Update: See below for an explanation as to how this happened.
Yesterday an article in The Sunday Times (UK) set the web abuzz over new findings that every Google search contributed 7 grams of CO2 to the atmosphere – half the amount produced when heating a tea kettle (heaven forbid!). I criticized the article for being overly alarmist, with a lack of perspective and possible bias. Google also responded, effectively denouncing the claim.
At the heart of the story was a young physicist named Alex Wissner-Gross, who, according to the article, says “that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea”. This sentence alone was enough to rile up reporters around the globe, and has now been repeated in hundreds of articles worldwide.
Unfortunately, according to Wissner-Gross he never said anything of the sort (or not, see below). For starters, he says he would never refer to any sort of measurement having to do with tea (he’d go with coffee). But his findings have nothing to do with Google as a company, either – they’re concerned with much more generalized stats, like your computer’s rate of CO2 production when you look at a webpage.
Wissner-Gross says that the widely circulated 7 gram/search figure came from some other source (he’s not sure where), and notes that if you read the article carefully it only makes it sound like it’s from his data. He has confirmed that he did make some vague statements regarding Google, including “A Google search has a definite environmental impact” and “Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power”. But the “tea kettle” statistic that has been repeated ad nauseum simply isn’t his. After learning of the misleading story, Wissner-Gross says that he contacted The Times and was assured that it would be fixed by Sunday morning. No corrections have been made.
Another concern I had with The Times article was that it neglected to accurately describe Wissner-Gross’s company, CO2Stats. The startup allows companies to purchase renewable energy to neutralize their website’s environmental impact and get “Green Certified” badges to display on their homepages. Because of this potential conflict of interest, Wissner-Gross’s affiliation with the company should have been described in the article, but was only mentioned in passing. Again, it seems like The Times was at fault here, as Wissner-Gross says that he described the purpose of CO2Stats and his role there in detail, though it seems to have been largely ignored by the reporters in question.
He may have been misquoted, but Wissner-Gross hasn’t failed to capitalize on the article – he’s spent the majority of the day conducting interviews with news publications as well as radio and television shows, and CO2Stats will likely see a boost (as will the Green IT movement in general).
This isn’t the first time in recent memory that The Times has been mistaken about a tech story – in late November the newspaper incorrectly reported on a complicated and fictional Yahoo/Microsoft search arrangement.
Update
Jonathan Leake, the Science & Environment Editor at the Sunday Times (UK), has taken umbrage with my choice of words. The Sunday Times did not “make up” the CO2 statistic, he says. Instead, it looks like it came from this obscure blog post, though Leake says that he was under the impression that it came from original research conducted by physicist Alex Wissner-Gross.
An editorial piece Wissner-Gross wrote to accompany the widely-spread ‘Tea kettle’ article contains the passage “based on publicly available information, we have calculated that each Google search generates an estimated 5-10 g of CO2″, which seems to indicate that the statistic came from his research.
However, Wissner-Gross denies that he offered the “5-10 g” figure as his own. In the draft he submitted to the Times, he referred only to “publicly available information”, not to his calculations. Leake has confirmed that the wording was changed during editing, but insists that Wissner-Gross claimed the statistic as one of his own findings during a phone conversation.
So where exactly did these figures come from if not from new research? Wissner-Gross says he searched the web for some publicly available information about Google until he came across a blog post written in 2007 on Rolf Kersten’s Weblog. The post estimates that one Google search equates to 6.8 grams of CO2 emissions, which is apparently where this oft-repeated statistic originated. But even if Wissner-Gross is telling the truth and he never misrepresented the origin of the data, he used a blog that could hardly be considered a reputable scientific source (no offense, Mr. Kersten) to write his article.
Better you learn now about what the times has become then to never know. This is no surprise to many.
Well there goes the credibility of the 5th estate.
Sometimes you have got to be so creative ‘with luck of course’ to get publicity, why spend a bunch of $$$$, huh…”Wissner-Gross”…is he being smart?
Think about it:
Problem #1 Newspapers have a tough game to fight to survive
Problem #2 People are very busy trying to survive in these tough times.
Why waste precious time with these “made up” stories (creating a bigger Problem #2) ultimately risking their own survival (creating a bigger problem #1)
Best,
Raj
And how many megatons of CO2 does a badly researched article that gets re-posted all over the desperate press without any second thought and read by billions of clueless news believers add to the atmosphere ?
Whoever can do the math – and show that it’s correct – gets a free iPod Touch* 16GB from me personally!
The (enviro) search monster.
PS Sorry Google if you’d have a cool android device (web tablet anyone?) like this I’d make that the price.
* Only one winner and one price . If multiple submitted, first submission wins, if in doubt who was first we’ll do a draw. Paly it fair.
My reply is too long to post here (2 pages), but I tried my hand and I sourced everything. Here is a link to my findings on docstoc.
http://www.docs...unday-Times-CO2
Michael, Thanks for all the work.
DM me your E-mail so we can get in touch @peterurban
Michael, Thanks for the work you’ve put in to give us an idea on the CO2 cost of the times article. You’re clearly the winner of my challenge. So Congrats to the new iPod Touch 16 !!!
DM me your E-mail so we can arrange shipping.
twitter @peterurban
hey I tried to but I can’t send dm without you following me.
Of course, I forgot about that
. What’s your twitter name so I can follow you?
p
@anemene
lol cant believe you guys didnt even attack the times for all the fake hype, i hate people who stone other companies about the environment, yet dont talk about their own CO2
>>>
>>>
SO HOW MUCH CO2 DOES PRINTING A PAPER IN HUGE INDUSTRIAL PRESSES AND THEN TRANSPORTATION OF IT AROUND THE WORLD TAKE??
sure saving the environment is good, but the big guys have always done this, get behind a just cause and then exploit it to make it lucrative, its fear mongering and pretty soon every activity we take will be taxed on a global level, how do you guys know the carbon offsetting companies (the big$$$ corp type ones) how do you know those arent just keeping the money a bunch of tinfoil hat crazies willingly pay, watch for it soon because theres big big money and interests behind all this, even if the articles proven wrong, it made its damage and can now be cited “from a credible publication and credible scientist”, thats outright slander i would sue if i where google just to prove a point
Whow, you’ve got a bit of a long sentence there but I think I understand your point (despite my limited English skills). Well check Michaels answer to my challenge to ‘prove’ your point http://www.docs...30;..-Times-CO2
Wow. So the scientist’s views were not only hyped and distorted by the Times, he has a conflict of interest as well. A two-fer.
But of course this didn’t stop all the knee-jerk earth-savers from handwringing.
So, how much energy does it take to do a google search? Maybe not as much as to boil half a kettle of water, but as much as what?
As much as to… start your car? Produce a square foot of tinfoil?
It uses energy to do much of anything nowadays. that’s for sure.
I read in another article that it was not 7 grams of CO2, but 0.2 grams that is produced by a Google Search, and it would take a thousand searches to equate an average car driving a kilometer.
*searches for article*
http://www.info...subSection=News
I would guess the actual figure is somewhere between what Google claim and what The Times came out with.
Remember, it’s not just power to the servers you need to consider, it’s lighting and air conditioning for the datacenters, the initial manufacture of the hardware, light, heat and transport for the engineers that developed the search algorithms, etc. as well as all the routers between you and Google servers.
That gets watered down a lot because of the sheer volume of Google searches, but it all needs to be added into the equation.
And don’t forget overhead. Like the Google Jet!
Those of us who smelt the stink from miles away knew there was something terribly wrong with the Times of London article.
The fact that the said “scientist” also sells this “Enron-like” bogus product is a separate issue. But, coming back to the original “news report” (if you can call it that), the whole sorry episode trivializes the complex issues of global warming and climate changes, and basically gives the most serious industrial polluters an excuse to say, “Hey, we’re not worse than Google!”
Sigh.
One problem is that everything we do requires energy, the bigger problem is that we still quire that energy from sources that leave a carbon footprint. If we don’t want to go back to the caves we need to address the second problem instead of just focusing on saving energy (which is also important of course).
Do you know how much CO2 is emitted by your Blog or Website.
You can calculate the CO2 emission from any website or blog using CO2 Stats
http://www.abou...log-or-website/
Regards
CHRIS MARTIN
The headline on the piece is indeed misleading, but the full article makes it clear that the figure of 7g of carbon dioxide per search comes from two completely different sources. Here’s the paragraph:
“A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour of CO2, he says. Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).”
So it wasn’t about Google in particular, but just running your computer in general? Sounds like they arbitrarily used a Google Search as an example and any hubub about Google efficiency is irrelevant. Fascinating.
“The carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use” makes me think we should be taking a closer look at computer manufacturers, not Google.
Typical misleading news report from the media of the Old world.
http://spraveen...o.blogspot.com/
Heres a great video explaining where this battle between the NY Times and Google is going:
http://www.adri...dia-revolution/
FYI, the “Times” mentioned is the Times of London NOT the NY Times. They are two completely different companies and the NYTimes, while not perfect, is a significantly better news source than the Times of London, which is owned by News Corp. The same folks who bring you Fox News…
Crikey Australia was the first media outlet to “out” the beat-up:
http://www.crik...-footprint.html
What’s the old saying? Something along the lines of ‘I don’t care what they say about me in the newspapers, so long as they spell my name right’. Good to hear his spinning this into some attention for himself and his cause.
Jason,
I don’t like the self-admiring tone of this article. I don’t think you should get a cookie. You didn’t accomplish anything. You’re part of the reason this erroneous story made it to the major news services to begin with. Digg was the other reason.
Sun just acquired Q-layer, why hasn’t that graced the pages of TC ???
http://www.sun.....20090107.1.xml
You could not be more wrong:
http://www.tech...ting-offerings/
5 days ago…
I am shocked — shocked — that the New York Times would exaggerate and distort the facts in order to advance their left-wing agenda. Shocked!
The Times of London.
This BS still stinks. I don’t believe Alex Wissner-Gross’ latest story. I think the article as written in the Times was intentional anti-Google propaganda. Bought and paid for. And Alex Wissner-Gross knows it.
IMO, The Times (of London) is a poor excuse for a newspaper. Unfortunately for readers in the USA I expect that you will soon become familiar with this as News International, the parent company of The Times, now owns the WSJ and is looking for “synergies”.
Is this PR or what?
I have no doubt that both NYT and CO2stats will leverage on this opportunity. I am not sure whether this misrepresentation of data is by mistake or its is being done consciously. However, it is for sure that any news item revolving around Google will be discussed and will get you some mileage.
Guys, use Google to make your marketing! Good example of PR on web.
it’s the London Times you dumbass, read the goddam content, if you can in fact read!!
This latest twist also doesn’t quite ring true to me.
While the original figures are possibly overblown as some noted, Google’s own figures could do with a little hard probing rather than just taking them as gospel.
They note that their system consumes 0.0003 kWh per search. If you take c 200m searches / day as a 2008 mean, at that rate you get c 60,000 kWh per day, or 21.9m kWh per annum. Given that the average UK citizen consumes in the order of 8,000 kWh per annum all in, that is in theory about 2,700 UK citizens worth – ie according to Google’s data, they should consume about the equivalent amount of power annually as a typical village for all Search needs.
However, Google’s infrastructure is nothing like village sized – Google themselves have indicated their power requirements are something like half that of a city like San Francisco (pop 800,000).
So something is not quite adding up.
And funnily enough, if you take the original and much berated Times / Wissner-Gross estimates of c 1/2 a kettle boil (c 0.05 kWh) per search, and run the above numbers through it, you wind up with Google needing the energy of a city of about 450,000 people.
So, if Google ain’t burning that energy in search, what exactly are they burning 99% of their energy on?
I doubt this Alex WG’s account. Times reporter has him on tape for sure so the truth will come out and we’ll find out that just as suspected, WG is full of it.
Nigel Lupton commented: “IMO, The Times (of London) is a poor excuse for a newspaper. Unfortunately for readers in the USA I expect that you will soon become familiar with this as News International, the parent company of The Times, now owns the WSJ and is looking for “synergies”.
The Wall Street Journal-now owned by Rupert Murdock. Now I’m even more certain that this is intentional Anti-Google propaganda.
The goal is control of the internet/control of information.
Murdock/WSJ+Fox+Microsoft/Dell vs Google/Apple.
Apple has been the main target in the past few years, but now it’s Google.
Mainstream media always botches/distorts/exaggerates science. Nothing new. This doesn’t really ruin the credibility of news organizations for me.
It’s really great to see a newspaper start to think about green issues. Perhaps the Time will go further and consider all the trees that they’re destroying by printing on paper – or if they use “recycled” paper – they can consider all of the energy they are consuming in recycling those dead trees. Then perhaps they can think about all the energy used to distribute the papers to all the newsagents and stores etc… and then all the energy that’s used when folks drive down to the newsagent to pick up the paper…. and finally – when you’ve finished the paper… all the effort that goes into cleaning up the papers from the rubbish bins….. hmmmmm….
I am shocked, I thought that if it was on the Internet then it had to be true…
Lesson learned:
Hoaxes get attention fro media
Requirements for a hoax:
- A respected source
- Familiar brand name
- A big impact in society
Now how can we get our service related to a hoax (without getting torn apart by law suits)?
I boiled a kettle while I was reading this page.
First, The Sunday Times is a Murdoch paper. So from the exposure in the US to Fox News – we shouldn’t really be surprised that this story appears to be a bit freed of the facts.
Second, the pedant in me believes that it’s the Sunday Times not the Times of London or even the Sunday Times of London that published this story. They have a digitized archive going back to 1785 – http://cli.gs/m5jtAy
Im tellin ya dude, one day Google is going to rule the world!
http://www.privacy-web.us.tc
There’s been some buzz that Google has been looking into Sun Microsystems Niagara line of Servers. T-2000, etc.
These have a lot of processing power while using less energy. Especially for multi threaded applications, such as the Java applications that Google uses for many of it’s services.
Real or true story, I wonder if the whole Green movement gets them to put these into production.
Aah, that’s given me a warm fuzzy glow. I work in search engine optimisation so obviously as soon as the ’story’ broke it was circulated around the office to credulous gasps and whispers of “ooh, aren’t Google evil?”. I was the only person who bothered to point out that they didn’t seem to directly quote the guy and that, if you stopped to think for just a second, the figures made no kind of sense whatsoever. As I have long said it should be made a legal requirement that any science-related story in the news media be reported on by a journalist with a relevant degree in science. Blatant lying like the kind the Times tried to get away with should be met with stiff penalties.
In a couple of years all Googleplexs’ will be covered in a thick black cloud of soot, circa Pittsburg 1965.
Made in Switzerland:
http://www.phys...s144946345.html
http://www.romandie.com
IMO it’s very VERY clever
Dan
Even if the 7g where not the BS it is, this sort of stuff just takes folks eye off the ball – based on the US EPA, burning a gallon of gas generates 8788 grams of CO2 (http://www.epa....e/420f05001.htm). Find a way to save couple gallons of gas or heating oil a year, and you can feel fine about hitting google all you like, even if you buy the notion that a search takes 15 cpu minutes to process…. Got to keep perspective on this stuff.
Hum….. makes you wonder how much other BS you have taken as the gospel about global warming!
There are couple of points to be made here:
Every click in viewing web pages and surfing the web contributes x grams of CO2. The hours you spent on social networking sites, chatting useless nonsense are contributing to the CO2. Therefore please limit your surfing. Also, all the electronic devices, blackberries connecting people also contribute to the CO2. So think before you surf the web or check you emails every second.
Great to see a bullshit story debunked so quickly by this and other websites, I guess because it’s tech related.
Shame that the same can’t be said for most of the other made-up ’science’ stories we get in the major press. Ben Goldacre at http://www.badscience.net/ is putting up a splendid fight however – well worth a read.
go figure the press is just showing how irresponsible it is again just to sell papers. so much for ethics. mention press and you might as well pick up and enquirer.
great! now I can keep on Googling without worrying too much about the impact it has.
And that article created so much movement and blogging, it’s impressive… way to make a media splash.
Utter utter nonsense. Yet again the general public is having its time wasted by pathetic reports from so called broadsheets. Its about time that these papers gave its readers some credit and ceased treating everyone like idiots, and instead switched to reporting news rather than creating news in order to sell paper.
And now the Google Carbon footprint. Papers want their power back.
Main stream media has lost just about as much money as they can stand to the internet. Look for our whole entire industry to come under attack. Enovation was good, but it was not good for the Main Stream media
You’re right, they’ve lost the 3rd Media revolution. Earlier today I blogged about what a blessing the credit crunch really is when it comes to old media (Credit Crunch speeds new media revolution ):
Traditional newspaper have stayed traditional. Most of the people working at newspapers are old timers, senior reporters and editors who have grown up with the traditional printing press and have switched to digital offset without really changing their process. Currently I see a lot of traditional publishers in the Netherlands clinging on to their outdated ways, trying to get a little bite of the mobile news market and a little bite of the online marketing chunk without wanting to change their own ways. This is lack of innovation.
The credit crunch might be a blessing to shake that old tree (and save a rainforest in the proces) and force the old newspaper industry to innovate. The world of news and information has changed with the arrivel of web 2.0, called the social web, or conversational web by others. The most heard argument in this case is that bloggers are not trained journalists and are living the fastlane without time to do thorough research and taking time to write indepth stories. Well, there are a few out there that prove you wrong. And if that’s the case, why not skip daily newspapers and let the bloggers and televesion do the daily news and create more indepth research magazines?
Last year, the Sogeti research insitute, ViNT, published a book called “Me the Media” in which it describes 3 media revolutions:
- The First Media Revolution: type letters and printing press
- The Second Media Revolution: electronic mass media
- The Third Media Revolution: web media
The industry has grown with the first revolution and survived the second, but now is crumbling under the onslaught of this third media revolution. It was bound to happen sooner or later, the crunch is just the final push to speed up this third media revolution. It neither is Obama nor the Credit Crunch but a driving force called innovation that is bringing about these winds of change.
Sustainability and complexity of environmental problems {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/lUtmyIpfMl_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Sustainability and complexity of environmental problems ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/UTBWawftbn”}}}
Great research. I was among those who blogged the original story (Plant a Tree and get a free search) and stand corrected by this article. I’ve made amends and blogged Google Emissions Crunched as Kincaid gets it straight today.
But does it matter how much grams it is exactly? It is not helping the environment, but what are the alternatives? Cut down the rainforest to satisfy our information needs by distributing all the blogs on paper? I guess not. You might encourage a lot of writers to just stop blogging and the world would be better off.
I doubt we’ll see that happening. Perhaps it’s better to think how we can compensate. Have Google plant and other big spenders plant a forest to compensate, just like we’ve got to pay an additional tax for flying in the Netherlands. The only problem is…. Google and every other major player on the market is either American or China based, which means they don’t really give a **** about the environment. Despite Al Gore and every greenie in the States, every environmental deal is blocked by the United States in favor of economic growth. Where did that bring us? It only brought global crisis. America has blocked deals like the Kyoto protocol so it could continue to produce supersized cars. It has only killed innovation and the United States are now putting billions of dollars into an outdated automotive industry. Cars are too big, engines to polluting for the present day world. No wonder nobody’s buying anymore.
to be honest, at first I did not want to believe this story. there was no way that would be true. Then I read a story about how modern aircraft generate lift. witch is totally different what I was told at school. well that is just great. I just don’t know what to believe anymore. What happened to the internet where everything was true!!! I want it back!!!
I’ll be glad when the technology to remove CO2 is perfected. Hopefully, it will be much cheaper than all the efforts made to keep it out of the air.
http://blog.rei...atmosphere.html
This CO2 witch-hunt needs to end. Hair-splitting exercises like this are just ridiculous.
The entire idea of man made global warming is still very much debated, regardless of the pious attempts to kill the debate and say it’s proven beyond a doubt that CO2 produced by human activity is having a significant (and negative) impact on the environment.
Since a human being might release 10 times more CO2 per hour when jogging, than when resting, shouldn’t we tax jogging, or require face-masks with carbon traps to be worn when jogging?
http://www.nyny...anet-or-google/
The numbers all pale in comparison to the amount of CO2 that Arrington blows out.
I kid, I kid.
No offense taken
My original guestimate from 2007 was based on a presentation “Google – A Model for the Systems Architecture of the Future” by Prof. Paul A. Strassmann George Mason University, December 5, 2005 which says that in 2005(!) Google used 32k servers for 40Mio searches/day. That combined with a typical x86 server power consumption led to the 6.8 grams.
See slide 15-16 of my presentation embedded in the blog.
6.8 grams I actually found to be pretty low for the value of the service, compared to things like Second Life etc.
If it’s now officially 0.2 grams in 2009 – even better!
i agree that there are many complex issues and the findings were not sturdy and at the end of the day the only thing that that guy wants is money. this drive for money for survival pits many people against their soul like saving mother nature or whatever but i would rather warm the globe than be homeless lol
Every statement Wissner-Gross makes contains weasel words.
Wissner-Gross told us he prefers decaf coffee. Wonder if those would be considered weasel words.
For the interview with him: http://www.webh...s-interview.php
As you’re mentioning stoves and whether they’re gas or electric, I suspect that you’re not familiar with what Brits are generally talking about when they say kettle in the context of tea or coffee.
Pretty much 100% of the time here, when saying kettle, we’re referring to the plug-in, electric type of kettle and not the stove top version (I don’t think I know a single person with a stove top version that isn’t just ornamental now).
A Canadian friend once found this out over here, almost to the cost of a very nice flat near Tower Bridge. She was making the tea one morning, found the cordless, electric kettle, filled it with water, turned on the gas hob and placed it on there before going to the front room to watch TV. She was only alerted by the smell of the rubber seals and plastic base burning a few minutes later and the smoke pouring out of the kitchen.