Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral
Misleading stats too.I'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's burned. Secondly, and he notes this in his estimate, it's 500,000,000 "killed _or affected_", 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.Basically some guy just made up a number of animals that exist and everyone else just assumed that 100% of them were killed. Terrible "science."Many bigger news sites have braced themselves for pushback on this stat by adding "and plants" ("500,000,000 animals and plants") so that their use of the statistic can't be criticized later.