More alarmist science built on bad facts, with some poor newspaper standards to boot. Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross in The Sunday Times reports that two Google searches use as much energy – and so have as much environmental impact – as boiling a kettle.
This doesn’t sound right and, according to Google, is way off the mark - Wissner-Gross’ figure for a Google search (7g of CO2) was a guess and Google has corrected it to 0.2g a search.
And what is the carbon footprint of a newspaper? Nearly 200g, according to the Carbon Trust. And Wissner-Gross? He’s a founder of CO2Stats, a commercial service that makes your web site carbon neutral. Not very clean on either count.
UPDATE: amusing take on the story from The Register.
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