Harvard Physicist Sets Record Straight About Google

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Here’s a weird one...the Harvard physicist that was quoted in an article we posted yesterday (here) says that he never mentioned Google by name and that his work had nothing to do with Google. So, what this is saying is that the research data is correct (the 20mg of CO2 number) but the physicist was talking about internet use in general, not Google. Ummm, okay. While the eggheads argue over who is killing the planet, feel free to spend your 20 milligrams of CO2 per second visiting [H]ard|OCP. ;)

One problem: the study's author, Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, says he never mentions Google in the study. "For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google," Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. "Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site."
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Ah so it was the media that sensationalized the results of the study. Analyzing how energy use relates to internet use is a reasonable study as it can lead to more efficient systems. Telling people not to google because it uses as much energy as boiling a pot of water is ridiculous.
 
How much Co2 did they waste on that incredibly stupid study? At least the web contributes something useful to humanity, unlike their research and the articles about it...
 
I just did a search on "Alex Wissner-Gross" in Google, Yahoo, Dogpile and Ask. I also used the search engines to migrate between search engines.

Now he will be forever linked with the destruction of our planet.
 
Say it isn't so! The media misrepresents the facts and injects their own biased conclusions into a news story?!?

This happens daily, fortunately they got called on it. I must have heard this story repeated several times yesterday and each time I kept thinking "BS". And the news media wonders why their readership and viewship is falling like a rock.
 
Oh, so now I feel bad for autorefreshing 20 tabs in order to get a windows 7 beta key...at least I now finally know why the ice caps are melting.
 
Oh great, I'm just waiting for the enviro-nuts to try and hit us with an internet carbon tax now.
 
vsboxerboy said:
Oh, so now I feel bad for autorefreshing 20 tabs in order to get a windows 7 beta key...at least I now finally know why the ice caps are melting.
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You haven't heard that last year the northern caps grew the most ice it's ever grew in a year. And I can't understand this statement that "all of the record snowfall in the west this year is because of global warming." So if I use their logic to cool my house I need to run the oven long enough and my house will cool down?
 
MotorMouth said:
You haven't heard that last year the northern caps grew the most ice it's ever grew in a year. And I can't understand this statement that "all of the record snowfall in the west this year is because of global warming." So if I use their logic to cool my house I need to run the oven long enough and my house will cool down?
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what logic?
 
MotorMouth said:
You haven't heard that last year the northern caps grew the most ice it's ever grew in a year.
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It wasn't the most ice ever, but it end the met season with 9% more ice than last year. Of course, last year it lost more ice than anyone had ever thought possible, more than twice as much as usual, so this slight uptick is vastly outdone by the previous years' losses. We're still looking at an ice free arctic by 2025 at the latest.

MotorMouth said:
And I can't understand this statement that "all of the record snowfall in the west this year is because of global warming." So if I use their logic to cool my house I need to run the oven long enough and my house will cool down?
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Warmer climate means more precipitation in some locations, generally very heavy local precipitation because more water evaporates from the oceans. In the northern part of the world this falls as snow in the wintertime. Cold does not necessarily equal snow, as some of the driest deserts in the world are tundras, very cold places indeed.
Most of the warming climate models predict much heavier local rainfalls with flooding, think California, while other areas become arid and dry, think Georgia.
In fact, the deserts have been spreading northward around the world, so you can expect the U.S. to become more like Mexico, and Canada and Russia to become more like the U.S. as far as climate is concerned.
 
Tokamak said:
It wasn't the most ice ever, but it end the met season with 9% more ice than last year. Of course, last year it lost more ice than anyone had ever thought possible, more than twice as much as usual, so this slight uptick is vastly outdone by the previous years' losses. We're still looking at an ice free arctic by 2025 at the latest.
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Slight uptick? Everyone was predicting the arctic would be clear this winter. They said all signs were pointing towards it... and the ice reached the same level it was in the 1970's.

What the hell makes you think they can accurately predict the ice levels in 2025? :rolleyes:
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Everyone was predicting the arctic would be clear this winter. They said all signs were pointing towards it... and the ice reached the same level it was in the 1970's.
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I don't recall everyone predicting the arctic would be clear this winter, certainly you didn't but I get your point :). The worst I heard was there was a 50% chance that it could be clear, and most predictions still state there's a 90% chance it will be clear by 2025.
I'm not sure where you're getting the ice is the same level it was in the 1970's, a 9% increase in minimum sea ice extent from 2007 (according to the NSIDC) still makes it the 2nd lowest year for ice coverage in recorded history, and 34% below the 1979-2000 average.
 
I would believe the raw data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center before I would believe a DailyTech article.
 
Wow, that DailyTech article even quotes the NSIDC and there's no corroboration on the NSIDC's website. I'll have to look into this a little more.
 
Yeh I said this when the original post was made...

I didn't think the rest of the internet worked on magic.
 
Tokamak said:
Here it is: The Arctic Climate Research's response to the Daily Tech's article. Long story short, the Daily Tech mined the data to find something they wanted it to say.
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No, they pointed out that the data shows that global ice is at the same level it was in 1979.

The point being that climate change in the arctic =! global warming.

How can you reasonably expect to know what the temperature in Alaska will be in 2050 when we can't even predict the weather next week? We haven't recorded data long enough to observe the small scale climate change that occurs naturally around the globe. For all we know there's a cycle of slight warming and cooling in the arctic based on changes to the currents and subsequent removal of old/growth of new ice.
 
If you read U of I's response to the Daily Tech article, it says global sea ice is not an accurate indicator of climate change. Arctic sea ice is much more of a canary in the coalmine because the arctic is warmer than the antarctic, so when the globe gets warmer, the arctic melts, but more warmth at first means more precipitation on the antarctic until the temperature down there gets high enough to really melt things.

Daily local temperature readings have very little to do with overall climate change. You're comparing specific weather forecast accuracy to general trends in the next several decades. Predicting an arctic sea ice free summer sometime in the next 25 years would be closer to saying it will rain in Seattle sometime in the next 12 months. You don't know exactly when it's going to happen, just that it's probably going to happen.
 
I wish that plants had some sort of communication network where they argue about O2 killing the planet.

I have to wonder if the world being flat train of thought was argued this hard. Some scholar from back in the day insisting that we put more weight in the middle of the world since it could tip over and if he was wrong what was the harm?
 
are there any websites i can visit that will help me increase my CO2 output? or is google my best bet?
 
Tokamak said:
I don't recall everyone predicting the arctic would be clear this winter, certainly you didn't but I get your point :). The worst I heard was there was a 50% chance that it could be clear, and most predictions still state there's a 90% chance it will be clear by 2025.
I'm not sure where you're getting the ice is the same level it was in the 1970's, a 9% increase in minimum sea ice extent from 2007 (according to the NSIDC) still makes it the 2nd lowest year for ice coverage in recorded history, and 34% below the 1979-2000 average.
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Funny, here I was thinking ice never even broke levels found in 3 of the last 4 warming periods (which we're in right now), nor have we come even close to some of the temperature records. We're EXACTLY where our planetary history records say we should be right now.

These ridiculous global warming predictions only work for scientists ignoring decades of respected and undisputed environmental records. The earth's temperature spikes every 112,000 years, stays warm for 12,000, and plunges back into 100,000 years of ice. You can talk about C02 all you want, CO2 levels varied by a factor of 10 (from 20x current levels to 2x current levels) millions of years and, and the temperature record shows a tiny drop over the period.

480px-Ice_Age_Temperature.png
 
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