Worldometers is a fascinating website that shows visitors real-time statistics on a wide range of categories. The categories include world population, government & economics, society & media, the environment, food, water, energy, and health. While some of the statistics are exactly what you would expect, such as current world population or deaths caused by alcohol and smoking, the real beauty of this website is its ability to update these statistics in real time right in front of your eyes. As long as it’s taken me to type this paragraph, the 8 million cigarettes have been smoked, 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide has been pumped into the atmosphere, and 2,000 television sets have been purchased.
Some of the statistics are lighthearted and mildly interesting, like amount of books published this year (773,324), tweets sent today (600,000), or emails sent today (215,000 currently and rising rapidly). Most of the statistics are grim, and are made even more so by the constant update. Some of these unfortunate statistics are fortunately ticking up slowly – the 2,975,612 tons of toxic chemicals released into the environment this year has only risen by a dozen in the last few minutes. Forest loss rises similarly slowly, currently at 1,580,296 hectares. Desertification is a little faster, and has already reached 3,646,502 hectares.
Not all of the statistics are so negative, however: the counter of MWh produced by renewable resources is slowly but steadily catching up to MWh produced by non-renewables, and the largest number on the entire site by far is the MWh of energy produced by solar energy that has struck the earth TODAY. Worldomoter also includes statistics on days until the end of gas (59,166), days until the end of coal (150,336), and barrels of oil left (1,154,233,840,000) which is decreasing close to 1,000 per second.
What I think Worldometer does best is to put things in perspective: there are so many deaths every second, yet so many births per second, that the net increase ends up being relatively slow. For every undernourished person (772,984,307), there is almost 2 overweight people. Every time an individual beats malnutrition, someone else is diagnosed as obese. This is the only time I’ve ever seen any of these statistics flash before me like this and I have to say it’s very eye-opening. Each live statistic can be expanded to reveal even more detail and links to other sites or statistics where you can find out more. From a physical geographer’s standpoint, this site is a treasure trove of information about amounts and rates of countless statistics all applicable to Earth’s systems.