more fascinating facts and figures
3rd April 2018 – More Fascinating Facts and Figures
An instructive article I read recently suggested we should think harder about the numbers we read and try to put them in some kind of relative perspective. So I started thinking about the fact that the world’s population is already above seven billion and forecast to rise to as much as later this century. Now we all know seven billion is a really big number but have you ever thought how big it really is? Imagine a large sports stadium crammed with 100,000 spectators. Ten stadiums and you have a million people. So far so good. But for seven billion you need 70,000 packed stadiums.
That’s more than my mind can cope with so I took a different tack. Now I imagined setting off driving down a road with stadiums the size of Sydney's Olympic Stadium end to end on one side of the road. Only when I had driven one and a quarter times round the earth would I reach the final stadium. If that’s not bad enough, imagine the logistics to provide each spectator in one stadium with a T shirt, hot dog and drink and then clear up the trash and the deluge of sewerage. Now do that for all the stadiums and you start to get an idea of what the world has to cope with every day!
Now if that number was hard enough to put into perspective, here are some more big numbers. A study commissioned by the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, the results of which were published in Nature in March 2018 determined that there are more than 79,000 tonnes of ocean plastic in a 1.6 million square kilometre area of the North Pacific Ocean, 16 times more than previous estimates, and including more than 1.8 trillion microplastic pieces (to put those numbers in perspective the chemicals industry produces 300 million tonnes of plastic a year, less than 20% of which is recycled, while the world’s oceans cover 300 million square kilometres in total). I wonder if the climate scientists have factored in the plastic when forecasting rising sea levels due to climate change?
Incidentally it’s not just the salty seawater that’s at risk. The World Health Organisation has announced a review into the potential risks of plastic in drinking water after a new analysis of some of the world’s most popular bottled water brands found that more than 90% contained tiny pieces of plastic. A previous study also found high levels of microplastics in tap water so we aren’t saved by giving up those polluting plastic bottles! It’s not just water that is polluted with chemicals. Another study suggested that traces of a synthetic chemical, Bisphenol A (BPA), can be found in more than 80% of teenagers.
Still on water, the 2018 United Nations World Water Development Report warned that more than five billion people could suffer water shortages by 2050, largely as a result of increased usage, climate change and pollution. Water usage has grown by one per cent per year over the past decade.
From water shortages to food excesses. The British Government has instructed food producers to cut 20% of calories in their food products by 2023 in order to reduce childhood obesity. Already, one third of British children are overweight or obese by the time they leave primary school. Cancer Research UK estimates 70% of millennials will be dangerously overweight by middle age.
An analysis conducted by Forced Migration Observatory concluded that at least 7.7 million Brazilians, or one every minute, have been forced to leave their homes since 2000. Of those, 6.4 million moved after large-scale flooding, droughts and other natural disasters, while 1.2 million were forced out by large-scale construction projects like dams. Disaster experts estimate that climate and weather events displaced more than one million Americans from their homes in 2017. A study found that after Hurricane Harvey 30% of affected households had fallen behind on their rent and mortgage payments.
On a much more positive note for the planet, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance the cost of wind and solar energy dropped 18% in 2017. Between 2010 and 2017 the cost of solar has dropped by 77 per cent to a benchmark global average of $70/MWh, the cost of wind has fallen 38 per cent to a benchmark global average of $US55/MWh and the benchmark price for lithium-ion batteries has fallen nearly 80 per cent to $US209/kWh. (If you want to put these numbers in perspective, dig out your latest utility bill and check what you are charged per kWh remembering of course that there are 1,000 kW in every MW).
German courts are getting increasingly involved with climate change issues. A Peruvian farmer has successfully sued electricity utility RWE in the German courts because of glacier melting caused by CO2 emissions from coal fired power stations. Meanwhile, Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban polluting diesel powered vehicles. Already the price of diesel vehicles has dropped.
SoftBank and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement to build a 200 GW US$ 200 billion solar power plant to more than replace existing crude oil fired power stations. To put that in perspective, that is more than six times the current generating capacity of South Africa, which has a larger population. You might ask why they need all that power? Well, as temperatures rise they are going to need more power to cool their buildings and to desalinate (and deplasticate) sea water.
If you worried that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica had compromised your personal data, that affray has nothing on the US State Department which has filed a proposal which would require most visa applicants to list all social media identities they have used in the past five years, as well as previously used telephone numbers, email addresses and their international travel history over the same period. The Chinese government is going even further and creating a social credit system to improve the behaviour of individual citizens in which each one earns a score for good and bad behaviour. Already more than seven million people have been banned from boarding flights and three million from high speed trains because of aberrant social behaviour. And you thought big brother is watching was just a catchy phrase!
On a much more positive Chinese note, China could roll out medical artifical intelligence (AI) applications to the world. Alibaba has designed AI software to help interpret CT scans and an AI medical lab to assist doctors make diagnoses. Tencent’s Miying is a medical imaging program that helps doctors detect early signs of cancer, while Yitu is developing software that automates the identification of early stages of lung cancer. Imagine if China made all these available – hopefully free of charge – to all the short staffed hospitals in third world countries.
A 2018 report from the World Economic Forum claims 1.4 million American jobs will be eliminated by automation by 2026, most of them held by women. The Association for Advancing Automation reported that in 2017 North American companies bought a record 34,904 robotic units valued at US$ 1.9 billion. The number of robots ordered by the automotive industry dropped while the plastics, rubber, metals, food and consumer goods sectors recorded the highest growth. Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots while Walmart is starting to install shelf-scanning robots seeking out of stock items, incorrect prices, and other things that need human attention. With so many jobs being automated it’s amazing they don’t show up on official unemployment statistics.
Research by academics from the University of Leeds found that the total cost of electric vehicles in the United Kingdom, USA and Japan over the first four years was lower than the total cost of hybrid and conventional petrol or diesel powered vehicles. Although the initial capital cost of electric vehicles is higher, fuel costs are lower, as is maintenance as there are far fewer parts to an electric vehicle.
A February 2018 report from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) records that the number of electric cars worldwide at the end of 2017 was 3.2 million, of which 1.2 million are in China, 750,000 in the USA, 201,000 in Japan and 187,000 in Norway. Some 1.2 million new electric cars were registered in 2017. The number of electric vehicles sold in each of the past three years has been more than double that of the previous year.
Finally, in this age of false news, the one thing you probably believed was true and accurate was your electric clock. So you will be disappointed to hear that because of a dispute over electricity between Serbia and Kosovo, clocks in Western Europe relying on electric cycles have lost more than six minutes so far this year. At least six is a number we can all understand!
An instructive article I read recently suggested we should think harder about the numbers we read and try to put them in some kind of relative perspective. So I started thinking about the fact that the world’s population is already above seven billion and forecast to rise to as much as later this century. Now we all know seven billion is a really big number but have you ever thought how big it really is? Imagine a large sports stadium crammed with 100,000 spectators. Ten stadiums and you have a million people. So far so good. But for seven billion you need 70,000 packed stadiums.
That’s more than my mind can cope with so I took a different tack. Now I imagined setting off driving down a road with stadiums the size of Sydney's Olympic Stadium end to end on one side of the road. Only when I had driven one and a quarter times round the earth would I reach the final stadium. If that’s not bad enough, imagine the logistics to provide each spectator in one stadium with a T shirt, hot dog and drink and then clear up the trash and the deluge of sewerage. Now do that for all the stadiums and you start to get an idea of what the world has to cope with every day!
Now if that number was hard enough to put into perspective, here are some more big numbers. A study commissioned by the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, the results of which were published in Nature in March 2018 determined that there are more than 79,000 tonnes of ocean plastic in a 1.6 million square kilometre area of the North Pacific Ocean, 16 times more than previous estimates, and including more than 1.8 trillion microplastic pieces (to put those numbers in perspective the chemicals industry produces 300 million tonnes of plastic a year, less than 20% of which is recycled, while the world’s oceans cover 300 million square kilometres in total). I wonder if the climate scientists have factored in the plastic when forecasting rising sea levels due to climate change?
Incidentally it’s not just the salty seawater that’s at risk. The World Health Organisation has announced a review into the potential risks of plastic in drinking water after a new analysis of some of the world’s most popular bottled water brands found that more than 90% contained tiny pieces of plastic. A previous study also found high levels of microplastics in tap water so we aren’t saved by giving up those polluting plastic bottles! It’s not just water that is polluted with chemicals. Another study suggested that traces of a synthetic chemical, Bisphenol A (BPA), can be found in more than 80% of teenagers.
Still on water, the 2018 United Nations World Water Development Report warned that more than five billion people could suffer water shortages by 2050, largely as a result of increased usage, climate change and pollution. Water usage has grown by one per cent per year over the past decade.
From water shortages to food excesses. The British Government has instructed food producers to cut 20% of calories in their food products by 2023 in order to reduce childhood obesity. Already, one third of British children are overweight or obese by the time they leave primary school. Cancer Research UK estimates 70% of millennials will be dangerously overweight by middle age.
An analysis conducted by Forced Migration Observatory concluded that at least 7.7 million Brazilians, or one every minute, have been forced to leave their homes since 2000. Of those, 6.4 million moved after large-scale flooding, droughts and other natural disasters, while 1.2 million were forced out by large-scale construction projects like dams. Disaster experts estimate that climate and weather events displaced more than one million Americans from their homes in 2017. A study found that after Hurricane Harvey 30% of affected households had fallen behind on their rent and mortgage payments.
On a much more positive note for the planet, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance the cost of wind and solar energy dropped 18% in 2017. Between 2010 and 2017 the cost of solar has dropped by 77 per cent to a benchmark global average of $70/MWh, the cost of wind has fallen 38 per cent to a benchmark global average of $US55/MWh and the benchmark price for lithium-ion batteries has fallen nearly 80 per cent to $US209/kWh. (If you want to put these numbers in perspective, dig out your latest utility bill and check what you are charged per kWh remembering of course that there are 1,000 kW in every MW).
German courts are getting increasingly involved with climate change issues. A Peruvian farmer has successfully sued electricity utility RWE in the German courts because of glacier melting caused by CO2 emissions from coal fired power stations. Meanwhile, Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban polluting diesel powered vehicles. Already the price of diesel vehicles has dropped.
SoftBank and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement to build a 200 GW US$ 200 billion solar power plant to more than replace existing crude oil fired power stations. To put that in perspective, that is more than six times the current generating capacity of South Africa, which has a larger population. You might ask why they need all that power? Well, as temperatures rise they are going to need more power to cool their buildings and to desalinate (and deplasticate) sea water.
If you worried that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica had compromised your personal data, that affray has nothing on the US State Department which has filed a proposal which would require most visa applicants to list all social media identities they have used in the past five years, as well as previously used telephone numbers, email addresses and their international travel history over the same period. The Chinese government is going even further and creating a social credit system to improve the behaviour of individual citizens in which each one earns a score for good and bad behaviour. Already more than seven million people have been banned from boarding flights and three million from high speed trains because of aberrant social behaviour. And you thought big brother is watching was just a catchy phrase!
On a much more positive Chinese note, China could roll out medical artifical intelligence (AI) applications to the world. Alibaba has designed AI software to help interpret CT scans and an AI medical lab to assist doctors make diagnoses. Tencent’s Miying is a medical imaging program that helps doctors detect early signs of cancer, while Yitu is developing software that automates the identification of early stages of lung cancer. Imagine if China made all these available – hopefully free of charge – to all the short staffed hospitals in third world countries.
A 2018 report from the World Economic Forum claims 1.4 million American jobs will be eliminated by automation by 2026, most of them held by women. The Association for Advancing Automation reported that in 2017 North American companies bought a record 34,904 robotic units valued at US$ 1.9 billion. The number of robots ordered by the automotive industry dropped while the plastics, rubber, metals, food and consumer goods sectors recorded the highest growth. Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots while Walmart is starting to install shelf-scanning robots seeking out of stock items, incorrect prices, and other things that need human attention. With so many jobs being automated it’s amazing they don’t show up on official unemployment statistics.
Research by academics from the University of Leeds found that the total cost of electric vehicles in the United Kingdom, USA and Japan over the first four years was lower than the total cost of hybrid and conventional petrol or diesel powered vehicles. Although the initial capital cost of electric vehicles is higher, fuel costs are lower, as is maintenance as there are far fewer parts to an electric vehicle.
A February 2018 report from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) records that the number of electric cars worldwide at the end of 2017 was 3.2 million, of which 1.2 million are in China, 750,000 in the USA, 201,000 in Japan and 187,000 in Norway. Some 1.2 million new electric cars were registered in 2017. The number of electric vehicles sold in each of the past three years has been more than double that of the previous year.
Finally, in this age of false news, the one thing you probably believed was true and accurate was your electric clock. So you will be disappointed to hear that because of a dispute over electricity between Serbia and Kosovo, clocks in Western Europe relying on electric cycles have lost more than six minutes so far this year. At least six is a number we can all understand!
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