2 Billion Parades

America's famous Thanksgiving Day parade is famous for it's enormous balloons. These character balloons can each be the size of a medium-sized building, and require dozens of people to control them, and prevent them from floating away.


Clearly, it takes a huge amount of helium to fill these balloons. But the people at the Climate Reality Project did the maths to compare the amount of gas for the annual parade, to the amount of annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Turns out that to put the world's greenhouse gases into parade balloons (even giant ones) we would need to have 2 billion parades each year. That's a lot of gas!

[Related Links: Other ways of visualising emissions - as a giant ball, compared to a double-decker bus, or as a globe-covering quilt.]