World Statistics By the Minute



Global MapFamily historians are always looking into the past to learn more of their ancestors, yet examining and being aware of what is happening in the world today can be just as important. There is an online site, ‘Worldometers‘ which cooperates with the ‘Real Time Statistics Project’ to provide statistics of all types of events in real time. The site is made up of counters which offer the most up-to-date figures on different categories. Those figures are continuously updated.

Whenever you access the site at the top will appear the month, day, year and time the statistics represent. Next are the eight major categories with major components and its current statistics. What is fascinating to watch is that those figures continue to change, minute to minute and even second to second.

The categories are: World Population, Government and Economics, Society and Media, Environment, Food, Water, Energy and Health. The sections under each category are varied. Under World Population is the current world population figure of over 6.9 billion and climbing. Also is the figure for the number of deaths world-wide in one day, rough around 86,000.

Going to Government and Economics would be the number of automobiles, 4.2 million, produced this year (since January 1, 2011) in the world, the number of computers sold, 23 million and how much governments are spending on their military.

With Society and Media there is the number of Internet users across the globe, the figure for new books published, some 81,000 and how many email messages, over 2 billion, sent in a day. With Environment is the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that are given off, the figures for the number of plant and animal species, over 11,224, that have gone extinct during the year and how much forest land has been lost.

The Food category gives the number of about 1 billion undernourished people in the world and the amount of food produced during the year. The number of people with no access to safe drinking water is about 1.3 billion in the Water category and with Energy, how many barrels of oil were pumped, over 44 million, that day. Under the Heath category it gives this year the number of women, about 51,000, who died during childbirth and the number of people, some 542,000, who died this year from smoking.

There is a separate section titled ‘Statistics of the Month’ with unique categories dating back to January 2008. Some of the areas covered include: the number of glaciers lost in West Antarctica, the number of toilets flushed and how many people died of swine flu, all in 2009.

This is an interesting and educational site to investigate.

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