change (or whatever they're calling it today) movement. They're worse than PETA in trying to dish out the guilt to a ridiculous extreme. Another equivalent, PETA kills most of the animals given to them, while CC/GW/GC folks like Al Gore love to fly around on private jets and throw big, wasteful bashes. My "carbon footprint" is probably a very tiny fraction of Gore's.
Think of how smaller the carbon footprint would be if people just made up the answer to things they didn't know! ;)
Let us see. We use to walk to the book shelf, pull off an copy of the encyclopedia or whatever, that was produced on paper, likely shipped around the world, printed on paper from trees, that wiped out some native forest to be grown for paper, that polluted some river.
So, if I have a $1,000 set of encyclopedias that I open once a month for a year before they are outdated, what is the cost of each search? In dollars, in energy, carbon? In anything it was going to be a lot more expensive.
Living in Chile
Of course, clicking on the following might lead to seven more grams of carbon dioxide being generated . . ..
Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation
http://physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/QM/lloyd_nature_406_1047_00.pdf (pdf warning, obviously)
When I first read that, I read: ultimate physical limits to [i]copulation[/i].
Oh well, just another pot of tea boiled I guess. 'ave another one guv.
Seriously.
Temper your fucking concerns for shit that really matters.
Shit that, hey, you can measure without LYING about it.
Until I see more of you stupid wankers walking to work, I am going to consider any false-concern about what someone does on the internet complete garbage.
Want to save the planet? Shoot your neighbors kids in the head. Follow it up with anybody within range, and then yourself.
BOOM. Instant reduction in pollution and consumption.
Complaining about Google's energy efficiency is like complaining about Walmart's product stocking efficiency.
That is, they have strong incentives to be really good at it.
Have you heard? Green is the new you...
Numbers released by the U.S. Department of Energy:
Role of Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases
(man-made and natural) as a % of Relative
Contribution to the "Greenhouse Effect"
__________% of All Greenhouse Gases__% Natural__% Man-made
Water vapor -_________95.000%____94.999%___0.001%
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) -__3.618%___3.502%___0.17%
Methane (CH4)_________0.360%_____0.294%___0.66%
Nitrous Oxide (N2O)_____0.950%____0.903%___0.047%
Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.)_0.072%____0.025%___0.047%
Total________________100.00%_______99.72%____0.28%
Total human contribution in greenhouse gases - .28%! And .117% just in CO2! An insignificant number!
"Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate."
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
So, As you see, ALL of humanity can only contributes .117% of CO2, so Global Warming is FRAUD. Created by the likes of AL Gore who sells himself 'Carbon Credits' and uses as much energy in his Tennisse mansion in one day as I do in 17months living in my house. Created for the Eco-Weary that are worried that they have it too good and must stake some blame in the missery of anyone else not doing as well on the planet and justify their place.
If you REALLY worry about the enviornment, and you REALLY feel that you have that great of an impact on it, then please do the responsible thing and quit exhaling, perminatly. The rest of the world MIGHT notice once your gone....
WHEN are you people gonna wake up to this Cult of Green.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I found that the link in my post, to the letter from Chris Landsea, was broken. Here is another link to his letter, which sets some background for more of the material that you will see:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy_general/000318chris_landsea_leaves.html
If there are other links that have broken by now, I am sure a Google search on keywords from the article title will find other links to the same information.
This is the sort of post we need to see more of.
Kudos for actually citing facts.
It's been a long time.
He did point out this is an apples-to-oragnes comparison. The flight calculations considered only fuel. The IT calculations were wider in scope (power, manufacture, various infrastructure).
Airlines actually do not fly jets in the most fuel-efficient manner possible. There is a cost index calculation they perform that takes into account just about the entire airline infrastructure that dictates how they fly their planes. Flying slower saves fuel, but it costs more to pay the flight crew, increases time on the aircraft (maintenance and lifetime is based on hours of flight), and ties up the plane longer (which might in the aggregate require more planes to cover the routes). The result is they actually fly planes fairly close to their maximum speeds (the big exception would be on very long routes - where the added range could make the difference in needing one more leg). On a per-passenger basis an airliner is about as fuel-efficient as an SUV - so it shouldn't be surprising that fuel is only one of many costs that need to be considered.
I suspect that all those other costs also have substantial carbon footprints associated with them. I wouldn't be surprised if the fuel only represents maybe half of the carbon cost of a flight. It is just very dramatic to think about 50,000kgs of diesel going up in smoke.
Did the author read Google's on pages on energy usage?
http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/reducing.html
http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/index.html
Think Deeply.
Thanks. It was easy for me because I was just cutting and pasting from an email :)
This is true but it's always good to fully explain what is meant by it: It takes as much fuel to drive an SUV around the world as it does to fly around the world.
So if you were to drive at 65 MPH for 24+ days (assuming 8 hours sleep a day) you would use as much fuel as one flight. It goes to show you how much fuel those planes use, eh?
Again, if you're reading this and you're from New Zealand visit CreativeFreedom.org.nz
Google: Give up all your earnings now to Al Gore, before it's too late.
try dihydrogen monoxide (see also http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html) vapor which makes up in excess of 90% of the greenhouse gases that are destroying the planet. Oddly, nobody seems to have gotten around to classifying it as a pollutant so we can use "cap and trade" credits to reduce its egregious effects on the environment. Call your Congresscritter. We must save the planet.
Think about this logically: someone, somewhere, has to pay for the electricity for all that. It trickles down to the consumer or the company fails. So: where is the massive cost from the rough equivalent to 400-odd cups of tea I boil every day?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The google queries don't actually create CO2 themselves. No, it is the computer's power consumption. Therefore, if I run my computer on solar energy, and all the routers between my computer and the data center are run on some eco friendly energy, and the data center is run on hydroelectric energy, then there is zero carbon footprint.
This is another misleading global warming article. Global warming has yet to be proven. Specifically, Carbon Dioxide has not been proven to be the source of Global warming.
Reasons I like Slashdot...
It's not an idiot-fest of blind-eyed liberals like Digg. It actually has smart people willing to analyze the articles that are posted by mods.
Flamebait me now, oh smarty-pantses.
3
Forgive me this rant... but Yale is a great school, Stanford is a great school, MIT, Caltech, and a whole score of others are truly a cut above. Harvard is... a has-been that now rests on its name, not alot more.
Do yourself a favor and don't be so in awe of an epic name and lose sight of reality. Harvard has repeatedly demonstrated its cluelessness about anything but dead novelists.
Not questioning this crap is exactly why people with an H-brand resume walk into jobs ahead of *gasp* qualified people.
Finally, I think its amusing that a Harvard apologist couldn't do better than "... eat shit and die you shit-flinging pin head mother fuckers..."; just wow.
by killing all of the environmentalists. How much carbon is generated by bloviating environmentalists spewing FUD by publishing badly flawed studies such as this one? It has to be in the megatons. By reducing the carbon footprints of all environmentalists to zero we could reduce energy consumption, carbon-dioxide production and we'd have fewer annoying fucks to deal with.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Who lets this kid on the front page of my slashdot. Pathetic.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
There is only one solution to stopping the "carbon footprint": KILL EVERYTHING!
Considering Google's high energy standards from using alternative energy in the GooglePlex, to using energy efficient hardware, its not enough! So everyone must die! That's right! Kill everything! Destroy everything you touch! (By clicking on that link, you have drowned a litter of puppies due to global warming! How do you sleep at night! You should kill something! HURRY!) You must save the planet from yourself. You are not clean enough! You're mentally ill! (Gasp! You killed the wiggy-wamp-wiggy! A species of ant that lives in the Rainforest! MURDERER!) Germs are making you like that! They fart their carbon dioxide in the air! Must destroy the germs! Must kill everything! AUGH!
OK, enough sillyness. I've had quite enough of this carbon footprint bullshit! You know what, I'm going to keep surfing the Internet. I'm going to surf the internet until I kill a penguin with an oil tanker in Florida!
"Save the planet? We can't even save ourselves!"--George Carlin.
By reading this post you have already helped destroy the o-zone layer. Never mind that a Gamma Ray Burst can destroy it in an instant, but you a supernova to somebody.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
How does me, querying the database, INCREASE the carbon footprint?
Can anyone explain?
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
I didn't know you measure internet searches in meters, curious!
M stands for million, douchebag!
Environments ARE destroyed. A farmland or forest that has been turned into a lake is not "modified farmland" or "modified forest". It is a lake. Those environments have been destroyed where the lake now exists.
Not all trout can live in environments that are suitable for salmon runs, and vice versa. A fishery that is good for lake trout or bass or imported pike is simply not as valuable for the local economy as a fishery for ocean-run salmon. If you doubt that, just ask people who live around a viable salmon fishery.
Boat traffic and the ability to water-ski in a lake do not necessarily offset the money that can be made by river rafting and other guide-for-wild-country activities, if the lake were still river.
If you even live in an area where it is legal to buy wild-caught trout, compare the cost to that of wild-caught salmon. Who is making more money? And farm-raising fish, including salmon and trout, is problematic. They have their own serious issues to overcome, and the quality simply does not compare.
Further, damming a river does not just affect the environment upstream! It also "modifies" the environment downstream, to a significant degree. Control of the waterflow tends to ruin the water levels around the gravel beds where salmonids spawn, and it also affects the sedimentation, which also are critical to spawning grounds.
I should also remind readers that it has indeed been established that dams are the leading cause of loss of salmon breeding habitat, as well as being a leading direct cause of salmon death. In my area it has been determined pretty solidly that the removal of a few dams could restore salmon runs to the area. Several times already the decision of whether to leave or remove those particular dams has been a very close call, even though they supply roughly 10% of the electric power for this area. You had better believe that many economic studies have been done, on all sides of this issue, and it is still very much up in the air.
And so on. If anyone thinks this is that simple: that you are simply modifying one environment for another that is just as good, then they haven't done their homework.
Sitting on the couch is also better for the environment, since carbon is stored in fat. When you exercise, your body generates heat and expells more carbon dioxide from rapid breathing.
BTW, who on earth gives a rats ass about how much carbon a stupid browser search generates?!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
But how much is actually used to perform a search, and how much is just the cost of running the servers? I doubt that running searches on google uses much more power than their servers just idling.
I should have put this in my other reply:
The 3 dams to which I was specifically referring above are in a gorge; they do not actually form lakes but merely flood a greater area of riverbed. In the process the shallows where salmon spawn have largely been destroyed, not to mention the much larger mortality rate from the salmon going downstream past the dams.
Further, this water is not much use for irrigation: the farms are at much higher elevation than the river, and groundwater is easier to obtain. Pumping river water that far uphill would not be economically feasible.
The main purposes of these dams are for transportation of commodity goods via barge (I have already mentioned the locks), and the generation of electricity. However, before the advent of the dams, rail provided plenty of cheap transportation of goods, and did not need to be taxpayer-subsidized. The businesses that oppose the removal of the dams do so on the basis that they would be losing a major taxpayer subsidy of their business. I say: too bad. We shouldn't be subsidizing them anyway. They got along just fine before the dams, they can get along just fine after.
As such, the situations is entirely different from that of Shasta. It is apples and oranges.
The assertions you make here are simply false. The very first link I made was to an open letter by Chris Landsea, who is not only a reputable scientist, but whose work was referenced by the UN in the very IPCC report that popularized the whole "global warming" thing. Excuse me, but you do not get to accept the one thing (the UN IPCC report) as a "reputable source", then turn around and say the author of that very work is not a "reputable source". That is simply contradicting yourself. This is a reputable scientist whose work was used by the UN itself as being authoritative in the field... but you say his statements are not "good enough" for you. Well, you can't have it both ways.
Other articles to which I have linked are also by scientists who worked on those very same climate reports that have been cited by the UN and other "warmers"... irresponsibly and incorrectly. And the articles cite a number of peer-reviewed reports that have appeared in reputable journals. Your statement that my evidence did not include same merely indicates that you did not actually read the material I made available to you.
The part of my post about problems with peer review had to do with the PRIOR discussion that the old post was a part of. I did not use it to make excuses as you claim. In fact, it had no relevance to the current discussion whatever. I am frankly amazed that you did not realize this. That was a link to an OLD post of mine, 6 months or so old. I was not about to re-type those links merely to put them in the current discussion. Other statements I made in that post are also completely irrelevant to what has been discussed here. Generally, I credit slashdot readers with enough intelligence to separate the wheat from the chaff. Obviously, you got some chaff in your eyes.
Regardless of that, since you did read the old post, why did you apparently not see the part in which I wrote that some of the sources might well be biased? I did clearly state as much. However, I also offered the caveat: sources of contradictory information are similarly biased. I was merely trying to offer an alternative view, and show that it did indeed have some validity (and it does). And not all the sources are biased by any means, many of them are quite reputable (again, look at the scientists who describe their own experiences with the IPCC).
If you feel "the evidence clearly points in support of greenhouse global warming", then you haven't done your homework, which is precisely what I was pointing out here. In order to make a statement like that, it is clear that you did not even read all the material that I made available to you. Further, it completely ignores the inverse correlation of warming with sunspot activity, which is a much stronger correlation than greenhouse gases could ever pretend to be, or other possible causes that have greater credibility. You also ignore the reports (again, by reputable sources) that have been claiming that the "evidence" presented by the "greenhouse warmers" has largely been faked or exaggerated.
Why do you think the UN retracted, just one year later, the conclusion of that original Assessment Report that got all the "warmers" so up in arms? Do you think they made the retraction arbitrarily? Because they had all the evidence they needed, but wanted to just "get along" with everybody else? Not fucking likely. They retracted their original conclusion in the face of well-supported accusations of irresponsible science, distortion of data, conclusions that did not follow the evidence, and yes, in some cases, even outright fraud.
The UN retracted their original conclusion because they DID NOT actually have evidence to back up their claims. They DID NOT have data that withstood the claims of fraud by other scientists. They DID NOT publish conclusions that were actually justified by the science they referenced. As the very scientists who gathered that data themselves testified, publicly.
While I agree with many of your statements above, your kn
Darn! I'm distracted too!
As your post gets modded up, more people will read it and get distracted too.
This world will be a better place if we send tea drinkers to an even better place!
Like the Enterprise NCC-1701-D?
Google's porn search eliminates all the carbon emission needed to take a woman out to dinner and a movie.
Yes, but what you see on screen is theoretical knowledge. To be relevant in this world, you'd need practical experience.
Exactly. Its worth thinking about how much energy google could save. Say you are writing about energy use and you want to put in the saving you would get using a compact car compared to an SUV. You have seen it somewhere in the magazines (which have been printed and delivered previously using energy). You spend 15 minutes looking through them while your computer is switched on, then slowly type up the info, taking 5 minutes to double-check the figures.
If you had googled you may have found the info in five minutes and copied and pasted the figures in one, taking another to reformat. This would have saved energy rather than costing it.
CO2 does not cause Global Warming. CO2 is not a poison, Carbon monoxide is. CO2 is absolutely essential to all life on this planet, and there is no indication that we have too much CO2.
The man-made climate change is based on computer models which inputs can be easily manipulated to confirm whatever you want. The "predictions" are as accurate than a old gypsy woman reading your palm. The IPCC is not a scientific institution, but a UN organization with its agenda and a one-sided opinion mostly based on speculation.
There are over 31,000 American scientists who signed a petition which disagrees with the theory of man-made global warming. And no, not all of them are paid by big corporations.
I do believe that the CO2 emission caused by Google is pretty much at a fixed fix. So the more people search, the less CO2 is being caused per search. This is not the case with boiling water. The more you boil, the more emission you cause.
Great - more plant and tree food!
You quote Mr Segalstad, a Geologist. who rants against the conclusions of the UN IPCC.
Here is a rebuttal I found:
"Segalstad dismisses the IPCC's detailed ocean circulation models (which indicate that the deeper layers of the ocean do not mix much with the more mobile surface waters) and also ignores the feedback effect of rising surface temperatures on the ability of the surface waters to retain CO2. As many (other) AGW sceptics constantly remind us, in past warming periods CO2 rose after the warming began: this was due to warmer oceans.
If Segalstad was right, atmospheric CO2 levels would have risen far, far slower than they have over the last five decades and no-one would ever have been alarmed by the increase as it would have corresponded only to the last few years' emissions. We'd have seen a decrease in atmospheric CO2 in the mid 1990s corresponding to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. It didn't happen.
The fact is, carbon dioxide is obviously remaining in the atmosphere for many decades, and is likely to remain there for centuries without human intervention."
So Mr Segalstad seems to be wrong about the main issue he seems to know something about, his model does not account for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Well, Duh!
If the rest of your links is so easily rebuttable by evidence so widely available I think your experts may not be such.
For goodness sakes, the enormous majority of the scientific community everywhere is saying he is wrong, the rebuttal to his main argument is easy to understand and put forward, so he may have been part of the panel, I don't see mentioned on his website why he had a change of heart about the whole matter.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So you think that by closing our eyes, putting our hand in our ears and shouting "lah,lah,lah" our problems are going to go away?
It is reasonable to understand the environmental impact of our activities in order to so something about the way we pollute.
Nobody serious is advocating going back to primitive societies, only people like you that prefer to ignore reality and pass the environmental bill to future generations make such outrageous claims.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
People that think responsibly about the environment want that people make small choices that save energy and that governments encourage people to make those choices.
We should be able to live modern lives as we understand such a thing today but is a disgrace if we don't attempt to do so by using the least energy possibly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
From another article I found:
Quote
OK, that's not fair to Levan. In his letter, he cites another 400-er: Tom Segalstad, "a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
I don't have desktop access to ISI, so I can't pull Andy's trick. But as near as I can tell, Segalstad has published a grand total of one paper in the peer-reviewed literature on climate change: a rather narrow critique published in 1992 of the record of carbon trapped in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. Subsequent research has shown Segalstad and his co-author on that paper to be wrong.
Unquote
So much for your "expert".
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The current US government, some one that has hardly shown any environmentalist credentials, put the polar bear in hte list of threatened species due to the demonstrably reducing of the sea ice that forms their habitat.
There is also plenty of evidence that in at least on third of the known populations there are clear sing of decline, and even anecdotal evidence provided by indigenous people (the spotting of bears in land) may mean not that populations are increasing, but rather that the bears have to stay inland because they can't go anywhere else.
The reduction of sea ice is a fact, not fiction. It is a well known correlation that the destruction of the habitat of species cause species extinction. The polar bear's habitat is the sea ice during the winter, it is simply common sense (which is being slowly being backed up by research findings) that if the bear's environment suffers, the bear is bound to suffer.
This has nothing to do with sensationalist press or rumours, legal procedures are being followed that classifies the bear as a threatened species based on the factual evidence that we have.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
there ARE papers out there already, by reputable scientists, printed by reputable publishers, that establish the (negative) correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature. While I do not have time this morning to look many of them up, here are some comments that I found in about 10 seconds on Google:
"Ancient Observations Link Changes in Sun's Brightness and Earth's Climate" by Kevin D. Pang and Kevin K. Yao; EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Volume 83, number 43, 22 October 2002, pages 481+.
This is an article written for scientists. The authors track 9 cycles of changes in solar brightness over the last 1800 years, and then correlate these with various changes in the Earth's climate. As you undoubtedly know, an especially suspicious correlation is that of a period of no sunspots (and hence low solar activity) corresponding with the Maunder Minimum of ~1645 to 1715 A.D, a period of extreme cold in Europe. Because of the complexity of effects on the Earth's climate, the jury is still out on whether this period of a Little Ice Age was indeed caused by the lack of solar activity. However, the correlations are intriguing and continue to be discussed at scientific meetings such as the AGU. You can find lots more about the Maunder Minimum and its relationship to sunspots on the web.
http://www.cgfi.org/2008/03/01/global-temperatures-have-dropped-did-sunspots-predict-it/
These are just a couple of quickies, and are hardly peer-reviewed articles, however I do not have time to look up more this morning. My point is that if I can find this information within 10 seconds, you can find much more if you take a mere few minutes to look. If you don't bother to look, then don't bother me any more about it.
I was NOT referring to ANY irrigation dams, anywhere. So you have no basis for calling ME a liar! I was referring to a specific case and I even stated that it had nothing to do with irrigation.
Your case may be different. So be it. But I was not referring to your case. So get off my ass about it.
Nor was I referring to any of the other points you make. Except your figure of 99%, which is highly suspect. Where did you get that figure? The number 99%, without any data cited to back it up, makes me suspect that it is simply fabricated.
My laptop is rated at max. Power 45W, when i measured it it was approx 20W in normal operation (although i am not sure about the power adapter efficiency....) .
Does he have any corresponding research regarding Live search or the environmental impact of making all those porn DVDs
davecb5620@gmail.com
Can I tag a story "STFU"? Cause reading a headline like this has about as much environmental impact as my blood boiling. I'm getting so very sick of having to hear about the "environmental impacts" of ridiculous things.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Not at all. Fuel economy for a Boeing or Airbus plane built after 1990 and filled to 75% capacity should be about 60 mpg per person. I wasn't in the mood to do the math, but this article from Boeing implies a 747 built in 2002 and filled to 75% capacity gets better than 80 mpg per person. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/news/feature/mileage.html
"what it doesn't say is that the website--and Wissner-Gross-- directly benefits from this kind of research. C02Stats offers clients plans, ranging from $5 a month to $100"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Its funny how there is so much hype about renewable resources... How about renewable waste? CO2 is 100% renewable. No more absurd than if trees ever got together and sanctioned O2 waste, "We of the united tree council need to reduce our Oxygen footprint to reduce global cooling". Oxygen may not be a greenhouse gas but its far worse! Everything oxygen touches causes it to corrode.
As already pointed out, Google saves the total CO2 cost that would have been produce if Google had not existed. Imagine how much CO2 a search would cost if it where 1972 all over again!
News flash - WATER VAPOR is THE most abundant greenhouse gas on this planet. Without it we would fluctuate our temperatures too drastically near like the moon. Cubic foot per cubic foot 10% humidity or 100% humidity has hundreds more greenhouse power than a cubic foot of pure CO2.
Lastly - it all comes down to "people believe what they want to believe". If you are one of those who subscribe to man-made / CO2-base climate change, you are going down a slippery slope. Why? Because when boiled down to it's essence, conceptually-speaking, you will one day have to subscribe to human curtailment (human numbers are to blame and not just human activity). I'm just waiting for the day when global population-credits are officially advocated by you "believers"...
Except unless it was a private plane, that plane still takes off with or without you guys on it. Now I know if you're not on the plane, you can't attribute that back to your own carbon footprint, just pointing out that the comparison doesn't really hold up as strongly as you believe.
Though I would also have teleconferenced. Seems like a no brainer.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
For every search you don't make, I'm making 3.
.. buy some Google Search Credits?
I mean, I wanna continue living my opulent Google Search intensive life, but I don't want to feel bad about it.
Please, someone sell me some indulgences.
These numbers don't seem reasonable.
We will assume the dirtiest possible generation of electicity: Coal.
Coal runs about 6150 kW-hr thermal per ton. = 6785/tonne (metric ton)
= 6.7 kW-hr per kilogram.
We'll assume 40% plant efficiency. So now we are down to 2.8.
7 grams of carbon dioxide is produced from 1.9 grams of carbon.
1.9 grams of carbon = 12.8 watt hours.
This seems to me to be an unreasonably large amount of energy for a single search.
If we take the search I just ran for the kilowatt hours per ton of coal as typical, it took .3 seconds. At this rate searching requires a power level of 150,000 watts.
There are all kinds of arguments that this time shouldn't be used: Much of that delay is waiting for spinning disks. And who knows how many simultaneous searches are done by that one server.
You can also make the distinction between the differential cost of searching versus the aggregate cost. The first is the carbon cost of an additional search. You could calculate this by dividing the carbon cost of putting a new search server on line and running it by the nubmer of searches per hour it could handle. The second is done by taking Google's total power consumption and dividing it by the total number of searches.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1506&Itemid=59
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
Good God, this is a good post
Any large company or other organization is always an easy target for criticism. If it costs X amount of CO2 to do a search on Google, isn't it likely to cost a similar amount if you do any other kind of web search as well?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
If you are really concerned about your carbon footprint, go get a billion carbon offsets for free!
Yes, I was in a hurry this morning and did indeed miss your references. (I am used to looking under "References", not "Data Sources".)
However, looking at it more thoroughly now, your graphs are anything but straightforward for the lay person to understand, largely from the lack of information on the page.
Above, you cite your temperature data source as
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
but in the Wiki entry, the stated source of temperature data is
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/solanki2004-ssn.txt
which data is originally from Jean Jouzel, from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in France. The former source does not reference the latter in any obvious way. So, which is it?
Similarly, above you cite
http://sidc.oma.be/
as your source for records of sunspot data, but on the Wiki page you cite the Solanki data
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/solanki2004-ssn.txt
and again, the source cited above does not appear to reference the data source you cited in the Wiki article in any obvious way.
I do not see any citation for source of your CO2 data anywhere on the Wiki page, even within "Data Sources". The only two sources are the ones I have just mentioned.
There is a reference to the Mauna Loa data on a different page, linked to by one of the "related images", but that is not the page you originally referenced.
My point being that considering just the information that was presented, as I saw it, even WITH the two sources you referenced, does not exactly prove anything.
Along that line, there is no explanation as to how deuterium data relates to sunspots. Is it a linear relationship? How would a reader know? If so, great, but if not the graph would have little meaning. Nowhere is there any explanation as to the kinds of relationship here.
In any case, I see where there could have been a mistake, pointing me at that page rather than the other one linked to within that page. But under the circumstances, I think it should be pretty obvious why I basically stated "Huh? This doesn't appear to mean anything." And in fact, as given, it didn't.
I am not trying to nitpick here, but the question that was actually under discussion was the opposite: whether the CO2 warming model was adequate to explain the current climate changes. My position, as I clearly stated, was that the "greenhouse gas alarmists" were ignoring other factors and other data that may be just as relevant or even more relevant, sunspot activity among them (not even the only other possible cause... I mentioned that there were others).
In brief, I did not claim that solar activity was the only factor, or that it was adequate to explain the warming. What I claimed was that the CO2 model was INsufficient, and that other important factors such as solar activity were being largely -- and improperly -- ignored.
My position is simply that other factors have been ignored by the run-of-the-mill, everyday "greenhouse gas alarmist"... that is to say, most people who get their distorted facts from the newspaper or television. I was not deriding the scientists at all (except for those who have been thoroughly discredited, who are few). I also have little respect for those who spread the alarm via bad science, like Al Gore.
I have stated as much.
But I was not deriding the basic science or the scientists. Just those who suck up the mainstream view, come hell or high water, and refuse to entertain any other possibilities.