There’s long been a suspicion that the entire CO2 imbroglio is but a pretext to take control of the world’s economy and dictate the terms of our continued existence. The CO2 cultists are most certainly collectivists and one wonders whether they also cultivate a dislike for the human race itself. For them, there are only the guilty and the innocent. And the human race – in all of its individualistic untidiness – is presumed guilty.
And some very well-to-do people – with their businesses – have allied themselves with the cult to curry favor and avoid suspicion and scrutiny. Wealthy syncophants can be found in every such ‘revolution’. And there can be no better example than Google, which bills itself as being in the vanguard of innocence and purity, dealing in enlightenment and enlightened attitudes with no environmental impact. But sooner or later, the innocent get around to judging the guilty. And the verdict on Google is in – guilty. From the Sunday Times of London:
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
Google can protest its innocence, but to no avail:
Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.
It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.
Wissner-Gross has submitted his research for publication by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has also set up a website www.CO2stats.com. “Google are very efficient but their primary concern is to make searches fast and that means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns energy,” he said.
And there we have it. No matter how efficient they are, their sin is to make their searches fast.
When will this insanity end?
