Forget Google rationing: Only lighting farts can save the planet Assertions by a Harvard University environmentalist and green-website promoter that two Google searches cause carbon emissions equivalent to boiling a kettle appear to be based on questionable numbers. Building on the new research, the Reg can also exclusively reveal that three days of normal human farts cause the same amount of …
The BBC News page covering this was hilariously stacked with factual inaccuracies and general idiocy, over and above their usual standards - and that's on top of Wissner-Gross's laughably wonky figures. Sadly they managed to cleanse the page of the worst offenders before I'd even had a chance to fire off a vitriolic carbon-guzzling email in their direction.
The discrepancy between Google's opinion of the CO2 cost and the Prof's (however un-kettle like the results may actually be) looks quite simple to explain.
The way I read this when I first saw it, Google are saying "we use x" and the Prof is saying "the cost is y". The fact that x and y are different numbers is because x=apples (Google's 'leccy consumption) and y=pears (Google + your PC + all those other bits in between that make it work).
I think I'd rather do my bit for the planet by burning a facsimile of a Tudor Rose on the wall......
you know!
Using the newly developed F.L.A.T.T. tables (Flatulence Linked Anal Taxation Tariff), all foods will be labelled with one of 5 categories, from 5 to 1, with 1 being the highest taxed bracket (Baked Beans, Brussel Sprouts, Cabbage, lentils etc; that's payback for the veggie-munchers!) NuLabour expects to raise BILLIONS over the next two years, as more and more people find themselves reduced to living off baked beans coz they can't get credit for anything else!
I'm glad El Reg has finally covered this - I saw it on the BBC earlier and was fuming by the end of it.
Given that Google's data centres are running and consuming electricity 24/7 regardless of whether anyone is searching or not, how much CO2 do we cause by *not* doing searches? Surely by not searching, all the CO2 emitted is wasted, because we've no useful product as a result. At least by searching, we have something useful out the end for all the emissions.
Therefore, I'm going to declare that Alex Wissner-Gross is an idiot and to save the environment you actually need to search Google more.
How could google possibly afford to serve free (well, advert-supported) searches if they emitted 7g of CO2? The fuel costs would be phenomenal if the searches needed this much energy. I bet he has calculated it as if only one person is using the servers at a time.
Even if this is true, which I bet it isn't, how much would it cost to drive to the library to look things up?
Pedant mode...
>Farting and failing to burn off the resulting methane is incredibly environmentally irresponsible. The average person emits anywhere from half a litre to three litres of evil-smelling gas daily.
Er, methane is odourless around room temperature/pressure. You're talking about the other more aromatic compounds that are generally released at the same time.
Also, the advice to light them is a little um, well, do we have a word for a "Which? says destroy your disk drive" error? They neglected to mention that smashing up a disk drive can create small fast moving shards of sharp and spiky metal or glass which can be very painful. I'd have hoped El Reg might have pointed out that sparking up a bottom burp can go wrong? Ok, mostly harmless, but still, someone might try it after a night of Vindaloo and lager and do themselves some real harm. And if it's like my local curry house, the phrases "blast radius" and "Darwin nominee" come to mind.
I know, I know, I'm going. Mine's the one with a box of matches and some H-cream in the pocket
Are we missing a valuable energy generation capability here?
Collection may be difficult, granted, but how about pulling it all back out of the atmosphere, is it feasible?
My worry is as earth's population grows, our sum total of guffing combined with a lightning strike could see us all gone in a big KABOOM!
Coat no longer needed, it's warming up.
FAR worse - I'm sure there was something in the New Scientist about looking at the bacteria kangaroos have in their gut because they don't produce so much NH4 and seeing if cows couldn't have their intestinal flora modified.
As for hippos and other large animals, elephants? I'll let someone else do that from a safe distance.
Don't forget that while some of us are biofuelled (veggies, that is), those of you who eat beef are producing even more methane. They will presumably have to follow around a beef herd and combust their output too?
AC for obvious reasons, I suspect I've just started a war...
Paris since we're on the subject of vegetable matter.
No no no Lewis not Zippos nasty hydrocarbons not to mention co and co2 etc.
A greener option might be to build a mini tesla in our undies for those illuminating moments...
Just a thought, seeing as the article has been so well thought out and researched, to be really eco-friendly, should we not shave our (_*_) before lighting?
Just what *is* the chemical composition of singed harsehairs??
..how many kettles worth of C02 did you produce while writing this article?
Well, there was your laptop being on, you sitting there farting as you concentrated on the numbers (last nights Vindaloo didn't help), your lighting, radio playing in background etc etc.
You could have been better going & making Sarah Bee a cup of tea (bless her she's working hard today) and going home early.
Could lighting your parps be used to power a small-sized combustion engine?
Feed a tube from your aniarse to a small engine housed on the back of a pair of rollerstates. To be fair you would have to pump out a lot to keep going.
Or you could pump-out into a pressurised container. When it's full it could beep at you, at which point you could slot it into your roller-skate or stakeboard engine.
Or just take it home, release it under the duvet in the morning (as your getting up for work) so when your wife gets up she thinks she's shit herself.
Flame, because farts and fire shouldn't really mix.
So when do we see the next Toyota hybrid with methane abosrbers in the seats, linked directly to the air intake? Gives a new slant to "man-machine interfaces"...
"Was that you?"
"Yes, needed a bit more power to overtake that tractor:".
Might be the incentive TfL need to ban standing-room on buses, since getting all the passengers to sit down could improve air quality and fuel economy
A classic case of the media falling for junk statistics by a self-publicising academic with a vested interest, both for the the publicity and for commerciall interests. Wissner-Gross is co-founder Enernetics and you can sign up on its website for some (chargeable) services to evaluate the "greenness" of your web site.
This particular piece of self-publcity was even packed up by by David Aaranovich on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday (who, as a journalist, ought to be a bit more sceptical about this sort of stuff).
Quite how this guy came up with his numbers has not been published in detail, but it would appear that he is doing his CO2 emission calculations on boiling enough water for a cup of coffee, and not a whole kettle full (but boiling a kettle sounds so much worse doesn't it?). On that basis, 5g might be about right (although that's only about enough to drive the average European car about 30 metres).,
The other side of the calculation is the power used by your Google search - well the great ad purveyor in cyber-space have come out with vaguely believeable numbers which are a tiny fraction of these figures. However, the difference appears tocome about because the good professor has included liberal allowances for the electricity used by your PC, monitor, comms equipment and heaven knows what else including the viewing of the results. If we assume an average PC, monitor and comms equipment uses about 150 watts then it will be responsible for about 75gm of CO2 per hour, or a little over 1gm per minute. Spend 5 minutes looking at the results of the search (including going to the results) and you might be able to justify a 5gm calculation.
So it's not the Google search that's the issue - it's basically just using the damned PC. But it's so much more newsworthy to attach the name Google to a news briefing than just say that using a desktop PC for 8 hours generates about 600gm CO2 or roughly the same as driving 4km.
I realise all the above is variable - run a laptop and your usage will be a lot less. Run the latest graphics card and you'll probably melt a glacier somewhere in Switzerland. But what it doe go to show is that the media world is full of lazy journalists quite able to uncritically quote dubious numbers, to which we could add politicians. The same sort of nonsense occured with spurious calculations over cellphone charges left plugged in (which ended up splattered all over the Lonbdon underground in enviro-aware advertising by the Mayor of London's office).
Maybe the association or linking to farts should be removed?
The first and most obvious reason is that it seems dreadfully unfair to farts. After all, what have farts ever done apart from give relief - usually very well received relief.
The second is, of course, it would seem awe-fully unfair to give green activistas pains in the nether regions possibly almost laming themselves in the process? Preventing gustos can lead to terrible pains and just imagine the consequences of having to call out ambulances and health intervention purely because a futuristically sensitive person prevented a fart or two or more from being released?
Hmmm... on second thoughts cancel part 2 above.
All Wissner-Guff's site is doing is a dodgy estimate of the energy consumed by a website and then claiming some dodgier American 'renewable energy certificates' for you. These do not mean that the electrons feeding your site came from wind power (or his guff power, perhaps we should fit him with a turbine...) but that a piece of paper somewhere got processed. The problems are that a) US renewable or offset certificates are not recognised anywhere else in the world as the requirements are far less stringent and b) that all you are doing by purchasing them is making the grid electricity that little bit more dirty and coal based for everyone else in the US instead of actually changing the overall carbon intensity. The same goes for Google's hydro electric powered facilities, they are not green through being hydro, they are just making the grid dirtier for everyone else in the state they have moved in to.
I wonder if there are plans afoot within google such that when OLED screens are popular, the pages will be mainly black, thus being more 'green'.
With standard LCDs, the colour makes very little difference - black simply absorbs light from the backlight and turns it into heat (white lets all the light through). With OLED screens, the black is literally turning the light off, thus saving energy.
Of course, this is just my rambling mind, but it must be something google are thinking about!
To all those worried about the very real dangers involved in igniting your rectal pumpage by-product - I seem to recall that Lewis was a bomb disposal guy in a previous life.
I think he's the ideal guy to write an article on anal combustion safety, possibly accompanied by Playmobil re-enactments.
Yeah, lighting your farts may reduce the methane and therefore reduce a greehouse gas, but lighting your farts produces heat, which, well, heats up the environment... and if you do this outside, surely you becoming just as environmentally unfriendly as a patio heater then!!
Not so smug sunshine, if you please!
I've heard it said that a potential indicator of life in an oxy / helium atmosphered world is the quantities of methane in the jolly old atmos courtesy of the botty burblings of the herbivorous ruminants inhabiting the place. All veggie fuelled.
Now, I don't know about you, but while I'll admit that a few people in the immediate blast radius have, on occasion, taken issue with some of my more voluminous productions, I have yet to find anyone calling up from a few thousand light-years away to point out that they noticed it too.
While it's true that my more meaty diet may lend a certain piquancy to some of my output, I reckon that the sheer bulk of same is more vegetable related. I certainly find that a diet richer in pulses and fibre lends itself to a classic rasp, while on meat-heavy days the output tends towards the vile squeaker or even the SBD.
http://www.blackle.com/ made some sense when CRT's were the predominant display technology as CRT's do use more power when displaying a white screen than they do a black screen. But the black background has zero effect on power consumption for LCD displays, whose power consumption is independent of the amount of light displayed to the user.
"According to Dr. James L. A. Roth, the author of Gastrointestinal Gas (Ch. 17 in Gastroenterology, v. 4, 1976) most people (2/3 of adults) pass farts that contain no methane. If both parents are methane producers, their children have a 95% chance of being producers as well. The reason for this is apparently unknown."
The obvious solution is to stop methane producers breeding together. Your children will only contribute to global warming if both you and your partner see a blue tinge to your fart flame, and this ctest ould be incorporated into civil and religious weddings.
"but lighting your farts produces heat, which, well, heats up the environment..."
Exactly, saving you heating fuel in the winter! Well, for the people living in cold countries, at least -- they could buy fart credits from tundra people and the like (penguins!), I guess. A whole new market awaits thee. OK, you might need stronger air-conditioning in the summer, but I'm sure that if I massage the numbers enough I can show you that the winter savings and additional summer spendings cancel each other out.
Great article, by the way. :-)
Another great piece of hot air journalism for David MacKay to get stuck into:
http://www.withouthotair.com/
To dredge some interest from this discussion, working out the environmental impact of identifiable human-computer actions does seem to be more meaningful than simple stating how much energy a particular piece of hardware uses.
is that they can be used to promote anything you like.
I'm pretty sure my kettle is 3k watts and I know my inlaws always boil a full kettle, regardless of the amount required (I've tried to get them to stop but I can't!)
I've heard that it is far less resource-intensive to eat veggies instead of beef and not farm the cows. This means you don't need to deal with their emissions too. Seeing as I'm a vegetarian, I reckon I'm owed quite a few googles.
I still find it rather unlikely that google make enough in advertising to pay for boiling the kettle twice for every google query I've made. Someone out there must be clicking-through and buying an awful lot of stuff on my behalf!
Tux, Penguins live in the antarctic, the antarctic has a huge ozone hole, therefore, penguins must be an environmental disaster. Its just science and logic, init?
There's nothing better than a well timed SBD (silent but deadly) fart. Lighting them unfortunately gives the game away...You can hardly claim it wasnt you when you have just launched a flamethrower in a quiet room.
As much as lighting my gas would be funny...a surprise attack is funnier... Then I'll happily take credit for my carbon.
Methane stays in the atmosphere for (on a quick survey of sources) around a tenth of the time that CO2 does (maybe even less, depending on how you estimate things -- the CO2 figure especially has a very high upper limit depending on who you ask). And I'm pretty sure that it isn't so simple as saying that the 10-fold difference in lifespan is outweighed by the 25-fold difference in effect.
All I'm saying is that this isn't quite so clear cut as the 25x thing suggests.
So don't go rectum searing just yet.
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