Blackle

I’ve found this slightly ridiculous site and think it’s important to point out the significance of the error the creators made.

Blackle is, in short, a black version of google.com. With the amount of traffic Google receives, the amount of energy used displaying its search results is phenomenal and according to research done by the creators of Blackle, by displaying a black instead of a white background on Google, the world could save 750 MWh/year (=86KW). So, let’s take a closer look at this idea.

The underlying assumption is that black screens use less energy than white ones. I agree fully that this may have been true in the retro days of CRT screens: fewer electrons will need to be fired at the front of the screen so less electricity will be required. Unfortunately CRTs are somewhat backward and our world is very much a flat panel place nowadays. There are two types of flat panel: LCD and plasma displays. LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display and the principle is actually really quite beautiful.

A liquid crystal can be seen as a polarising tube: when light is shone down one end it gets polarised. However this tube is composed of several layers like a lot of very flat cylinders concatenated end-to-end, each with a polarising slit. In its natural state the crystal (tube) is twisted so that each layer is slightly out of line with the adjacent ones. Imagine looking at a slinky end-on then twisting it. When light is shone on one end of this twisted liquid crystal, the first layer polarises it. The second layer then blocks some of this light because it is polarised in a slightly different orientation and allows some through, re-polarising it. This is repeated for all the layers of the crystal and eventually some light gets through. The last layer’s polarisation is orthogonal to that of the first layer.

When electricity is passed through this crystal however, it straightens out and becomes an untwisted polarising cylinder which just polarises light like a normal polarising sheet.

To construct an LCD screen, a sheet containing an array of cells made of these crystals is placed in front of a sheet of normal polarising material. A backlight is placed behind both these sheets. An electronic grid allows electricity to be passed through any cell independently of all the others. In the un-electrified state, all the liquid crystals are arranged so that the polarisation of the back face (next to the polarising sheet) is in line with that of the polarising sheet (say, vertically) and of course the crystal is twisted 90 degrees so the front is polarised horizontally. This way, light from the backlight can get through both sheets since the back of the crystal is aligned with the sheet and light can get from the back to the front of the crystal. However the front of the crystal is fixed in orientation so when the sheet is electrified and all the crystals untwist, the back of the crystals end up horizontal. Now the crystal acts like a second polarising sheet but in an orthogonal direction to the first sheet. No light gets through and the screen is black.

So, what does that mean? No electricity needs to pass through the crystal to display a white screen but every single cell (pixel) needs current passing through it to display a black screen. The assumption was false for LCD monitors, which in 2006 accounted for 80% of all computer monitors.

The other flatscreen technology is plasma displays which physically illuminate each pixel with a separate light source (some sort of LED I’d imagine). These I think do conserve energy when displaying a black screen.

So the website, at the user end of things, actually does the opposite of the stated intention for 80% of computer monitors. To make things worse, the functionality of this site is much lower than Google. Since it’s a Google custom search, the site only has the Google features available to Google affiliates and lacks things like Google cache, translator, webapps etc.

Enough about the frontend – now for the backend. The site must receive tens of thousands of hits every day, and must therefore need some quite meaty servers to deal with the traffic. Let’s say it requires a server that draws 500W (including cooling), an average power consumption for a server. According to the internet archives, Blackle has been around since the beginning of 2007. Over 2 years this server would have burnt through 8.8MWh. The site advertises it has saved a total of about 1MWh. Blackle has in fact caused the world to use an extra US household’s year’s supply of energy. Oops. In fact, even if the server drew 60W (ridiculously low), it would still have used 1.05MWh to date, and the creators would have actually increased world energy consumption by 50KWh.

So yet again someone with good intentions has done the wrong thing. Far from solving the world’s energy crisis, the creators of Blackle have created something which is inconvenient to use and actually does the opposite of what it was originally supposed to do. It is, I wholeheartedly agree, a brilliant and novel idea, but sadly one which doesn’t work at all.

My Stance on Global Warming

I’ve just chanced upon Will’s ‘vlog’ post (it was a video embedded into a blog post – what else am I to call it?). It’s a bit old – I take time to chance upon things. So, the world is coming to an end because we are selfish and excessive in our use of energy. Apparently.

Officially, I like to refer to myself as a sceptic and positivist – I follow the doctrine that speculation on ultimate causes or origins is futile and believe in the system of obtaining knowledge through systematic doubt and continual testing. Thus my stance on global warming is neither that of the maniac eco-warrior nor that of the inexorable cynic. However whatever the case it’s always important to take a multifaceted analysis of any situation and think outside the box (to use the old cliché), instead of dogmatically pursuing a mere single thread which exists as a relatively insignificant decoration on a thick quilt of intrinsically interwoven issues.

An aspect of the entire oil and global warming debate which is often overlooked or perhaps deliberately ignored is the economic and political aspect of it. If you think about it, nowadays oil is equivalent to power. This is very much an economic phenomenon projected onto the plane of political power in which Middle-eastern countries and Russia are at liberty to exploit their massive amounts of black gold, an unfortunate precedent which can be and in fact is unashamedly translated into a disproportionate amount of undeserved political influence. I’m sure I’m not alone in my (personal, biased and subjective) dislike of the idea of all this scarcity power being in the hands of the countries which happen to have all this oil and gas; I’d hate to see America and Britain on their knees begging Putin (we all know he’s still wearing the trousers over there) or some militant religious extremist group for a few barrels of oil. In other words this political leverage is all about the scarcity power of oil. This constitutes my primary reason for supporting a long-term move to abandon oil and other fossil fuels as a source of energy: oil is a commodity on which the world is increasingly reliant and whose natural residence is apparently countries which unnervingly frequently end up in political turmoil (I think it’s fair to say) so my personal opinion is that it seems after a little consideration a fairly bad idea to build the world up around it. I’m therefore a great fan of alternative, particularly renewable ways of producing power which don’t involve the use of such a messily obtained substance.

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Returning to the argument considered by most eco-warriors, I think Will is in part absolutely right (please ignore my seemingly nonsensical juxtaposition of words) about the warming aspect of, global, err, warming – whether it be us or pixies or cosmological factors who/which are at fault, there exists quite unequivocally a problem and it undeniably requires attention. However, personally undecided about the verity of the claims about the anthropogenity (neologism I believe, but a good one) of global warming, I’d argue an engineering solution rather than a human / social / lifestyle one is needed here – a protective rather than preventative solution. The Earth’s atmosphere is simply so complex that few people can claim to understand its workings in any great detail, let alone work towards an accurate model of cause and effect; by my logic it follows intuitively that any attempt to tackle a perceived cause may well be in vain if not deleterious (for example the questionable proposal of filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide) – far more propitious a solution would be simply to be pragmatic and do what we know we can do: consider methods of protection against predicted conditions which can themselves be more reliably extrapolated than an attempt of analysis on dubious and often erroneous data.

In fact, even if it were true that humans were the cause of the earth’s positive temperature gradient (against time), I’d be willing to bet that any attempt to reverse the trend would be futile, be it too little, too late, or both. A single word sums up the impossibility of the task of reducing Carbon emissions: China. As some may know, I blame China for many things, including milk, red tape and Communism; in this case though I feel it would be unjustified to blame her, even if her factories were indeed the cause of such future strife and suffering. Allow me to elucidate my uncharacteristically sympathetic attitude towards the developing world. I’m one of those cynics who believe the world, or at least the majority of it – certainly the influential parts of it – are driven by two main wants: money and power. In addition, everyone knows that just about everything runs off electricty. No business could function without it: transport, computers, buildings and manufacturing all slurp up vast quantities of electricity. So if money is everything and everything is electricity, there’s a lot to be said for electricity in money terms. China was blessed with unfair amounts of coal naturally available to the country, making coal a cheap source of energy. Chinese businesses (probably with the help of the government) merely exploited this by building coal power stations en masse, something the West would undoubtedly have done in the past, and which it would probably still do today. We got damn close with ‘drill baby drill’. China’s population situation is also geared towards high energy consumption: it doesn’t take a great leap of faith to conclude that 1.3 billion people squashed into 9.6 million square kilometres will require more than a few wind farms to power, and at the time China began developing at its unprecedented and scarily rapid rate (around when I was born) nuclear power was still very much an experiment and the world was still reeling from Chernobyl; the only way to supply power affordably to such a large population with so little space was to use cheap and cheerful methods: fossil fuels. So is it fair to blame China for making use of her natural resources partially out of necessity? I certainly don’t think so.

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So returning to the problem of global warming, it seems unlikely that China will wilfully do anything about her carbon emissions. Meanwhile, even if both the UK and US manage the 2050 target (I’m sure it used to be 2012…), the effect will be minimal, to say the least, even if it is true that global warming is our fault. My argument about protection rather than prevention seems to make sense.

So why don’t I join environment committee? In fact, there are several reasons, but the main problem for me is that the committee stands for something which I don’t: working off the assumption that global warming is by definition anthropogenic, it seems to work primarily to reduce Carbon emissions, a measure which I consider ineffective at best, and simply wrong at worst, and the fact that some of its aims happen to coincide with my personal ambitions for the world, e.g. renewable power, isn’t enough to convince me to join. Regardless, I still wish them luck in whatever they do; I’m good friends with one of the main figures in the society and am confident that he has good intentions and indirectly or otherwise yearns for a future unreliant on oil, and therefore also on the Middle East.

An aspect of the irrationality of eco-warriors

Eco-warriors are interesting creatures. They are portrayed by the media as the saviours of our planet and get sympathetic treatment all-round because they ‘mean well’; yet many of them haven’t a clue what they really stand for and know nothing about the underlying scientific arguments behind the perceived problem. Though a sceptic myself about anthropogenic global warming, I still respect true scientists who have devoted time to research the issue and decided, independently of peer pressure and media attention, that they believe humans are having a damaging effect on the environment. However I just cannot bring myself to respect the one-sided eco-warrior who has never, and owing to obstinacy never will, hear the other side of the argument, and who, when asked about what evidence there is, flies into a rage and accuses the inquirer of being a sceptic who wants to see the world burn in hell.

The thing about eco-warriors is, as Theo pointed out in a comment to my post on Transport in London, that there is a certain level of idealism involved. It’s interesting that many of them believe electric cars are the solution. OK I admit it’s not true they’re ‘slow and pointless’ – in fact there was a fairly sleek one at the motor show at ExCel recently which had similar specs to a normal fast car in terms of speed, acceleration etc. (fine, about 3 times the price but still…). However the practical aspects are horrifically complicated yet hugely overlooked and few people seem to understand what will happen at about 5pm when all the electric cars recharge at once. England’s electricity infrastructure is crumbly enough as it is, and with a growing energy demand it has been predicted that the recent brown outs will be a regular occurrence in the future. And to be honest I don’t think British Energy is focussed enough on increasing Britain’s electricity production which merely exacerbates the problem; I suspect the company was simply too busy selling out to EDF (and now possibly Centrica) to bother about long-term plans and development, particularly in the area of nuclear energy, which was what EDF was originally supposed to bring.

So in short, the point I’m really making here is that the media and the green community simply do not understand the issue and as a result of their naïveté seem to have blown the perceived problem of man-made global warming so out of proportion that desperate proposed solutions have become positively nonsensical, and that those very nonsensical solutions are getting an uncomfortably wide audience which I fear may result in the future in a disaster which would have been so easily evitable.