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Re: SHOCK MEDIA - Pulp Fiction



SHOCK MEDIA (shockme@ipgnet.com) wrote:

:                Everyday, an area of tropical forest the size of Great Britain
:                is destroyed. 

Uh-huh. The area of the United Kingdom is about 95,000 square miles. 
Assuming that this deforestation has been going on for one year (it's in 
fact considerably longer than that), that's 95,000 * 365 = 34.7 million 
square miles, or about 60% of the earth's land surface -- more than the 
total area of Asia and south America combined, and _way_ more than the 
total tropical forest area.

The actual annual rate of deforestation worldwide is around 17 million 
hectares, about 65,000 square miles, for a daily rate of about 180 square 
miles -- not 95,000. You're off by a factor of more than 500.

Your position has merits, but you're not helping your argument with wild, 
unsubstantiated, and wrong facts.

:                Previously, the Wall of China was the only visible
:                man-made object from space. 

This statement is also false. It depends on what you mean by space, but 
there are dozens of man-made objects that are more readily visible than 
the Great Wall, which is actually fairly hard to see. Brightly-lit cities 
at night, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (totally 
logged on the Haiti side, in a straight line), even portions of the US 
Interstate Highway System are easier to see. And even from Shuttle 
altitude, you pretty much can't make out anything besides the shapes of 
land masses and cloud cover.

-- 
| Steve Thornton | stevet@cnct.com | stevet@eskimo.com | New York |
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