I am sure this question has a factual answer, but I don’t know if that answer can be agreed upon. I hope I am in the right forum.
While reading this thread, I clicked on Cat’s link and watched the bottle video. From there, I clicked on related links and came across this.
I watched the whole 22 minute video, even though I find the hostess annoying and patronizing. Every time I hear those kind of stats, I always am staggered. Can it possibly be true? I watched a Bullshit! video once that seemed to dispute this, or at least implied that the implications aren’t as dire as people make it seem.
But I don’t know enough about that to debate it. I just want to know if those figures she gives can be right. Is it possible that the Amazon is being cut down at the rate of four football fields a minute!! I can’t even type that without being shocked and awed.
The little bit of Googling I managed didn’t help me. Any Dopers have know the straight dope on this?
That’s a little low, actually, for 2008. According to this site, the total deforestation in Brazil* for 2008 was 12,911 sq km, or 1,291,100 hectares (1 sq km = 100 ha). Since there are 525,600 minutes in a year, that’s roughly 2.5 hectares per minute. An American football field is 5,353 m2, or just over half a hectare (ha = 10,000 m2). So the rate for 2008 was about 5 football fields per minute.
*This includes only the Brazilian part of the Amazon basin; it doesn’t include other parts of the Amazon basin, where deforestation is also often high.
ETA. The deforestation rate in Brazil has slowed quite a bit recently, but this is mainly due to economic conditions.
Wow. Thanks. I had heard these kinds of stats thrown around before, but geezus, I think on some level, I don’t want to believe that! It sounds almost impossible.