Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral
Misleading stats too.<p>I&#x27;ve seen countless articles mention that 500,000,000 animals have died. I was skeptical as to how you could even devise such a number reliably so I looked into the source of this statistic. First off, this number was devised by a single Uni professor. How? He multiplied the square-mile density of each species by the amount of territory that&#x27;s burned. Secondly, and he notes this in his estimate, it&#x27;s 500,000,000 &quot;killed _or affected_&quot;, not just killed. Third, for almost all species, there are no density figures, so he just picked the number 10 (lol, yes, seriously). Fourth, roughly 30% of those estimated animals are birds, of which other experts say 99% would survive because, ya know, they can fly away. Of the other 70%, many others would have just walked or slithered or run and gotten away from the fire.<p>Basically some guy just made up a number of animals that exist and everyone else just assumed that 100% of them were killed. Terrible &quot;science.&quot;<p>Many bigger news sites have braced themselves for pushback on this stat by adding &quot;and plants&quot; (&quot;500,000,000 animals and plants&quot;) so that their use of the statistic can&#x27;t be criticized later.