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.
Wow, i wonder how much my g1 gives off.
Better not start looking at all the other data centers around the world then.
Toxic pollutant? This does not mean what you think that means….
Arguably, sodas can kill but we need focus on real threats.
Have you not investigated the danger of dihydrogen monoxide?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Think of the tragedy of doing a search on volcanoes!
i wonder if the physicist calculated how much CO2 emmission resulted from his discussing of global warming? CO2 has been around for longer than man kind has been on this planet. if it didnt like it, it would have already done something with it. wake up.
AKA water….LOL!!
At least Google is trying to offset the carbon foot print. What’s BG doing? BG goes out and buys a hybrid truck.
I’m gonna start using Cuil for my searches since they’re probably down to one server start using a 14″ lcd.
Yes, CO2 is unbreathable to humans. However, plants LOVE CO2. As a matter of fact, over the past couple of decades, the amount of plant material on Earth has increased by 10%. Those plants are loving us right now.
yep the scintist is politicaly motivated if anyhing tight now the climate cycle is more evident of global cooling 2k8 hs ben recorde as the coldest year ever
It is CO not CO2. CO2 is what we exhale. So in order to reduce this so called global warming we need to stop having humans right? Besides global warming has been made up to 1: Change our view, 2: spend our hard earned money on “green technology”.
Recycling is ok but the rest is just crap.
another brilliant statement by mensa member Galvatron.
This is stupid, how about getting rid of ICE in autos before you attack google.
CO2 is not toxic to humans at low concentrations (currently around 350-400 ppm) and doesn’t become a problem until there are much higher concentrations.
Also, it is simply ridiculous to think that a google search produces 7g of CO2 but the server farms produce nothing when idle. The results simply can’t be expanded to numbers claimed by this blog entry.
If this was such a good thing Google wouldn’t be denying it…I’m more apt to believe the person with the degrees and has actually done his homework on the matter than some CEOs trying to protect a company…I like that they are taking certain steps in the right direction though.
The scientist that did the study also needs grant money from the government, which is why he is sucking up those who worship the global warming gods (i.e. the environmentalists).
Every time a living being (aside from some insects and marine life) on earth exhales, CO2 is released. This has been going on since life started here. Google is millions of years late to the CO2 game.
Have you seen the roof of Google? All solar panels. I bet a weeks worth of searching is less pollution than what a airplane emits on a flight from DC to NYC
yep politicaly motivated. he gets more fear mongering defacto findings to get his grant money
what waste of grey matter
The second I read this I did ad many google searches as possible.
I can argue that CO2 is not an extremely toxic pollutant which is very bad for our health, just in normal amounts. Sure, large amounts of CO2 are bad for you, but so are large amounts of almost everything including Water and O2. Try not to make things more sensational than they need to be.
@ The Outlaw: I suggest you take climatology class. Global warming in most certainly not made up. Global warming and cooling are actually normal processes that the earth goes through every few million years in order to maintain its natural balance. Unfortunately, the process is occurring more rapidly than it should due to increased levels of pollutants in the atmosphere. While I agree that the government and various corporations are cashing in on what is actually supposed to be happening, as dictated by nature itself, I think you should educate yourself about the matter a little more before calling it made up.
What?!? Am I reading this correctly??? “no one can argue that CO2 is an extremely toxic pollutant which is very bad for our health.” CO2 is most definitely used by plant life to produce…O2 aka the stuff we which is very good for our health. Hopefully you meant CO which, yes it is bad for us, yet has an almost negligibe effect on global warming when compared to water vapour. The only people that die from CO poisoning are the people that commit suicide and lock themselves in their garage with their car running.
@Esquire0399: I may not be a climatologist however I am a mathematician. I follow the rules of logic. I think what Outlaw and all the people that are saying global warming is made up(I happen to agree) is not that it’s not occuring, it’s been occuring forever. It’s that the sensational reporting that global warming is going to affect our children’s children is made up. If that was the case then when global warming was happening centuries ago(whenever the cycle dictated) we should subscribe to the same theory of ‘ affecting our children’s children’ thus we shouldn’t be alive. I think that’s what we mean or at least what I mean when I say it’s made up.
The earth’s temperature changes. Nature adapts, the weak die…the able live. /waves hand nothing to see here people, move along!
This whole conversation is moot. I am not a scientist, but from the very first liner of the article, I believe you meant CO. Not Co2.
Not to attack the poster again. I just wish reporters would do a little more research instead of just reading an article. Try to put things into context.
For example this gem, “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.”
Let’s pretend this is true. Putting it into perspective, the atmosphere is 5 x 10^18kg in mass. So the figure of 511,000,000kg per year is ~5 x 10^8kg per year. That’s 1 tenth billionth of the mass of the earth’s atmosphere!!! ZOMG! Talk about a needle in a haystack but hey when a butterfly flaps it’s wings yadda yadda yadda so you never know :p
@Dre a whole bunch more people die from accidental CO exposure than the ones that lock themselves in a garage with a car running.
That’s right, Dre. By all means, completely ignore the man-made exacerbated contribution to what has historically occurred over 600M years through the Industrial age.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e0/Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png/280px-Greenhouse_Gas_by_Sector.png
Like the taste of sand, ostrich?
That whole ‘Black Hole’-thingy was just another extremist agenda to manipulate world-powers also.
@eatmedic You’re right, I do a disservice to all those people that die from CO poisoning in fires and gas leaks. I guess I was being sensationalist trying to grab attention
However the point I was trying to get across was that very few(I hate to say no one, to restrictive) people die from CO poisoning because it’s being poured into the earth’s atmosphere from google/cars/industrial plants. They die because they’re in an ‘enclosed’ area inhaling this toxic gas. Better?(no sarcasm there, I know it’s hard to detect tone on the internet. I really am asking if my statement is correct eatmedic
)
I’m not going to contribute to any of the arguments posted here, but I will say that the ignorance of this line:
“no one can argue that CO2 is an extremely toxic pollutant which is very bad for our health”
has made me decide to remove you from my daily reading. –(BGR rss subscribers);