The much ballyhooed March 28
Earth Hour called for individuals, businesses and governments across the
globe to turn off unused appliances and computers for 1 hour as a show of
support for climate change action. The World Wildlife Foundation, the sponsor
of the event, went so far as to call Earth Hour "the world's first-ever
global vote about the future of our planet."
Internet users, it seems, could not have cared less.
The monitoring service Pingdom, which tracks 35,000 sites and servers across
125 countries, measured Internet activity during the Earth Hour time range.
Compared with the same period for the three previous weeks, Pingdom found no
decrease in Internet use.
"There was no noticeable difference, which means that Earth Hour had no
impact on the Internet," Pingdom wrote on its blog. The
company was disappointed with the results.
"The Internet today takes up a significant amount of the global power
output and considerably more of our collective attention," Peter Alguacil,
a Pingdom Web analyst, said in a statement. "All servers and web sites are
not business critical, and we sincerely wish more companies, organizations and
individuals will join us in pledging to shut down any infrastructure they can
spare next year to make Earth Hour 2010 a virtual event as well as a physical
one."
According to an AMD-sponsored study by the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, power for servers and their cooling
equipment took up 1.2 percent of the entire U.S.
power consumption in 2005 at a cost of $2.6 billion. The numbers don't include
power for data storage and network equipment.
Pingdom promised to shut down as much as possible without compromising its main
monitoring and notification services for Earth Hour 2010, and urged individuals
and Internet companies to do the same.
"Earth Hour is intended to mobilize and manifest support for action on
climate change. What if Facebook, after notifying users, decided to shut down
for 60 minutes next year? That would be an unprecedented global
manifestation in itself," said Alguacil.
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