Here are a few of my favorite geographical news stories I've culled from my postings on my Twitter and Facebook pages. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
- Now that Saudi Arabia has confirmed they are sending two women athletes to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, it will be the first modern Olympic Games where every country is sending both male and female athletes to the Olympic Games.
- One study finds that tourists use too much water in developing countries.
- One in five people worldwide lack electricity and two in five use wood, charcoal, dung or coal to cook and heat their homes, according to this World Bank article.
- The Strand in London just opened and it's Europe's tallest building for the time being.
Comments
The article tells us one out of five have no electricity service. This is a beautiful example of how to lie with true but unqualified numbers.
Having electricity service is not just a yes or no proposition as is pregnancy. Using 1000 watts vs 50 watts (as do billions of people) yet are both counted equally as “having electrical service.”
I just made a very crude estimate of electricity usage. I found that about 1.1 billion people ( Euro Zone + US + Japan + Russia) use nearly half of the world’s electricity. (Don’t sharp-shoot me on the accuracy, it is only to prove a point.)
The other 6 billion use the other half.
…and you would engineer a social solution exactly how?
Hola, muy bueno lo de difundir noticias geográficas, sería un buen camino ya que no suele aparecer en los medios de comunicación. Con respecto a las estadísticas recomiendo la página Web: Miniathure Earth dónde sacan números sobre que pasaría si la Tierra tuviera 100 habitantes, por ejemplo que 7 de cada 100 tiene estudios secundarios completos y 1 de cada 100 son universitarios recibidos. Saludos.
Demetrio, the way you framed your comment makes my response complicated.
You not only ask for a solution but a “social solution.” A lawyer might say you are invoking something, actually two things, not in evidence – that is, a solution and a social solution.
There are about 7.1 billion people on earth today. (Next year about 7.2 billion.) If we all had agreed in 1960 when there were only 3 billion that there would be no more population growth so that eventually everyone of us would have plenty of electricity this dream just might have been feasible.
But here we are in 2012 trying desperately to supply those who use large amounts of electricity plus chip away at the demand that grows every year. Babies don’t come with an electricity supply and they exceed deaths by about 100 million a year.
To make matters worse new generation capacity costs more than existing generating capacity. And those who do not have electricity are much poorer than those who do – or they would have electricity. Duh. Surprise, surprise. It gets worse. The cheapest energy at present is natural gas, a fossil fuel. Fossil fuels make CO2, a green house gas. GHG cause global warming and there is great pressure to decrease their use.
And it gets much worse. The sad news is that we have overpopulated all ways to solve the problem. Now our problem is to avoid mass starvation and the depletion of fresh water supply.
Up until a thousand years ago there were never more than 0.3 billion people on this planet. In only 1000 years we have about 24 mouths where we had one. I’ll bet neither your congressman nor your professor knows this. It is a pity they don’t.
The Shard, not the Strand, in London just opened and it’s Europe’s tallest building for the time being.