Metro News reports on an unreleased study that links web use and global warming.Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross studied the environmental impact of internet use, and found that about 20 milligrams of CO2 are released into the atmosphere for every second that an average website is viewed. That includes the energy used both on the surfer and hoster's end.
“At an individual surfer scale, the impact is not that large — about 50 per cent larger than a human exhaling,” Wissner-Gross said recently. “But in aggregate, for websites that get a lot of traffic, it can be substantial and it can be thousands of pounds of CO2 per month.”
His report has generated a lot of talk, most notably from Google after a British newspaper singled out the search engine giant as a key offender, mainly because it directs individuals to multiple servers simultaneously to generate speedier responses.
Google responded with the claim that it would take more than 1,000 queries on its search engine to equal the greenhouse gas emissions generated by an average car driving one kilometre.
Sounds innocent enough...but judging by the number of Google searches (according to Search Engine Watch), that's 91,000 kilometres a day!
Editors note: Thanks to Jimmy Guy for passing this along.
