Factoids

Being in New York in UN Week (when the General Assembly gathers) you pick up some interesting but random "facts". Not sure what to do with them, and can't guarantee am not guaranteeing their accuracy, but they're interesting nonetheless. Like:

- The number of people suffering from Alzheimers in the world will increase five fold by 2020. The last 15 year prediction greatly underestimated the increase.

- In 2003 there were no mobile phones in Afghanistan. Now there are six different services and 3 million subscribers.

- If the US, Russia, India and China were as efficient as Japan in terms of carbon emissions global greenhouse gases would be cut by 20%.

- The markets allocate more capital in one hour than all governments combined in a year.

- At current trends the entire polar ice-cap will have disappeared in 23 years.

- China's per capita GDP places it below the 100th country in the world. (Which I guess is another way of illustrating potential growth)

- A new coal powered energy plant opens every three days. In 20 years we will have produced more CO2 than during all previous human use of coal.

PS: And a great quote from Desmond Tutu: "Religion is like a knife. If you use it to cut bread it's good. If you use it to cut your neighbours arm off it's bad."

Comments

[D Bull]

Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of factoid: "an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact."

Sacred factoid: "At current trends the entire polar ice-cap will have disappeared in 23 years."

Really?

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/a_new_record_for_antartic_total_ice_extent

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N39/C1.jsp

Can't blame you for not being aware of this research - the BBC's many environment correspondents tend to avoid such "inconvenient truths".

[Richard S]

Well that's exactly why I called this post Factoids! (And added that I could not verify or stand behind any of them). But well spotted, the ice cap line did start with Al Gore I think.
I've added inverted commas to make it clearer Im offering them up for thought, discussion and reaction rather than asserting them as the truth....(how very BBC)