Firstly, I am not condoning the ravaging of the rainforest and the destruction of the Amazonian environment, but what I do object to is what I like to term “made up statistics”. I’m sure that the rainforest is being depleted at an alarming rate, but Sky’s adverts have really started annoying me with their made up figures.

Recently Gary Neville has fronted an advert which quotes: “The area the size of three football pitches in the amazon disappears every minute“.

Now that seems a lot to me so I thought I’d do the maths:

The area of the Rainforest is 5,500,000 km²

Since we’re using Gary Neville as an example, let’s use Old Trafford, of which the pitch size is 105 x 68 m = 7,140 m²

Three of these would be 7,140 x 3 = 21,420 m² or 21.4 km²

If three pitches disappeared every minute, then in an hour it would be 21.4 x 60 = 1284 km²

Every day would be 1284 x 24 = 30,816 km²

Therefore, how many days left of the rainforest do we have before it disappears into oblivion?

Well the calculation would be 5,500,000 / 30,816 = 178.478 days (rounding down to 178 days)

Considering today is 15th June 2014, if Gary Neville is correct, then the rainforest will have gone by December 10th 2014

Does that sound right? It certainly doesn’t to me. Sure I agree that something must be done, but don’t make up stats just to shock people into doing something about it. I hate made up statistics, it’s a real pet peeve of mine. Not the first time this season that Gary Neville has got something really wrong.