Environmental Math

You simply cannot make this stuff up! A nice little expose on how radical environmentalists do math...and come up with their fraudulent statistics.

Frequent Flower Miles

Many readers yesterday were confused by the claim in a Daily Telegraph piece we cited that "the flowers that make up the average bunch have flown 33,800 miles to reach Britain." Given that the circumference of the Earth is less than 25,000 miles, how could this be?

No, Brits aren't sending their sweethearts native-grown Venus flytraps. Rather, the environmentalists who are making this claim refer to something called "flower miles," which, as near as we can figure, is a multiplicative measure like man-hours.

If, say, a staff of 10 work the same eight-hour shift, they've worked 80 man-hours. If, say, two dozen roses are transported 150 miles from a warehouse to the lucky recipient, they've traveled 3,600 "flower miles," even though the vehicle conveying them has only gone the same 150 miles as each individual flower.

If this is really how environmentalists measure things, they should be against carpooling. After all, if you drive to work with three passengers, you're quadrupling the number of man-miles traveled. The Earth can't take that kind of abuse!

James Taranto, Opinion Journal, February 15, 2007

Remember this, when you read any "data" they provide about global warming, or cigarette smoke...

The Gunslinger