Monday, January 15, 2007

Medium vs. medium

Mathematically of course, it should be a tie.

Well, I guess we are a medium, and I do cock an eyebrow on occasion, so who's to talk.

So it was nice to see another having a mild go at another, though it did come across as a bit 'green is our turf': An incomprehensible truth - as it's short term I'll pop it all in here:

Sky News viewers will by now be wearily familiar with its "UK's CO2 emissions this week" counter, part of the news channel's must-watch "green week". A giant string of numbers across the bottom of the screen, it is apparently counting - guess what? - the UK's CO2 emissions this week, presumably to tell us what a right bunch of pollutants we are. Hmm, interesting. Last time Monkey looked it was 6,385,073. What does this tell us, exactly? Monkey's not sure. In the absence of any context, it's about as useful as a petrol car with diesel in the tank. And how can Sky be so sure they have the correct figure? Have they strapped some measuring device to the top of the ozone layer, like a giant molecular pedometer? What if this week turned out to be a particularly good one (or bad one, depending on how you look at it) for CO2? We can only hope, in the hope of making it a better story, that they haven't left the cars running in the Isleworth car park all week.

They do have a point. And sadly, I suspect this will not be the last odd bit of green thing, thing and statistics trotted out in the coming... er, however long we have while they slug it out.

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