Google, pots and kettles

Ben Gladstone — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:28:06 +0000

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.

At Conosco, our IT support service offers virtual servers – so your applications use far less energy.

Posted in Technology Tagged: ecology, google

Effortless computing » ecology

Google, pots and kettles