A Harvard boffin has worked out that googling produces significant amounts of carbon dioxide, stating two search requests create as much CO2 as boiling a kettle of water, which sounds quite high if you ask us.
Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims a typical search on a desktop PC produces around 7g of CO2, although Google claims the figure is closer to 0.2g. Dr Wissner-Gross says Google uses multiple data banks at the same time to speed up its search operations, and that a combination of servers, clients, networks and end user PCs all add up to the high CO2 cost of Google's operation.
Gartner bean counters claim IT currently accounts for around 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, and Dr Wissner-Gross is trying to lend a helping hand, launching a site called co2stats.com, which should help tech companies identify energy inefficient aspects of their operations.
More here.
Update:
Dr Wissner-Gross has since accused the Times of doing a rather poor job reporting on his study, and claims never to have mentioned Google in it, nor the 7g of CO2 emissions caused by Google searches.