Your Google search is killing Earth
Debate global warming all you want, but no one can argue that CO2 is an extremely toxic pollutant which is very bad for our health. When we think of how CO2 gets into our atmosphere we tend to think of millions of cars whipping down highways or of factories whose smoke stacks spew black, acrid smoke while producing consumer goods. But have you ever thought of Google? Harvard University Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross has calculated that a simple Google search emits 7g of CO2, about half of what is given off when boiling a pot of tea. While 7g of CO2 isn’t an awful lot in the grand scheme of things, considering that Google handles over 200-million searches per day you can forgive us for double checking our calculators when we calculated this out to be 1,400,000kg of CO2 per day or well over 511,000,000kg in a year. Google denies the aforementioned figures and said on its official blog that the actual CO2 emissions per search are more like 0.2g, but that stat is difficult to accept considering how many servers are involved with a single search (you know, that and the fact that Wissner-Gross has a Bachelors in Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from MIT along with a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard). Numbers aside, emissions aren’t a good thing and Google obviously recognizes this having co-founded Climate Savers Computing, a group comprised of the who’s-who of the tech world with the goal of halving its CO2 emissions by 2010; a noble effort indeed.
Ad hominem attacks are no way to win an argument.
“methods are either productive or counterproductive where having a low carbon footprint is concerned.”
Exactly. And this article is COUNTER productive. So is this conversation. Because the emphasis is on consumer behavior rather than corporate resource management. My point, for the third time: you’ll never stop people from searching for information. The only way to lower emissions in this regard would be to create more efficient servers.
I DO happen to understand server load. Probably better than most people. It’s why I don’t buy into these myths that somehow running a server to service millions or billions of searches per day is any less efficient than servicing those requests for knowledge in some other way. One example I gave in farce was actually _driving_ to a library.
If Google were to vanish, demand for information would be only partially be reduced because of convenience. But a vast majority of people would still need to find information one way or another. I still haven’t seen any suggestions for alternatives.
Hopefully you can respond to my argument now, rather than comparing me to a “small child” – as if children are stupid or something. But that’s an argument for another day.
Why do cowards always do their damnedest to redirect the argument away from their own statements … when they’re held accountable? There is no ad hominem “attack” where one does not exist.
Don’t like the taste of your own words? [“The only way searching less would affect emissions would be if everybody did so at the same time”] Don’t employ them. Quite easy, no?
The intellectual capacity of a small child was the comparison, not a small child’s intellect. As the self-annointed neurolinguist, your forthcoming struggle to equate the 2 phrases will be duly ignored.
Idiot.
“Idiot.
”
ad hominem. Will no longer feed the troll.
I love greentards, fighting for invisible issues to give reason to their otherwise meaningless lives, probably as a result of the loss of religion as a primary focus, but let theologists give the analysis there.
You don’t have to create fake goals just to somehow better some invisible problem, but this
“green” crap is a classic example.
It seems more logical to attack primary carbon-emitting objects such as vehicles, airplanes, cars, et. al. rather than trying to carve out a niche in some small area that SHOULD CONTINUE TO EXIST in its current form (and grow!) to help further our technological evolution which is sadly way behind what it should be at right now.
The bottom line is some greentard decided to do this study because it is the only way one can get attention in today’s media. Carve out a niche someone hasn’t attacked yet and lock your claws in.
Seriously, if you’re that worried about your google searches destroying the planet, skip tea for a week and query away!
^In the face of your depraved indifference, your grasping at straws is duly noted.
Figures! The above 2 muckraking, trolling bloggers are firing blanks. One [premature] shot and they’re done.
why do yall talk bout blobal warming nerds!!!!