Alex Wissner-Gross, the physicist quoted in several articles about Google's carbon footprint, is putting some distance between himself and comments attributed to him over the search giant's environmental impact. He told TechNewsWorld.com:
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."
Wissner-Gross did say that a search using Google has "definite environmental impact" and that they operate energy-intensive data centres, but Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch says:
But the "tea kettle" statistic that has been repeated ad nauseum simply isn't his.
Wissner-Gross asked for a correction, but none has been made.
That doesn't mean that Wissner-Gross isn't talking about Google's environmental impact, which he does in this CNBC interview, but he puts this in context of the global IT industry. The presenter seems shocked that Global IT has the same carbon footprint as all of the world's airlines, according to Gartner. But she also doesn't qualify the ffigure with real numbers, currently 2% of global emissions.
