BreathingEarth.net is a really neat flash site I found yesterday while I was browsing around. It’s an online flash presentation that “displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates”. And they do this in real-time!

The presentation really puts things into a perspective. What will it take for us to wake up?

Breathing Earth is definitely one of the more fascinating websites I’ve come across in a really long time.

Using a water cooling system for your personal computer has been around for a while. But it isn’t until recently that you can cool down your servers using water. Panduit Corp recently released a new Net-Access Server Cabinet System that features IBM’s Rear Door Heat Exchanger Water-Cooling Technology. It is basically a five-inch deep cooling door that uses chilled water to dissipate heat generated from the servers. This can easily reduce server heat output by up to 55%.

Gartner recently released a report that says that water can carry, unbelievable, 3500 times more hear than air at sea level. This can considerably improve the temperature of data centres with more cooling efficiency.

In the personal computing world HP (Hewlett-Packard) have had one of the best recycling programs. Now, six months ahead of schedule HP has recycled its one billionth pound. HP CEO Mark Hurd says that HP have “reached the tipping point where the price and performance of IT are no longer compromised by being green, but are now enhanced by it.”

All this means that companies that have invested in recycling are now making a profit by recycling products at the end of the products life. It’s great that HP can lead the way in recycling and say to its competitors that they actually make money from it while it attracts new customers.

But we are sad to see that HP still rank far down in the Green Electronics Guide from Greenpeace.

HP - A free-faller, dropping down for failing to provide clear timelines for eliminating the worst chemicals. It looses points for weak definition of take back policies.

In the Green Electronics Guide HP is only placed on 11th place (of 14 places). According to Greenpeace HP “fails to provide timelines for the complete elimination of toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and all brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and therefore loses points”.

The Kanguru Eco Drive

I have posted about the new tower server Primergy TX120 from Fujitsu Siemens Computers that is said to be the world’s most energy efficient server. Not everyone can afford to buy a server, so here is something for us more ordinary bloggers.

Western Digital, one of the most well known hard drive companies, has teamed up with Kanguru in marketing a green hard drive for consumers and businesses. These GreenPower Hard Drives are all internal drives which are available in capacities from 320GB and up to 1TB (1000 GB).

Western Digital claims that these new GreenPower Hard Drives is saving up to 40% in power consumption. Western Digital says they accomplish this through several technologies such as balancing spin speed, transfer rate and cache size; automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag and calculating optimum seek speeds.

These new GreenPower Hard Drives goal is to be “Energy Star 4.0” compliant. That means a minimizing their carbon footprint while realizing savings in electricity costs.

According to Western Digital data-centres that use “10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons”.

Also, don’t forget to check out Kangurus eco-friendly hard drives. These eco-friendly hard drives have three power modes that allow you to save up to 75% on the energy usage. The drives are fully RoHS compliant (no hazardous substances).

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/greenpower.asp
http://www.kanguru.com/35ecohd.html

Acorn Host is a green reseller host. Reseller host means that Acorn Host buy hosting space from another web host and sell that space to their own customers. Reseller hosting is not unusual, your current host is probably a reseller host.

This is what Acorn Host say about themselves:

Web hosting from a company that shares your values. We are dedicated to being a company that enriches and supports life. We offer exceptional uptime, responsive service, and carbon neutral hosting.

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We normally don’t do commercials here on the Green Blog but this commercial is so funny that we just have to share it with you. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY

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I got a new book called Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet at the end of last week. And to tell you the truth I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. Whenever I get a free moment I try to read a few pages more. It is such a great book!

Mark Lynas is the author of the book. He has also written High Tide, a superb book too (which I have also read). But what is this new book all about then? The title of the book is Six Degrees because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that at the end of this century global temperatures would have risen by between 1.4°C and 5.8°C (this worst-case scenario was raised to 6.4°C earlier this year).

My idea was to piece together all the available scientific projections for the impacts of this warming on a degree-by-degree basis, with a chapter for 1 degree, 2 degrees and so on up the scale.

The book is easy to read, easy to understand, interesting and just plain great. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand this book. It is written so that you and me can fully understand it.

If you are only thinking of buying one book this year then you should buy Six Degrees. If you aren’t thinking of buying any book at all please consider long (not too long) and hard about buying this book. Buy the book to your friends and families, I know I will.

Buy Six Degrees:
- Friends of the Earth
- Amazon.co.uk
- Amazon.com (This title will be released on January 22, 2008.)

Reviews of Six Degrees:
- The Independent, review by Marek Kohn on 13 April 2007.
- The Sunday Times, review by Fred Pearce on 8 April.
- Daily Mail, review by Hephzibah Anderson on 30 March.
- Guardian, review by Josh Lacey on 14 April.
- New Statesman, review by Johann Hari on 2 April.
- Financial Times, review by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on 7 April.

WebCtel was founded in 2000, in New England and is the only solar powered web hosting services provider of that area. WebCTel provides website design, maintenance and support, application development, productivity tools and consulting.

WebCTel is headquartered in the Greenworks Building in East Cambridge, site of a former rubber manufacturing facility. The contaminated building has been reclaimed and now provides office space to businesses and non-profit organizations that place an emphasis on environmental protection and implementing social change.

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