Google pollutes
Quote: Executives at Google have been quick to respond to the claims that surfaced this weekend about the harm the search engine does to the environment. According to a physicist, Alex Wissner-Gross, a single Google search produces 7 grams of carbon dioxide - the "greenhouse gas".
Not so, says Google, it's merely 0.2 grams. For a company that rarely comments on any attacks it receives, this almost instant response is revealing. Indeed, it is probably more revealing than the search engine's quest for the truth and their famous "do no evil" claim. Whilst they may be right that the estimates from Wissner-Gross are ludicrously high, Google omits to tell us that it responds to over 1m searches every minute. That means that every day searches on Google produce 288,000Kg of carbon dioxide. Phew...! That's equivalent to each of us flying from London to Google's Californian HQ 137 times a day. All in all, then, Google is probably polluting the atmosphere as much as 1 flight a day does from London to San Francisco - assuming there's an average of 137 people on board each flight. Still trying to figure out the math in the 2 last paragraphs and still waiting for my boarding pass. |
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| I did the math, and that's about correct. In round numbers, the plane would burn about 26,000 pounds of jet fuel, and there's about 21 pounds of CO2 released for each pound burned.
The surface of the earth is approximately 500,000,000 square kilometers. Converting square kilometers to square inches yields about 7.8 x 10**17 , or about 780,000,000,000,000,000 square inches. The weight of the atmosphere is about 15 pounds per square inch, giving about 11,700,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of atmosphere. Just for the ease of the math, let's assume we added 1,000,000 pounds of CO2 instead of about 600,000 pounds. That means the flight added 1/11,700,000,000,000th or 1 eleven-point-seven billionth of 1 percent of the atmosphere in carbon dioxide. Then the trees and the oceans absorb about 95% of it, and every time someone buries some trash into a landfill that re-sequesters a bunch of it. If you want to calculate what that number is in terms of percentage of atmospheric CO2, just divide the 11,700,000,000,000 by a little under 3,000, or about 1/3,900,000,000th or 1 three-point-nine millionth of 1 percent. The actual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is approximately 385 parts per million, up from 377 5 years ago. According to http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ The increase last year in CO2 was the lowest increase since 2000. How could that be? Over the previous 8 years, rain forests are still being cut down, use of fossil fuels was higher than ever, (Especially in China (who now produces MORE greenhouse gasses than the US!,) having more than doubled their economy from 8 years ago). That alone would be an approximately 12% increase in global output of CO2. How can that possibly be? In fact in the late 1977 and 1988 there were 6 years that saw more growth in CO2 parts per million of atmosphere than last year. How can that possibly be? Because the planet is cooling slightly, and has been for somewhere around a decade at this point. Surprised? Some say that carbon dioxide levels follow temperature not the other way around. Some say the cooler the oceans get, the more carbon dioxide they absorb. (Notice when you open a WARM soda how fast the carbon dioxide gas escapes the liquid compared to when it's really cold?) Over the previous 30 years, the ocean temperatures have been in a warm phase, and CO2 has been going up rapidly. In the last 8 or 10 years or so, the ocean temps have started to cool a bit, and we see that the oceans are now taking up more carbon dioxide. Sooooo, Google away!  |
| Thank you Ron, Google and I are good friends for example:
Quote: It's time to pray for global warming, says Flint Journal columnist John Tomlinson. From his latest article... http://my.auburnjournal.com/detail/103704.html--- Article Body --- If you're wondering why North America is starting to resemble nuclear winter, then you missed the news. At December's U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan, Poland, 650 of the world's top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?" I asked myself, why would such obviously smart guy say such a ridiculous thing? But it turns out he's right. The earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since; it dropped dramatically in 2007 and got worse in 2008, when temperatures touched 1980 levels. Meanwhile, the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center released conclusive satellite photos showing that Arctic ice is back to 1979 levels. What's more, measurements of Antarctic ice now show that its accumulation is up 5 percent since 1980. In other words, during what was supposed to be massive global warming, the biggest chunks of ice on earth grew larger. Just as an aside, do you remember when the hole in the ozone layer was going to melt Antarctica? But don't worry, we're safe now, that was the nineties. Dr. Kunihiko, Chancellor of Japan's Institute of Science and Technology said this: "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other ... every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so." Now why would a learned man say such a crazy thing? This is where the looney left gets lost. Their mantra is atmospheric CO2 levels are escalating and this is unquestionably causing earth's temperature rise. But ask yourself -- if global temperatures are experiencing the biggest sustained drop in decades, while CO2 levels continue to rise -- how can it be true? Ironically, in spite of being shown false, we must now pray for it. Because a massive study, just released by the Russian Government, contains overwhelming evidence that earth is on the verge of another Ice Age. Based on core samples from Russia's Vostok Station in Antarctica, we now know earth's atmosphere and temperature for the last 420,000 years. This evidence suggests that the 12,000 years of warmth we call the Holocene period is over. Apparently, we're headed into an ice age of about 100,000 years -- give or take. As for CO2 levels, core samples show conclusively they follow the earth's temperature rise, not lead it. It turns out CO2 fluctuations follow the change in sea temperature. As water temperatures rise, oceans release additional dissolved CO2 -- like opening a warm brewsky. To think, early last year, liberals suggested we spend 45 trillion dollars and give up five million jobs to fix global warming. But there is good news: now that we don't have to spend any of that money, we can give it all to the banks. |
| Well, I think they are a little more certain of the situation than I am. I have spent a LOT of time reading and researching about climate change. While clear and solid physics show that CO2 definitely will retard some heat from leaving Earth I think it is totally unclear as to what affect if any will come of it.
The greenhouse effect and its associated imagery is a misnomer -- a greenhouse does not prevent heat from radiating away like some sort of blanket over the air in the greenhouse; a greenhouse works by preventing convection -- it traps the air inside the greenhouse and prevents the warmed air from blowing away. The physics of CO2 "forcing" (the term for something to affect the temperature) are based on heat radiation. The CO2 molecule absorbs the heat, and then re-radiates it. But it is believed it re-radiates randomly in all directions, so instead of that bit of heat energy radiating away from the planet, it is intercepted and 50% of the time it radiates back towards Earth. This is the way the climate models look at CO2 forcing. What they don't take into account is convection. We all know that warm air rises, and we all know that the atmosphere is more dense closer to the ground. As heat radiates away from the surface of the Earth and is captured in the atmosphere, the heat is then conveyed by its water vapor molecule or CO2 molecule, or whatever molecule has it trapped at the moment) by process of convection higher up into the atmosphere, bypassing a lot of that CO2. And water vapor, and methane and any of the other so-called Green House Gases. They also don't, believe it or not, take clouds into account in the model. They claim it is because they are not well understood. I believe them when they say that. Clouds may or may not behave differently with more CO2 forcing going on... hot air may rise a little faster causing more clouds or less clouds of one type or another at higher or lower altitudes. All of those variables just in clouds are not understood. Whether the increased reflectivity of the clouds will lower the temps, or will the cloud cover (water vapor and or crystals) trap some of the heat. Will it rain more, bringing cold water down displacing hot air upwards. Unknown. This is just the beginning of the discussion of different aspects of climate change science, there's much more. Suffice to say that I believe that our computer climate models are not yet capable of the complex task of global weather. They just aren't. BUT, this does not mean I am for the burning of fossil fuels or against alternative power sources. Burning fossil fuels is dirty and pollutes in other ways. I am also very sad that in this stimulus package only a tiny amount will be spent on solar energy. With $100 billion we could make a huge inroad into reducing our reliance on coal and imported oil. For $500 billion we could have built a majority of the systems for solar collection and electricity distribution across the US. I fear that if we don't do it now, we never will.  |
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