Saving Earth

A typical search through the online giant’s website is thought to generate about 7g of carbon dioxide. Boiling a kettle produces about 15g.

The emissions are caused both by the electricity required to power a user’s computer and send their request to servers around the world.

The discovery comes amid increasing warnings about the little-known environmental impact of computer and internet use.

According to Gartner, an American research firm, IT now causes about two per cent of global CO2 emissions and its carbon footprint exceeded that of the world’s aviation industry for the first time in 2007.

Dr Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard University who is leading research into the subject, has estimated that browsing a basic website generates about 0.02g of CO2 for every second it is viewed.

Websites with complex video can be responsible for up to 0.2 g per second, he believes.

European Union leaders have agreed to offer around €7.2 billion to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change over the next three years.
After a hard push by the Swedish presidency of the EU at a summit of the bloc’s premiers and presidents in Brussels on Friday to get every single member state [...]

The Copenhagen climate change summit kicks off today in what will be a two-week marathon set of negotiations involving 15,000 delegates from 192 nations. The run-up to the talks saw a series of announcements by several of the world’s largest polluters pledging all sorts of commitments to reducing carbon emissions, but it has been China [...]

The Amazon Rainforest area occupies over 7.5 million square kilometers, about 40 percent of South America’s territory.
A region of superlatives, the Amazon, the world’s largest intact rainforest,spans nine South American countries – Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Venezuela, and French Guyana (part of France). Thetotal forest area of 6.7 million km2 is nearly [...]