The Internet’s Role In Global Warming

Global warming is the continued rise of the earth’s temperature due to the activities of man. The increased heat is responsible for a host of ills including the unpredictable weather patterns that cause natural disasters every year. The worst case scenario, if things are left unchanged, involves widespread cataclysmic flooding from the polar ice caps melting unnaturally. Such an event would kill millions of innocent people and do untold damage all over the world. rnGreenhouse gases are one of the main contributing factors to the continued threat of global warming. They absorb and reflect thermal energy, trapping it within the earth’s atmosphere and permanently raising the planet’s overall temperature. They come from the tainted emissions of most industrialized countries. Factories, power plants and motorized vehicles all produce incalculable amounts of greenhouse gases. rnEach individual, country, organization or business entity produces a certain amount of greenhouse gases due to their excessive power consumption habits. This measure of harmful emissions is called a carbon footprint. Anything and everything that requires a power source, either directly or indirectly, has a corresponding carbon footprint. rnWith the continued rise of the internet’s dominance, so the resources needed to support it increase. Each click on a website, each video you stream and each song you download costs energy. Things have become so dire that by the year 2020, simply keeping websites on the web would have a total carbon footprint equal to that of the entire airline industry. Clearly, carbon neutral web hosting is a desperately needed service all over the internet. Carbon neutral hosting provides the same service as any other web server currently in existence. It runs your website, gives you a unique URL, offers mass storage, assigns it an IP address and provides your content with sufficient bandwidth. The main difference is that it derives its power from a renewable source with zero greenhouse gas emissions, a few examples of which are hydroelectric dams, solar panels and windmills. rnImagine if all websites today decide to switch to carbon neutral web hosting; the environmental implications are staggering. It would be as if every airline in the entire world all agreed to stop flying planes. That’s a reduction of more than a billion tons of CO2 in annual greenhouse gas emissions.