In what appears to be a bit of an adver­tise­ment for climateprediction.net–a dis­trib­uted com­put­ing project to test the accu­racy of var­i­ous com­puter mod­els of cli­mate change–The Econ­o­mist looks at the impact of com­put­ing on the envi­ron­ment; specif­i­cally car­bon diox­ide emis­sions.

Accord­ing to a report pub­lished by the Cli­mate Group, a think-tank based in Lon­don, com­put­ers, print­ers, mobile phones and the wid­gets that accom­pany them account for the emis­sion of 830m tonnes of car­bon diox­ide around the world in 2007. That is about 2% of the esti­mated total of emis­sions from human activ­ity. And that is the same as the avi­a­tion industry’s con­tri­bu­tion. Accord­ing to the report, about a quar­ter of the emis­sions in ques­tion are gen­er­ated by the man­u­fac­ture of com­put­ers and so forth. The rest come from their use.

via More Intel­li­gent Life