I for one welcome our....

er..

Wrong thread - sorry.

The BBC News page covering this was hilariously stacked with factual inaccuracies and general idiocy, over and above their usual standards - and that's on top of Wissner-Gross's laughably wonky figures. Sadly they managed to cleanse the page of the worst offenders before I'd even had a chance to fire off a vitriolic carbon-guzzling email in their direction.

Apparently Kangaroos don't fart due to the inability of their gut fauna to generate CH4, consequently we need our gut fauna to be gene spliced with those of a Kangaroo.

Efros

Paris... cos queefing don't count!

The discrepancy between Google's opinion of the CO2 cost and the Prof's (however un-kettle like the results may actually be) looks quite simple to explain.

The way I read this when I first saw it, Google are saying "we use x" and the Prof is saying "the cost is y". The fact that x and y are different numbers is because x=apples (Google's 'leccy consumption) and y=pears (Google + your PC + all those other bits in between that make it work).

I think I'd rather do my bit for the planet by burning a facsimile of a Tudor Rose on the wall......

you know!

Using the newly developed F.L.A.T.T. tables (Flatulence Linked Anal Taxation Tariff), all foods will be labelled with one of 5 categories, from 5 to 1, with 1 being the highest taxed bracket (Baked Beans, Brussel Sprouts, Cabbage, lentils etc; that's payback for the veggie-munchers!) NuLabour expects to raise BILLIONS over the next two years, as more and more people find themselves reduced to living off baked beans coz they can't get credit for anything else!

...that's bound to put the wind up someone.

How could google possibly afford to serve free (well, advert-supported) searches if they emitted 7g of CO2? The fuel costs would be phenomenal if the searches needed this much energy. I bet he has calculated it as if only one person is using the servers at a time.

Even if this is true, which I bet it isn't, how much would it cost to drive to the library to look things up?

Thanks Reg - monday seems so much better for reading this. I'm in a quiet office trying not to laugh out loud. Perhaps the "automatic in-pant flare stack technology" could be USB powered?

Pedant mode...

>Farting and failing to burn off the resulting methane is incredibly environmentally irresponsible. The average person emits anywhere from half a litre to three litres of evil-smelling gas daily.

Er, methane is odourless around room temperature/pressure. You're talking about the other more aromatic compounds that are generally released at the same time.

Also, the advice to light them is a little um, well, do we have a word for a "Which? says destroy your disk drive" error? They neglected to mention that smashing up a disk drive can create small fast moving shards of sharp and spiky metal or glass which can be very painful. I'd have hoped El Reg might have pointed out that sparking up a bottom burp can go wrong? Ok, mostly harmless, but still, someone might try it after a night of Vindaloo and lager and do themselves some real harm. And if it's like my local curry house, the phrases "blast radius" and "Darwin nominee" come to mind.

I know, I know, I'm going. Mine's the one with a box of matches and some H-cream in the pocket

Are we missing a valuable energy generation capability here?

Collection may be difficult, granted, but how about pulling it all back out of the atmosphere, is it feasible?

My worry is as earth's population grows, our sum total of guffing combined with a lightning strike could see us all gone in a big KABOOM!

Coat no longer needed, it's warming up.

Does this reduce my googling allowance?

The vented one please.

If all the excess methane we humans produce on a daily basis could be captured in the home and then sent to power a generating plant then the millions of unemployed could be paid to stay at home, farting into a collecting bottle to produce green energy

Thanks Lewis.

FAR worse - I'm sure there was something in the New Scientist about looking at the bacteria kangaroos have in their gut because they don't produce so much NH4 and seeing if cows couldn't have their intestinal flora modified.

As for hippos and other large animals, elephants? I'll let someone else do that from a safe distance.

The New Zealand Government even tried (and failed) to tax farts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/05/australia.davidfickling

Flames, for lighting up!

Don't forget that while some of us are biofuelled (veggies, that is), those of you who eat beef are producing even more methane. They will presumably have to follow around a beef herd and combust their output too?

AC for obvious reasons, I suspect I've just started a war...

Paris since we're on the subject of vegetable matter.

No no no Lewis not Zippos nasty hydrocarbons not to mention co and co2 etc.

A greener option might be to build a mini tesla in our undies for those illuminating moments...

Just a thought, seeing as the article has been so well thought out and researched, to be really eco-friendly, should we not shave our (_*_) before lighting?

Just what *is* the chemical composition of singed harsehairs??

..how many kettles worth of C02 did you produce while writing this article?

Well, there was your laptop being on, you sitting there farting as you concentrated on the numbers (last nights Vindaloo didn't help), your lighting, radio playing in background etc etc.

You could have been better going & making Sarah Bee a cup of tea (bless her she's working hard today) and going home early.

we just need platinum-lined catalytic-converter underpants in order to make these dangerous emissions safe!

"evil-smelling gas" ... methane is odorless. the fart smell comes from other stuff like hydrogen sulfide. still worth lighting them though - partly to convert the CH4 to CO2 and partly for amusement ....

The icon doesn't need explaining, obviously ...

Who care about Gaza, the recession, feral kids, moral-less politicians etc.

I don't - this is the sort of "thought-provoking" article we need in today's depressing climate. I'm a self-confessed ecotard, and I even I found this absurdly funny.

Pure class.

I always though lighting farts "trousers down" could result in the risk of a nasty flash-back. The Davy-lamp nature of the trouser cloth should reduce this risk significantly. Unless you have particularly flammable trousers.

Flame icon obviously.

Could lighting your parps be used to power a small-sized combustion engine?

Feed a tube from your aniarse to a small engine housed on the back of a pair of rollerstates. To be fair you would have to pump out a lot to keep going.

Or you could pump-out into a pressurised container. When it's full it could beep at you, at which point you could slot it into your roller-skate or stakeboard engine.

Or just take it home, release it under the duvet in the morning (as your getting up for work) so when your wife gets up she thinks she's shit herself.

Flame, because farts and fire shouldn't really mix.

So when do we see the next Toyota hybrid with methane abosrbers in the seats, linked directly to the air intake? Gives a new slant to "man-machine interfaces"...

"Was that you?"

"Yes, needed a bit more power to overtake that tractor:".

Might be the incentive TfL need to ban standing-room on buses, since getting all the passengers to sit down could improve air quality and fuel economy

can we have a new Reg measurement for "the average person's daily rectal-methane greenhouse burden"!

Oh, and a new keyboard too, natch.

Maybe the association or linking to farts should be removed?

The first and most obvious reason is that it seems dreadfully unfair to farts. After all, what have farts ever done apart from give relief - usually very well received relief.

The second is, of course, it would seem awe-fully unfair to give green activistas pains in the nether regions possibly almost laming themselves in the process? Preventing gustos can lead to terrible pains and just imagine the consequences of having to call out ambulances and health intervention purely because a futuristically sensitive person prevented a fart or two or more from being released?

Hmmm... on second thoughts cancel part 2 above.

All Wissner-Guff's site is doing is a dodgy estimate of the energy consumed by a website and then claiming some dodgier American 'renewable energy certificates' for you. These do not mean that the electrons feeding your site came from wind power (or his guff power, perhaps we should fit him with a turbine...) but that a piece of paper somewhere got processed. The problems are that a) US renewable or offset certificates are not recognised anywhere else in the world as the requirements are far less stringent and b) that all you are doing by purchasing them is making the grid electricity that little bit more dirty and coal based for everyone else in the US instead of actually changing the overall carbon intensity. The same goes for Google's hydro electric powered facilities, they are not green through being hydro, they are just making the grid dirtier for everyone else in the state they have moved in to.

I'm betting a tenner that both Lewis and Ted have listed giving up smoking as their new years resolutions! :D

Do I get a carbon credit for using Gas-X then?

I wonder if there are plans afoot within google such that when OLED screens are popular, the pages will be mainly black, thus being more 'green'.

With standard LCDs, the colour makes very little difference - black simply absorbs light from the backlight and turns it into heat (white lets all the light through). With OLED screens, the black is literally turning the light off, thus saving energy.

Of course, this is just my rambling mind, but it must be something google are thinking about!

To all those worried about the very real dangers involved in igniting your rectal pumpage by-product - I seem to recall that Lewis was a bomb disposal guy in a previous life.

I think he's the ideal guy to write an article on anal combustion safety, possibly accompanied by Playmobil re-enactments.

Yeah, lighting your farts may reduce the methane and therefore reduce a greehouse gas, but lighting your farts produces heat, which, well, heats up the environment... and if you do this outside, surely you becoming just as environmentally unfriendly as a patio heater then!!

Oh so cruel. Why not just call me Johnny Fartpants and be done with it

Just part of our plan to take over your puny planet.

We'd like to encourage all humans to eat lots of beans and Google way!

- Your future Overlords

1 kg milk = 100 gm CH4 = 2.5 kg CO2 equivalent

Paris MilkMaidEquivalent icon 'cos the Google "blu dart" SearchEngineEquivalent icon is currently unavailable.

http://www.blackle.com/ made some sense when CRT's were the predominant display technology as CRT's do use more power when displaying a white screen than they do a black screen. But the black background has zero effect on power consumption for LCD displays, whose power consumption is independent of the amount of light displayed to the user.

"According to Dr. James L. A. Roth, the author of Gastrointestinal Gas (Ch. 17 in Gastroenterology, v. 4, 1976) most people (2/3 of adults) pass farts that contain no methane. If both parents are methane producers, their children have a 95% chance of being producers as well. The reason for this is apparently unknown."

The obvious solution is to stop methane producers breeding together. Your children will only contribute to global warming if both you and your partner see a blue tinge to your fart flame, and this ctest ould be incorporated into civil and religious weddings.

Le Petomane could have powered the stage lights.

And if you need to search on the name, prepare to abandon any idea you had of the French as a nation of sophisticates.

@AC 14:40 - The Great Voltini and Nurse Electra are ahead of you, too ... Another fine show.