Is “Don’t Be Evil” Google in fact a sinister pollution-spewing machine? A Sunday Times article cited new research by Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, claiming that every Google search emits 7 grams of CO2, about half the amount released from boiling a kettle of water (15 grams). It portrays Google as “secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint” and refusing to “divulge” the locations of its power-sucking data centers.
There’s more:
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.
The article also implicates other online activities, like Twittering or maintaining an avatar in Second Life (by one estimate, that avatar uses almost as much electricity as the average citizen of Brazil).
Google promptly put out a response on their blog challenging Wissner-Gross’ claims and touting the company’s green credentials. Each search emits a mere 0.2 grams of CO2, says Google. Besides, isn’t online searching greener than driving to the library?
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Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds hover at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, at altitudes of 76 to 85 km. They’re so high up that they reflect the sun even at night, producing an electric-blue glow. Now some scientists say these high-flying clouds may come with a metal lining – not made of silver, but of sodium and iron.
For the last two years, the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite mission has been studying noctilucent clouds, also known as polar mesospheric clouds. A curious property of these clouds is that they reflect radar, which scientists thought might be due to charged particles in the clouds. But new mathematical calculations published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres by Paul Bellan, a physicist at Caltech, suggests the reflections could be due to a thin layer of metal coating the clouds.
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NASA researchers have released 90 rubber ducks into the Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier—the same glacier that may have sunk the Titanic a century ago—in an attempt to understand why glaciers move faster in the summer and why sea levels change.
Because the Jakobshavn Glacier is known to discharge as much as seven percent of Greenland’s melting icesheets, NASA researchers are specifically interested in knowing how the meltwater moves through the glacier. While they can clearly see how the icebergs fall into the ocean, it’s impossible to see exactly how the water flows. In theory, as the sun warms the ice in the summer, the top layer of the glacier melts and flows through a hole in the glacier until it reaches the other side. As such, the researchers suspect the rubber ducks will end up in the surrounding water in Baffin Bay.
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Over the weekend United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that whichever candidate becomes the next U.S. President this coming January needs to start from day one leading the world on confronting global warming. But that’s not enough for some members of Britain’s esteemed Royal Society, who in a collection of papers published this week called for major steps in geoengineering to fight climate change.
Perhaps you’ve heard of some of the wilder ideas for fighting global warming: seeding the ocean with iron to make it grow phytoplankton which will absorb carbon dioxide, or launching a Greenland-sized, Montgomery Burns-inspired deflector shield (or many trillion tiny ones) to block some of the sun’s rays. Cockamamie schemes or not, the Royal Society scientists say that because governments have done so little to curb greenhouse emissions, any possible method to fight global warming should be on the table because doing something is better than doing nothing.
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Environmentalists have been all over Japan’s “scientific” whaling for years, with some organizations saying the program is unnecessary or little more than commercial whale hunting in disguise. But now Japanese scientists have published new research in Popular Polar Biology, and their findings aren’t good: whales are getting skinnier, and global warming might be at fault.
The scientists measured the amount of blubber in minke whales captured since the 1980s and found that the level has dropped off precipitously since then. Why are they pointing the finger at global warming? Because krill, the tiny crustacean at the base of the food chain, have declined in Antarctic areas by 80 percent since the 1970s. Part of the problem is warming waters, but over-fishing for krill to use at fish farms and the ozone layer hole have contributed to the drop as well.
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Global warming could bring a strange assortment of winners and losers. Greenland could be a winner, The New York Times says, as melting glaciers free up land once buried under ice. Northern Japan, on the other hand, might be a loser, and not just because rising seas may start to reclaim the islands.
Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, has both an ecosystem and an economy that depend on Arctic ice floating down from the Sea of Okhotsk at the eastern edge of Russia. The drift ice brings nutrients that feed phytoplankton, which form the base of the area’s ecosystem. And tourists flock there for the chance to stand on an Arctic iceberg.
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·Are electric cars so quiet they can sneak up on pedestrians?
·Show us the money: Music label threatens to stop licensing songs to Rock Band and Guitar Hero unless they get more cash.
·Global warming comes to your living room—you can buy a stranded polar bear on a rug.
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If you can’t laugh about the federal government’s repeated attempts to muzzle scientists whose findings don’t jibe with the administration’s political agenda…well, what can you laugh about?
The Union of Concerned Scientists decided to fight hubris with humor by launching the Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest this spring. The voting is open, and this is the last week to pick your favorite—all voting ends on Friday. The final 12 entries are pretty good—we have our favorites here at DISCOVER, but we don’t want to sway the polling.
“Science Idol,” as the contest has been nicknamed, may not attract the national attention of its television namesake. But perhaps dealing with government interference with science with humor will open a few more eyes—or at least we’ll get a good laugh out of it.
Image: iStockphoto
It seems like a fairly simple calculation—trees absorb carbon dioxide, so fighting forest fires and thereby saving trees helps to combat global warming. But University of California, Irvine researcher Michael Goulden says that fighting fires may have actually decreased the amount of carbon stored by some of the forests in the Western United States.
Measuring 1990s forest data against readings taken in the same areas in the 1930s, Goulden found that, altogether, the forests contained about 4 percent more trees per hectare in the 1990s than they had 60 years before. But despite that increase in the density of trees, which Goulden credited to government policies of fire suppression, those trees stored 34 percent less carbon in the 1990s.
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Need to orchestrate a media stunt to gather attention for your cause? Here’s what others have tried:
1. Glue yourself to the prime minister. On the positive side, it’s sure to get plenty of press coverage, like 24-year-old Dan Glass garnered today after slathering his left hand in adhesive and trying to glue himself to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. (Glass was protesting a potential expansion of Heathrow Airport.) On the negative side, even Super Glue takes a moment to dry, and Brown was able to wrest himself free of Glass’s gooey grip. Glass later tried to glue himself to the gates of 10 Downing Street, and that didn’t work, either.
2. Try to bring sex dolls into the Philippines. Speaking of failure, this is a surefire recipe. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals tried it in December; their intention was to protest Kentucky Fried Chicken by putting the dolls under a banner reading “KFC Blows.” Only one thing stood in their way: Filipino customs officials confiscated their dolls.
3. Dress up. The Arctic Front sends out volunteers in polar bear costumes to protest oil drilling in Canada. They even have their own Facebook page and photo gallery.
4. Dress down. Upset at the number of trees felled to make Victoria’s Secret catalogs, ForestEthics protesters showed up at the company’s cross-country tour in 2004 wearing angel wings, lingerie, and wielding chainsaws.
5. Don’t bother dressing at all. Hundreds of nude cyclists rolled around the U.K. and mainland Europe last summer to promote biking as an eco-friendly form of transportation. Presumably they had no trouble staying cool, but what about the chafing?
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