TURN UP THE GOOGLE

More Google searches needed, please.

With some areas in Alaska dipping into the minus-seventy degree range, record cold temperatures sweeping across Europe, and some climate scientists now believing that the Earth could actually be entering another Ice Age, the answer may be to keep on “searching,” at least according to physicist Alex Wissner-Gross.

He says that running two Google searches from your computer consumes as much energy as boiling water for a cup of tea.

I assume this is a bad thing.

From the Times Online:

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

This story can probably fit neatly into the “Global Warming Is Going To Kill Us All” file … but the file may soon be obsolete – as I (and many many others) have predicted for a long time. Not only is the entire human-induced “global warming” phenomenon proving to be silly science fiction, but many are now wishing that all of it were, in fact, true.

From Pravda, of all places:

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Bring on the heat.

I think it is safe to say that the evidence of an oncoming Ice Age is, at least, as credible as any evidence one may pull out of their agenda-driven top hats to predict a doomed future for Earth due to man-made global warming – but it will be interesting to watch how many stories of a possible coming Ice Age make it into mainstream media news broadcasts and newspapers.

Of course, I still marvel at how often tomorrow’s weather forecast veers off the mark, but that’s me.

The climate, to quote a phrase, is bigger than us all.

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