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Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Worries Researchers
NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they "found much more debris than they expected." The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash.
"The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. 'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution."
Is it full of garbage patch dolls?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you look under the bottom of each plastic, you'll see a triangle-cycle. It means it can be recycled! :) :)
I'd guestimate, (after years of consumerage) that 95% of what we consume can be recycled. Just seperate
and curb it!
This story remind me of the George Carlin bit on the environment:
AccountKiller
We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.
Famous last words before being eaten by Cthulhu.
The mass production of plastics didn't take off until about the 1950s. What we're looking at is approximately 60 years worth of garbage. The pile they have looked at is approximately twice the size of Texas. If that doesn't seem large now, then it certainly will in another fifty years if we continue to discard plastics at our current rates. I suspect that you'd find that our use of plastic has curved upward sine the 50s, rather than remaining at a constant rate... so I think that hoping for an island only four times the size of texas by 2050 would be optimistic.
Considering that the bottom of the food chain resides in said "thin layer" (and much of the top of the food chain feeds there) the potential impact is magnified well beyond its volumetric measure.
Considering that the bottom of the food chain resides in said "thin layer" (and much of the top of the food chain feeds there) the potential impact is magnified well beyond its volumetric measure.
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers. So twice the size of Texas is 1.4 million square kilometers. The world's oceans cover approximately 361 million square kilometers. So an area TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS (oh noes! Panic!) is 1/3rd of a percentage point of the surface area of all the world's oceans.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Problem: Overfishing
Problem: Garbage in the water
Solution: Pay fisherman to catch garbage
Why not pay some of those Japanese whaling factory ships with their big front loading dock doors and all those impoverished fishing crews to go and net this crud out of the water... keeps an industry running, saves some whales, helps a bit of fish restocking and cleans up the planet a bit... I'm sure they can find some bailout budget left to help out Can't hurt to try.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
Researchers (and sci-fi writers) always talk about things like gigantic space elevators and star-encompassing spheres; works that would take an entire world's focus (and several generations of dedicated work) to accomplish. I always figured that those were unaccomplishable dreams...
But then I read this story and got to thinking... Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?
present day... present time... hahahaha...
Maybe it's a small percentage point, but twice the size of texas is still pretty damn big!
ìì!
Gyre never made it as far as chortle or galumph, but if it had crossed into proper english it would most certainly be a verb.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
The "pile" isn't. Most of the plastic is microscopic bits of plastic floating under the surface. That's why they're wondering about plankton and trying to convert it into diesel fuel. Those few pieces of plastic they found on the surface is all that found to photograph that day. If you sail down there bring a microscope.
That's 0.3% for those of us who are like Rodney McKay, and understand numbers better than words.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
And promptly spit back out. Hey, even unspeakable horrors have standards. He's not gonna eat something that tastes like garbage.
Don't mess with plastic Texas!
I've seen a handful of pictures from this Pacific Gyre, but they tend to be closely cropped pictures of nets full of garbage. Are there any pictures that give you a sense of scale for the Gyre? Maybe an aerial photo or something?
-Rich
The gyres (e.g., the Sargasso Sea) are where most of the nutrient transition from plankton to the rest of the food chain happens. It is a big deal, and you obviously don't know the first thing about oceanic life.
My wife..(yes my wife, and yes she's real flesh and blood) asked for an image of this Texas sized floating isle of junk. I can't seem to find one. The link shows a patch of junk about a squared meter in size. Any good images that I can point her to?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
so I think that hoping for an island only four times the size of texas by 2050 would be optimistic.
Well, let's be pessimistic and make it SIXTEEN times the size of Texas. In 2050, we'd still only have covered 3% of the world's ocean surface with a strange plastic mix. It floats on the surface and it isn't going anywhere... If for some reason scientists study and fully understand it, and determine its a problem, it will not be hard to clean up.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The vast, vast majority of the trash contained in this "garbage patch" is composed of particulates far too small for the eye to see, suspended below the surface. Cleaning it up would require a large number of autonomous floating machines with, essentially, portable water treatment plants on board. All of these suggestions about fishing boats running around and scooping up plastic bottles out of the ocean is complete nonsense.
Imagine trying to filter the dirt out of a muddy lake. Extrapolate that to an area of the ocean a few times larger than the state of Texas, and you can begin to envision the magnitude of the solution required.
The 'plastic' waste modern man produced could be seen as a resource storage.
We're burning up a lot of the petroleum resources. Which means it goes away. Gone, not available in the future.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is being preserved in that form. A century from now people might be saying 'thank goodness they saved SOME of the petroleum in the form of all that plastic in the landfills and floating in that big mass on the ocean.' And then they may go on to curse the 'environmentalists' who forced industry to stop using plastic bags and containers. All the 'biodegradable' packaging just crumbled away.
Not saying this is a completely thought out notion, but it makes some sense.
Tear into it if it conflicts with your religion.
I should say a really large view from the air. It is easy to fine up close views.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
This is what happens when people forget that our little planet is like a big house. When you "dump" your garbage, it's just getting moved from one room to another, unless you recycle it.
Somebody has not taken his lessons from playing Civilization...
Ezekiel 23:20
It seems to me that Pacific island nations with very low labor costs, high unemployment and a long tradition of seafaring should be able to find an economical way to round up that trash and recycle it for money.
--
make install -not war
Well, that certainly explains the majority of your Slashdot posts.
And where do you put it? It was dumped in the Ocean for a reason, because it was not convenient or possible to dump it anywhere else. Did you read the size of the garbage patch? Would you want that in your back yard? The point is that we are making too much garbage! Any 5 year old can tell you that's the real issue.
This is why I only buy family-size cheetos, unlike those selfish bastards that buy lunch-size packets.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's twice the size of Texas, but you can't actually see it to take a picture of it.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
I think that cleaning up a mess sixteen times the size of texas would actually be quite an enormous undertaking, especially if you're trying to do it without causing further damage to the ecosystem its in.
Ok, I guess I'll speak up for conservatives here...
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical that global warming trends we've seen are the result of our fossil fuel usage. If you follow the money, there are a lot of people in the environmental movement pushing "carbon credits", and are poised to make a boatload of money by exploiting others' guilt, while doing nothing to actually solve real problems. But no one wants dirty air or water. There are plenty of good reasons why we should be reducing our oil and gas dependency (just inhale deeply on a bad smog day if you live in LA). And one would be an idiot to argue that a bunch of plastic in the ocean (or other obviously man-made debris or pollutants) are anything but a problem caused by humans, and needs to be solved by humans.
Believe it or not, I consider myself an environmentalist. When I was a bit younger, I did a lot of hiking in the mountain ranges near my home. I think nature is something that needs to be carefully protected, because it's far to easy to trample it under the foot of progress and industry. I support our national park system, and conversation efforts everywhere. I'm switching my light bulbs to more efficient halogens as they need replacing (not by force of law, though!). I'll be replacing my gas-burning car with an electric when they come out with a practical, affordable model, and I'm looking forward to doing so.
However, I also believe that we can strike a balance between responsible stewardship, individual liberty, and capitalist enterprise. I just happen to believe that you need to be extremely judicious in applying the force of law to every problem you need to solve. Growing the power of government nearly always comes at the expense of individual liberty, so I prefer that not be our first solution, but the last.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The gyres (e.g., the Sargasso Sea) are where most of the nutrient transition from plankton to the rest of the food chain happens. It is a big deal,
citation needed.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I would bet you are right, but there are big masses out there as well. I have personal experience with this. My wife and I were sitting on the beach of the big island of Hawaii and this mass drifted in. I was told it wasn't the first time. Some guys had to cut the thing in half and then use a tractor to drag it away in pieces. I also noticed that it was something of a mini-ecosystem with crabs and flies and such crawling all over it.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
It's mostly theirs anyway !!
I'd really like to see an aerial survay of these big garbage patches.
All they're showing is a single clump of garbage in the water and holding some trash. Of course its worse than they imagine! They'll need more funds to go back and do more research.
On a side note,
Who knows maybe fish or other sea creatures are using these garbage patches as breeding grounds and actually increasing the population of sea creatures in the area.
If you follow the money, there are a lot of people in the environmental movement pushing "carbon credits", and are poised to make a boatload of money by exploiting others' guilt, while doing nothing to actually solve real problems.
How come when I say that people call me "closed minded"
Oh yeah, thinking for your self = closed minded.
Nevermind.
The "twice the size of Texas" figure is the lower-bound, conservative estimate. According to Wikipedia, the patch is estimated to be between 0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean. Also, the reason that this patch exists in the first place is because the North Pacific Gyre acts to collect debris (both biological and man-made) from around the entire Ocean. While still a relatively small area in size, it is incredibly important to the overall food chain due to the abundance of organisms sustained by the biomass collected by these currents.
It should be noted, for the record, that there are strong libertarian grounds for action on pollution(for that matter, much stronger action on pollution than we presently have). If a compound or compounds that you emit during the course of your activities damages my health or my property, it is subtler, but not ethically different, than any other means of you harming me or my property without my consent.
If it is so huge, why don't we just make an island out of the garbage, put a few meters of soil overtop, and sell it as prime real estate? That's what they did when they built the twin towers.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Yeah and they really stood the test of time.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Gyre
feel free to believe whatever you want.
for instance, i believe you're an ignorant, simplistically idealistic, buffoon with your head buried in the sand.
"Does eating plastic poison plankton?" Of course it does. That is how Sponge Bob and Mr. Krab planned it. They released plasic waste into the oceans to eliminate their competition, Plankton, owner of the Chum Bucket.
Well, there's also the south one, and the one near China, and....
No sig today...
Yeah and they really stood the test of time.
You're a moron. The twin towers collapse had nothing to do with what they were built on.
Yep, a very good point. That's why I don't outright reject the notion of government coercion when other measures fail. Pollution is certainly an infringement on our ability to enjoy a clean, pollution-free environment. Like I stated, I think there can be an appropriate balance struck in these issues. But when abuse occurs, the only one with the authority to ultimately correct that abuse is the government, and it's foolish to think that *everyone* can be reasoned with.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
According to Wikipedia...
You lost me there.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You mean worse than oh say, FISHING?
Seriously, filtering the top 6 inches of water, even going so far as to remove anything bigger than .5 micron shouldn't be such an impossible task, I'm envisioning a boat with a wide modified bow that collects the bow wave for filtering.. perhaps a group of them in an arrow formation filtering thier way back and forth across the gyre. Heck done right they could burn the plastic as fuel, capture the co2 in the sea water to help the phytoplankton recover.
As to to the depletion of the microorganisms in that layer, if the plastic is THAT deleterious we are likely doing the species(s) a favor by removing the badly damaged members, freeing up the space for healthier members to reproduce.
If you burn the plastic and debris at a high temperature the emissions are relatively small. Burn it and put the exhaust through another filter to catch whats left. Hell you could probably power the ship from the incinerators.
Too bad plastic is cheaper to make than it is to reclaim. Otherwise someone would have scooped it all up and made it into milk jugs by now.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers. So twice the size of Texas is 1.4 million square kilometers. The world's oceans cover approximately 361 million square kilometers. So an area TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS (oh noes! Panic!) is 1/3rd of a percentage point of the surface area of all the world's oceans.
Sure, since it's only twice the area of texas, we can leave it there.
After all, no problem as ever gotten worse when left alone, and we have plenty of experience with an area twice the size of texas covered with plastic.
makes sense.
No citation needed for basic, well-known, knowledge.
Considering that the chemicals plastics break down to can have dramatic effects in concentrations measured in parts per billion or less, this is a pretty considerable area.
So garbage is not randomly distributed throughout the oceans, but not surprisingly, it collects in areas of significantly increased density due to prevailing currents. How dense? Not dense enough to be visible to the casual onlooker. Only dense enough to be identified through careful study. So is that the story here?
No. The truth isn't good enough for a story. The truth isn't good enough to drive political action. So "scientists" lend their names to "authoritative" agencies like NOAA to come up with the story of a 1,700 mile "patch" of garbage. Alternatively (and dramatically), it has been called a "flotilla".
Yes, there's "a lot" of garbage in the ocean. And, it's a "big" ocean. Look carefully and you'll see that these stories don't do much to help you gauge what this "patch" really is.
"It's pretty shocking," said Miriam Goldstein.
"We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there," said Tony Haymet.
Thank you, researchers Goldstein and Hayment, for your contributions.
Look carefully through the photographs surrounding this story. Look for the 1,700 mile flotilla of garbage. By my understanding, this thing is a whole lot less dense than the stories would have you believe.
Here's a good one that I tried to track down:
This little "factoid" apparently comes from a non-peer-reviewed paper (page 270 here) published in 1985 that cites another un-reviewed paper in 1984 (can't find this one...Fowler) that estimated that 50,000 seals had died that year due to "entanglement" primarily in nets, as best I can tell. There's no more on methodology for determining that number, nor how it should be related to overall mammal population and more general "ocean debris."
Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.
There are two things that make this difficult. The amount of garbage is the size of Texas and a lot of the plastics have dissolved.
A crew went to the gyre and recorded a documentary (a free documentary by VBS.TV Garbage Island ), hoping to see giant island of garbage. While they did not see the island, what they saw was far worse. The plastics have dissolved and estimated that the amount of dissolved plastics is higher than the microscopic sea life and natural oceanic nutrients in the water. The gyre is now very, very gross. The garbage is either so scattered or very well dissolved that there is no way that it can be cleansed that easily.
We won't miss you, we'll just continue on without you.
I think the place you get your 'information' from that you seem to trust (though I doubt it is sufficiently backed by facts) probably stands to lose a LOT more money by being held accountable for environmental impacts...
but.. then again... who knows, right? we can pretend that 2+2 = 5 all day when you inject doubt and amplify small probabilities to seem significant.
Or is it an elaborate scientific hoax... pic or stfu/gtfo!!!!!!!!!!!!111
It's common knowledge that your mother sews socks that smell.
What could possibly go wrong? ?
Do you mind if it's 0.333% ricin?
LOL, and you're a sucker for the trolls, n00b.
It's in international waters... which country do you think is willing to pay for such an undertaking?
Sand's overrated... it's just tiny little rocks.
Using your foolproof ".03%! Oh noes" litmus test, the following things are also not worth worrying about:
Corrupted boot sectors
Dead rat in the wall
Several adult-sized poops in the swimming pool
Cancer
Er... ".3%" *shamefaced*
Oh, I wish I had mod points... hiiiiilarious.
The ocean might seem "all one kind of place" to you, but it isn't to the creatures who live there. If this were happening in a "desert" location, it would probably be insignificant. Unfortunately it's not. It's happening where currents naturally draw things together. Things like food. And that means its where important sea life congregates.
N.B.: I'm no oceanographer, so some of this is reasoned out from first principles, and there's some extrapolation. But this is more comparable to building a polluting factory in the middle of a rich food producing area (like, say, the Santa Clara Valley) than to building the same factory in the middle of the Sahara desert. And, yes, we were that stupid. We've been that stupid repeatedly. Many of our cities are built on the sites that were previously the most productive farm land. This is doing the same stupid thing again, with even less intentionality behind it than is usual.
For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's right. And if you think about it, the human body is only 1/3 a percentage point of potassium (http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howthingswork/f/blbodyelements.htm).
That means we can get rid of the potassium with no detrimental effects!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypokalemia
*cough*
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers. So twice the size of Texas is 1.4 million square kilometers. The world's oceans cover approximately 361 million square kilometers. So an area TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS (oh noes! Panic!) is 1/3rd of a percentage point of the surface area of all the world's oceans.
The world population is approximately 6.71 billion. A third of a percentage point of that is 25.68 million. The population of Texas is only 24.33 million. Ergo by your reasoning, if everyone in Texas dies, there's no need to worry.
Protip: by most standards, an event of that magnitude would be considered cataclysmic.
Alphanos
Th same ones that are giving up the funding to solve the problem.
Practically speaking probably mainly the USA, plus whomever we can talk into participating in the cleanup process. Heck if we can get a dozen countries to participate in an illegal war we should have no problem getting them to participate in this.
Ergo by your reasoning, if everyone in Texas dies, there's no need to worry.
Actually, that's a reason to celebrate.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What the fuck are you talking about, and how does that relate to the physical size of the garbage patch?
Because you insult those that disagree with you by implying that they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
Also, if he had just posted that I probably wouldn't have respected his comment. Granted, there probably are scammers among the carbon credit sellers. However, if you buy up some land and plant an orchard, that's a legitimate carbon sink (the trees themselves) which will also turn a profit.
I trust that sort of thing a lot more than the average venture capitalist. But that's why, if I were to buy a carbon credit, I would do something along the lines of finding a golf course and turning it into an orchard, or just a forest.
And I don't think than many environmentalists are honestly arguing that carbon credits are a solution. Environmentalism boils down to reduce, reuse, recycle. Corporations can take their greenwashed overconsumption and shove it up my ass.
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers.
Dude, you're talking about TEXAS. Nobody measures things in kilometers.
The world population is approximately 6.71 billion. A third of a percentage point of that is 25.68 million. The population of Texas is only 24.33 million. Ergo by your reasoning, if everyone in Texas dies, there's no need to worry.
Protip: by most standards, an event of that magnitude would be considered cataclysmic.
25 million people dying would definitely be a Bad Thing (TM), and as funny as the jokes could be, I'm not going to recommend or even hope that everyone in Texas dies, but if you look at it dispassionately, the human species would survive 25 million deaths without much trouble. Over 10 million people died as a result of the events of World War 2, which was about the same percentage of the world population, and we're still here. Using terms like "cataclysmic" when they aren't appropriate results in the term being taken less seriously when it would be appropriate.
Ergo by your reasoning, if everyone in Texas dies, there's no need to worry.
And your problem with his reasoning is what now?
"Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system."
Yes it would, and wouldn't that be an extremely intertesting bit of technology to develop? Right off the bat if they first developed a way to get the plastic to reclump together, then the filter, then be able to further refine it, it could be a very lucrative oceanic mine for decades, like has been mentioned, get some fishermen and sailors back to useful work. And similar high volume filtration tech might be used for another example say in cleaning up fresh water sources better, or to be part of waste water treatment plants. We already have filtration systems for this or that, but to develop something that could work on that sort of scale could very well be some important tech down the road. And like was pointed out, being plastic, this could help develop interest in larger scale energy plants that could use the stuff, including th..terraforming isn't the word, aquaforming? Huge floating energy conversion barges. Or just concentrate it back down so it could be used for..manufactured plastic goods. I don't see the need for plastics going away anytime soon, nor the need for more forms of energy. And we need *work* for millions and millions more people planet wide every year, something useful.
A lot of times I think we humans might be better off just with a 180 attitude adjustment, instead of always looking at things as problems, if we just looked at them as opportunities, it might make solutions appear easier and work better. The old saw of how to look at things, the glass half full or half empty deal. Turn the "Oh, noes!!" into the "Hot Damn!"s.
I'm sure Dexter is around.
Hmmm... I wonder how many bales of abandoned cocaine are in that heap?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/09/international.mainsection2
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/07/13/1183833752038.html
Exactly. And if you dig a bit deeper, you find out those scientists are all actually Nazis, who have actually been a part of the Illuminati all along! Also the shooter on the grassy knoll was an Illuminazi too. And of course, their Jew agents did 9/11.
It's hard enough for even a small handful of people to keep a secret over doing something that big, and you think it's reasonable that every single fucking scientist involved in this shit is an evil freedom-hating liar who wants nothing more than to steal all your hard-earned money, and not a single person has said anything about this? This sort of absurd conspiracy theory that asserts that everyone who thinks something you don't like are all evil deceptive fiends and nobody speaks up about it grossly violates Occam's razor, basic knowledge about human relations, and simple common sense. When that many people know something, it's simply impossible to keep it a secret. And then there's the matter of the news organizations, of course. If it's so simple and obvious to find this, they'd be all over this shit, especially given the public's distrust of global warming and scientists in general. You could of course assert that they're all in on it too, but that just makes the theory even less likely. The more necessary conditions your theory has for it to be true, the less likely it's true. See also this image.
Your post is dressed up in lots of fancy words and talk of FREEDOM and LIBERTY, but it basically boils down to a ridiculous conspiracy theory. And don't try to pretend you're an environmentalist; if you're not willing to make any sacrifices of any sort and only switching to greener technology when it's more convenient for you, you most certainly are not. This nonsense shouldn't be modded up, and certainly not this highly. It's not surprising that it is though, given Slashdot's "delusional libertarian nutjob" contingent.
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical that global warming trends we've seen are the result of our fossil fuel usage.
I'd like to know what alternative you propose as the cause of global warming.
You do agree in the existence of global warming though, I'll give you that. You agree that fossil fuel reliance is not a good thing. You even state you'll be willing to switch to electric, although what's considered practical and affordable is, of course, varied based on the person.
Carbon seems the most likely suspect in the global warming game. If you're trying to ask for a 100% guarantee, that never happens in science, as you well know.
However, I also believe that we can strike a balance between responsible stewardship, individual liberty, and capitalist enterprise. I just happen to believe that you need to be extremely judicious in applying the force of law to every problem you need to solve. Growing the power of government nearly always comes at the expense of individual liberty, so I prefer that not be our first solution, but the last.
I'm not entirely sure how this would apply. The environmental effects of dumping waste into water or simply burying it has been known for a fair amount of time. People still do it. There are companies that don't, but the ones that do are likely to continue to until someone bigger than them, i.e. the government, knocks them on the head. The question then becomes, at what point is it the "last" solution? After giving them leeway to fix things on their own for 1 year? 2? 5? 10? 20? The problem with last resorts is that people will always put in other options that, although completely and wildly unlikely, still has a chance of working.
And the converse, first resorts, when too extreme, are terrible. An accurate time table needs to be applied for when the government has to step in, not a simple "last resort" marker. Perhaps when a company hits x% pollution when compared to production? Or a simple flat xxx barrels of waste and yyy amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
that the bottom of the food chain resides in said "thin layer"
No, some small percentage of the bottom of the food chain resides in said thin layer, which brings the impact level back down to the "don't panic" level.
Unless I'm horribly mistaken and all of the world's plankton congregate in the North Pacific Gyre. Which they don't.
You know, putting scare quotes around the word "scientists" and mocking the NOAA does not actually undermine their expertise. There is no evidence the figure cited in the story comes from the pdf you link, none at all - what did you do, google the noaa website for the number 100000? Apparently not, since the page youre referring to (269) mentions 50,000-90,000 seals killed - not other mammals, and there's no number 100k there at all. But even if you're right and the number is pulled out of an ass, blame the reporter, not the scientists. Are you really skeptical that the NOAA is "scientific"? Do you know of a more reputable agency investigating these matters from a scientific perspective?
But if Texas were gone, where would our beef cattle come from?
SRSLY.
To hell with the electric car, we need an affordable electric truck that can tow a class III trailer, has an 8-foot bed, and a 120-150 mile range.
SRSLY.
I just saw something about on TV today, and it wasn't microscopic nor a small amount, they just used a bucket to get come water and filtered it with some piece of cloth.
Mod parent down, he's being reasonable and making sense. This has no place in an internet forum.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
How weird. A conservative who...conserves. Perhaps one day there will be a political party for people like you. I think I'd join it as well.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I did put some effort into understanding NOAA's role in this campaign, and apparently, a good deal more than you did. See NOAA here where the agency explains how it got from the "50,000 to 90,000" quote to their "100,000" propaganda number. Interestingly, if you had indeed taken the time to do exactly as you suggested, i.e. to google "NOAAA 100000", you would have seen this reference as the third link down. I took a much lengthier route, not looking to prove or disprove anything, but simply to understand the basis of the 100,000 estimate.
As NOAA's explanation indicates, they took the only loosely related range of "50,000 to 90,000", and from there, the 100,000 number emerges without further explanation. Your metaphorical characterization exactly matches my thinking when I saw it: they pulled it out of their asses.
I have high regard for the scientists of NOAA and their work products. I say this with great sincerity, and not to patronize your point. But in stark contrast with the genuinely authoritative works of NOAA, there are the political ways in which Presidential administrations and non-scientifically motivated high-level administrators of NOAA use its good name to advance political positions. In doing so, they besmirch NOAA's well-deserved reputation for good science, and cause people like me to use quotes around the word "authoritative" when describing the agency's "work" such as this. The politicians are simply taking NOAA's well-earned trust for a lowly political joy ride.
It occurs to me that I prefer the Bush administration's strategy of suppressing publication of NOAA work products that they found objectionable. If this ocean debris campaign is any indication of the Obama administration's approach, it looks like they will be using the NOAA moniker to publish political opinions as if they are the science of NOAA. This latter approach will be much more damaging to NOAA's scientists; it blatantly misrepresents their voices instead of just making it more difficult for them to be heard.
We've been that stupid repeatedly. Many of our cities are built on the sites that were previously the most productive farm land.
I don't think that's deliberate stupidity. Cities tend to get carved out of areas where lots of people live. Before the oil age farms required a fairly large amount of human capital to operate. Humans need to live somewhere, ergo you get cities. It still happens to a lesser degree. Farms don't require as much manpower to operate in this day and age but they still need goods and services. Those have to be provided by someone.
On balance cities are a good thing because the amount of land they occupy is generally less than it would take to feed their population. There's no way that Manhattan could feed it's population even if every square inch was devoted to agriculture. There are counter-examples to this of course (see urban sprawl) and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a major city.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Are you really skeptical that the NOAA is "scientific"?
After reading the GP's reply to this, yes. Thanks for prodding him into smacking your presumptive ignorance down.
Science is a methodology, not on organization acronym. When the NOAA actualy performs science, thats great! When they don't, but people like you still believe them hook line and sinker, that fucking sucks for everybody.
"His name was James Damore."
I'm switching my light bulbs to more efficient halogens as they need replacing
Halogen incandescents aren't much more efficient than standard incandescents - the main gain is that they last longer.
If you really care about the environment, consider using CFLs. Nicer ones cast nice light across a reasonable spectrum these days.
They say is all i ever hear about. Where is a single picture of this massive garbage patch. Every picture i've ever seen looks like a "researcher" just threw a garbage in the ocean and took a picture. Show a picture or STFU.
Did it occur to you that correlation does not imply causation? In other words, people who believe in global warming are likely to invest in companies they like, such as renewable/clean energy stocks rather than oil stocks, so that if people stop burning oil, yes their stocks will go up and they (collectively) make a boat load of money. People who believe in global warming are also likely to be park of the environmental movement and push a long list of ideas all targeted at getting people to stop burning oil. I would say that very few people are pushing these ideas because they want to make money from it and that the vast majority honestly just want people to put less CO2 in the air and put their money where their mouth is.
It is a *translucent* layer of material. That is why it could not be picked up by the satellite imagery, besides being of microscopic proportions individually.
This is one of the very few places of distant observations where our advances in technology cannot make up for the loss of *in situ* research, a bit like the HUMINT gaffe and shortage of CIA in the middle east.
Also - a typical example of the proverb about the fallen tree, not reported by the media. When it gets to the point to be reportable and visible from space - it would have been already way too late...
It was accidentally stumbled upon by a strained sailboat, thus the skipper was close enough and slow in the water to take notice and that's how it all started.
There are a couple of movies on the subject, shot on location and the result and the impact from them make all the difference.
Now, Make Your WISE Move...
Sure, should be no problem building something that can filter out a mass of pollution LARGER THAN TEXAS.
How long do you think that would take exactly? How much energy would that take? How are you going to transport the debris that is collected? Where are you going to put it? Is the solution more "green" than the problem?
This is a repeat thread with the same recommended, knee jerk solutions.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
So, you are making a case for leaving a huge amount of trash lying around? I personally find that irresponsible and immoral - it's our trash (humanity's, that is), we should clean it up.
Most of their outdoor photos have plastic trash in them.
You should have warned us that these photos are not safe for work. There are a large number of boobies shown in the last link.
However, if you buy up some land and plant an orchard, that's a legitimate carbon sink (the trees themselves) which will also turn a profit.
Depends on what you do with the trees. If you using the timber to build houses, for example, then it's a carbon sink (the carbon remains tied up in the houses), but if you're making newspaper out of them then it is simply carbon neutral (the paper is thrown out and decays) and often the breakdown of the waste will release methane, which is a greater contributor to the greenhouse effect than the carbon dioxide that you removed by growing the trees.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I didn't necessarily say government and taxes had to do it, I just said wouldn't it be interesting and perhaps very useful tech to develop, to take advantage of a concentrated source of raw materials, albeit it was placed there by mankind. And that spinoffs from developing this tech might be useful elsewhere. And that was about it. And we both agree more useful jobs are needed, I am against busywork do-nothing but look semi alive and active mc jobs, or most instances of the forced redistribution of wealth based on state coercive force.
On your exact tax question analogy, I can't answer that in the affirmative for either of your theoretical either/or "answers", because I can make a fairly logical and convincing argument that income taxes are no longer necessary under the currency creation and fiscal governing system we have, and would definitely not be necessary at all, corporate or private, with a few simple-important but actually simple-reforms to the laws. So neither would be (IMO) the correct answer.
If you want my views on economics, both macro and personal, to better answer you in more depth, I write extensively on them under "the almighty buck" in my journal and you are welcome to join in any conversations there that still have active replying available. A lot of my stuff is also under other people's journals in the discussions.
I am pro real wealth creation (I am a farmer, so I practice what I preach) and for the producers of wealth, and pretty much against most governmental busywork bureaucracy and the corrupt casino bank wealth skimming against the wealth producers that goes on, which has really morphed from the old traditional view of investing into just high stakes phony paper financial products gambling which should be airgapped from the real economy before they do even more damage. (that's the cliff notes ultra short summary version of my views).
If that helps to answer your questions.
Wow I know no one bothers to rtfa, but not even bothering to read the post you are replying to?
Nice, you've taken slashdot to a new level, congratulations.
This is an engineering problem, not a religious war. It has a solution but being a naysayer isn't part of it.
How long?
It took us what 60 years to cause the problem so it so anything less than that is a win, wouldn't you think?
Ok then,
Older Big ships run on steam. Water dosen't care what makes it boil.
That takes care of part of the energy requirements (depending on how dense the usable plastic is) and takes care of 93%ish of the bulk of the waste.
The CO2 capture is not all that tricky considering that the ships will be pretty big, bubble the exhaust thru some seawater and flow it across the decks in the sun, phytoplankton turn it into more plankton which we then use to re-seed the "cleaned" areas.
More green? you are going to have to very carefully define exactly what "more green" means. .01 % of the surface of the oceans, those creatures exist to reproduce and should manage to repopulate those areas just fine.
I'm pretty sure that we can figure out how to get the plastic out of the water. Yes it will probably kill countless billions of tiny tiny little sea creatures. Fortunately we are still talking about a good deal less than
Just how important is getting the plastic out of the water or conversely, just how bad is the plastic for the local environment?
I do wish for dirty water and air, we've already bottle water a huge commodity it will only make me more money as the environment gets worse. I hope to be involved in selling clean air in the future, I can afford to get in at the ground level.
Why not get them to clean it up, or we clean it up for them and charge them?
They can clean up oil spills from the water surface, but not solid plastic?
And if you are worried about the local ecosystem, do a little bit at a time. You won't clean the whole thing up in a month anyway, so the local ecosystem will have time to regrow.
As far as who will pay, why not take some from TARP or CARS, or . As long as we're just handing out checks, what's another few hundred mil?
Yeah whatever. I'll change my sig just to make you happy, since you apparently lack Tolerance for others' opinions.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If this were happening in a "desert" location, it would probably be insignificant. Unfortunately it's not. It's happening where currents naturally draw things together. Things like food.
But it's exactly that - a desert.
First of all, Gyres are not caused by ocean currents (at least not this one) - they are caused by air currents.
Secondly, there really was not much there anyway - from How Stuff Works:
The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals.
So as you see, you have it exactly right - it is happening in a desert, which is why it may not matter as much as they are making out. In fact the ocean is doing a damn good job of collecting crap which would otherwise be all over the place, and concentrating it exactly where it can do the least harm.
A counter might be it gets into the food chain through the tiniest organisms - but if the plastic all ends up here without escaping, how would the organisms? At least in any great quantity....
We should probably try to figure out how to clean it up, but it's not as bad as the hype is trying to lead you to believe.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, I guess I'll speak up for conservatives here...
Whether or not global warming exists isn't a liberal or conservative issue, it is a scientific issue, and one that has not been conclusively resolved.
The opening statement of your comment illustrates the entire problem in the US. The liberals have latched onto global warming as being humanity's Deathstar. The conservatives don't buy it. Your opinion is governed by your political orientation. Neither side is considering the issue from an impartial (much less a scientific) perspective and every corporation is trying to profit from it.
It's turned into one of those hot button topics like gay marriage and abortion... every uninformed retard is now going to have an opinion based solely on their political stance, science be damned. It's sad that most Americans don't possess the intellect or follow through to attempt to understand the science for themselves, nor do they possess the BS filters to understand when their politicians are manipulating them for political or financial gain, but they will spend hours of effort researching the best TV set and car to buy.
dude, fuck off.
or in other words, I'll take the word of an actual scientist at one of the US's finest oceanographic research institutes, with a professional reputation to protect, over some random /.ers political hunch.
signed, your friendly neighborhood oceanographer who has seen these garbage slicks mid-ocean with his own eyes. Yes, much of the plastic is still in visible chunks. It's disgusting. The non-visible stuff is measured by concentrated by plankton accumulating nets which record the volume of water passing through them allowing density calculations.
India, they are not using them anyway.
The movie Idiocracy had it all wrong. See what happened was the monstrous garbage pile in the middle of the pacific ocean toppled over and was the catalyst that woke up the people in preservation capsules.
They certainly didn't have Nostradamus' input to write the script for that movie.
I'd like to know what alternative you propose as the cause of global warming.
I propose the Sun
Carbon seems the most likely suspect in the global warming game.
I suspect it's the Sun
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I read some SF many years ago. When a baby was born it was immediately injected with something that made it possible for it to survive in earth's hideously polluted atmosphere. they didn't have normal drug addicts they had Oxygen sniffers who could die from taking their drug of choice. Does anyone have any idea what story/author this was?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
dude, fuck off.
Couldn't have said it better
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Great pacific garbage patch.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
That solves the real-estate shortage.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Yup. In addition to problems with some of their science, I have doubts about using government resources for a memorial.
So it's not that bad.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
There seems to be a mix of issues here. The 0.5micron bits have the potential of being much more bio active than the large bottles and chunks that are so easy to spot. However the microscopic plastic is photo degraded large bits.
It makes sense to do some research. A 1, 2, 5, 10... cm mesh net two meters deep could be used to filter feed a trash compactor ship. If the mesh was pulled in "correctly" fish turtles and the like would just flop off and back into the sea.
The key is not to get all the plastic and trash but sweep through and get the big bits. I suspect the real issue is that the area is rich in biologic activity and any 'sieve size' will not gather what we expect.
Right now it is moderately clear that we need to 'react' just not Overreact.
Indeed I agree, more research and some "test filterings" need to be done to determine exactly what we are dealing with, what beside the plastic is out there and how we can separate the two groups (pollution / life) with the minimum of damage to the ecosystem (which of course has to be compared to whatever problems the plastic is causing).
Like I said, it's an engineering problem, and as far as I am concerned a very cool one. I'd love to get a job working on helping clean it up.
You Sir get an A for the day!
I'm Sorry that is Sad. When you title something great pacific garbage patch, doesn't actually make it that. The gpcp can not be walked on, as this picture shows. And is way out in the middle of the ocean, not near land on some delta. FYI Plastic beach is not gpgp. But thanks for trying to look special!
Unfortunately that math is based on plastic being produced at an exponential rate, to go with with the populace. Yet even in the past 5 years consumer plastic is dropped drastically, and really only seen in commercial fields, at least in the USofA. And the majority of these fields, recycle the plastic, medical being the biggest user.
Hey sure, why not! Oh wait they have done that already! http://ecoble.com/2007/11/18/250000-bottles-amazing-recycled-mexican-island-paradise/
Who quotes wikipedia as evidence? And then back it up with estimates that have a difference of 20 fold?
When dealing with the government most problems have gotten better when left alone. Look at Yellowstone, it was all messed up for decades until the decided to leave it alone. The Earth is quite good at maintaining homeostasis without the help of mankind. Whenever we do try and "help" we find out 20 years later that we caused more problems, and it should have been left alone.
All through these comments I repeatedly see twice the surface are of texas, and 1/3 a percentage point. Yet these numbers really are for less then what is imagined. Surface area, were people measure their exitence is different then say an oceanic fish. Who isn't worried at all at the surface area. He cares about the VOLUME of the water. Where he actually lives. The Volume of the Earths oceans, 1.37 billion cubic kilometers, estimate from http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml. The volume of the garbage patch is near impossible to say. The average depth of the ocean is 3.8 km. Say that this microscopic debri penetrates the surface of the ocean at 3 meters, close to 10ft, highly over estimated. so you have an area, 0.33% of the surface. You will get a contaminated amount of ocean water 2.6 x 10^-4. Also written as 0.00026% of the water. So that would actually be 177000 people, of the 6.8 billion to put it in perspective. So using these numbers, if all the life in that stretch of area was contaminated and sick, it would be like having 177000 people in the world sick, at the same time! Wow this rates up there with the most significant find since they found out eggs are bad for you, or did the end saying they were good?
Divert it to the third-world.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
LOL that's hilarious. Even the GP's "smackdown" acknowledges that the NOAA is scientific, though he asserts without evidence that there is some "political" agenda because Obama is in charge now (yes, surely he dispatched Joe Biden right away to scare NOAA scientists into making up stories about plastic in the ocean, since ocean trash was so high on the Obama campaign agenda). Moron.
Well that link would have been more appropriate than a link to a giant PDF and the claim that the number "apparently" came from there -- I stand corrected that you did your research, but you could have explained that to begin with. The link you provide now also shows that the number is based on a study and is a lowball conjecture based on what appear to be valid studies -- not "scientific" perhaps, but pretty common in terms of how science is oversimplified to explain to reporters. I'm really not sure what your complaint is after reading this - the number seems more than reasonable under the circumstances, and it's hardly proof of some kind of political slant, much less a conspiracy to take a "joy ride" through miles of garbage.
In any case, your attempt to tie it into this sort of politics is a little hysterical -- unless you think a study from the early 80s was conducted to be used thirty years later to prove, what exactly? I don't get it, but it is telling that you prefer Bush's censorship to the conspiracy you've concocted here. Maybe you should also demand to see the NOAA scientists' birth certificates.
I have doubts about using government resources for a memorial.
Uh-huh. Sure you do.
I just read Beyond Developmentality, a fascinating book on this subject. Quoting from the blurb:
The author, Dr.Debal Deb, is a renowned ecologist and environmental biologist with several publications in the field.
Full disclosure: I personally know Dr.Deb, but this post is not a shameless plug to boost sales. I truly believe that what the book recommends is mankind's only real hope. See
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Developmentality-Constructing-Inclusive-Sustainability/dp/1844077128
Or
look it up on google
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. -Gandhi
Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.
So I take it, that that means that we don't need to bother cleaning it up at all. Maybe filling the ocean up with more garbage would actually be a better idea?
"I've got one word to say to you Benjamin, Plastic"
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Umm, there are only one hundred percentage points in the grand total. One of those is quite significant when there are no more coming.
Here's an exercise
* Find a sheet of square-ruled paper.
* Outline a 10-by-10 square area.
* Fill in one of thhem
* Reflect on those 100 being all there is.
sudo ergo sum
I have a feeling you're being a bit biased about which money and which channels for them you are following.
sudo ergo sum
and if you follow the money the other way we find companies that mine oil and coal. So there is big money on both sides.
Yes!
I believe that NOAA's credibility is derived from the credibility of the methodology, and the degree to which the organization exploits the methodology through its disciplined application.
That's 0.3% for those of us who are like Rodney McKay , and understand numbers better than words.
Fictional?
"For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed)."
That reason is capitalism + specialization (the plus is important) which requires constant growth (buying/selling) and expansion.
The for profit system + specialization (where people no longer can provide their own food clothing). Requires things must be bought and sold constantly in order to keep the economy moving along.
John adams noted this a while back:
Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that "the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic." But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, "even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce." As a result, there was "a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there."
You may understand my very simple point if you'll try to honestly answer this question (and reconcile it against the story here): How many marine mammals are killed each year by ocean debris?
Why do we make things that are effectively 'single use', after which it's terminal end point is some useless peice of unnatural shit that will never go away? Life has a built in life cycle for everything it makes - it eventually dies, biodegrades, and then is reused by other life again in a never ending cycle of rebith and renew. Why can't we take this same concept and incorporate it into the things we produce in order to be more compatible with the environment we find ourselves in? No more single use items. No more wrappers that you buy with your food that are then intended to be 'thrown away'. Have a plan that extends thruout the entire lifecycle or you don't sell it / produce it anymore.
As carbon seems to you to be the cause of warming, please explain why carbon dioxide has been rising for 10 years and temperatures haven't also risen. 23 years of rising temperatures (after a 30 year cooling spell) is due to carbon dioxide, but 10 years of temperatures not rising are also due to carbon dioxide?
is not practicable at this point, we should be doing something to reduce the amount of potential sources.
for example, i usually bring my lunch from home and store it in reusable containers. i don't take leftovers from the restaurant, so i don't have styrofoam. i pick up a random plastic bag i see on the sidewalk, assuming i can trash it reasonably quickly. using cloth shopping bags would reduce the amount of plastic bags...
perhaps if more people could try bringing lunch from home in reusable containers one day more/week?
"To stop the terrorists."
I'm surprised that more economists haven't questioned the paradigm of endless material growth, now that we know the world is finite. I recall reading years ago that there is not enough energy from all sources in the earth's crust to lift even 1% of the human population to the moon or beyond. Therefore it's clear that we have to manage our affairs, for the foreseeable future (centuries) within the limits of this one planet.
I suppose we have a choice: keep breeding and consuming our petri until our log growth curve hits the maxima (8 billion people? 11 billion? Something like that). And then enjoy the corrective measures that thermodynamics and mathematics will apply to our species within our closed system.
Or we can plan ahead and and live within our means, as if we were an intelligent species, able to grasp the meaning of large numbers and apply that meaning to the physical world we live in.
About the only place I've seen that is thinking this through completely is the Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economics, over at steadystate.org .
In short, they found no evidence of ecological harm, but they're going to go back, and keep going back, until they find some.
All financial contributions gratefully accepted.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Ok, I guess I'll speak up for conservatives here...
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical that global warming trends we've seen are the result of our fossil fuel usage. If you follow the money, there are a lot of people in the environmental movement pushing "carbon credits", and are poised to make a boatload of money by exploiting others' guilt, while doing nothing to actually solve real problems. But no one wants dirty air or water. There are plenty of good reasons why we should be reducing our oil and gas dependency (just inhale deeply on a bad smog day if you live in LA). And one would be an idiot to argue that a bunch of plastic in the ocean (or other obviously man-made debris or pollutants) are anything but a problem caused by humans, and needs to be solved by humans.
Believe it or not, I consider myself an environmentalist. When I was a bit younger, I did a lot of hiking in the mountain ranges near my home. I think nature is something that needs to be carefully protected, because it's far to easy to trample it under the foot of progress and industry. I support our national park system, and conversation efforts everywhere. I'm switching my light bulbs to more efficient halogens as they need replacing (not by force of law, though!). I'll be replacing my gas-burning car with an electric when they come out with a practical, affordable model, and I'm looking forward to doing so.
However, I also believe that we can strike a balance between responsible stewardship, individual liberty, and capitalist enterprise. I just happen to believe that you need to be extremely judicious in applying the force of law to every problem you need to solve. Growing the power of government nearly always comes at the expense of individual liberty, so I prefer that not be our first solution, but the last.
Global warming cannot possibly be anthropogenic - I've heard this sentiment a lot, and as a researcher I'm frankly baffled by it. Carbon dioxide levels have peaked beyond anything we've seen in the last several millenia, and far and away this increase can be accounted for by even conservative estimates human emissions. At the same time, even though CO2 isn't the most potent greenhouse gas in the world, it's quite closely tied historically with changes in global temperature, usually with the temperature change (apparently) driving increased CO2 emissions, yes, but we've altered that paradigm dramatically through our unintentional geoengineering efforts. These increased emissions demonstrably increase capture of infrared radiation, leading to heating in even the simplest laboratory setup. That established, most conservative estimates place the total cost of carbon sequestration at between $100 billion and $300 billion per year. Given that most warming and ice flow models undershoot the current deglaciation and warming trends, it seems then that if such sequestration is not quickly brought online, we face the potential for real global calamity, especially among the first world power. This level of economic output is simply not satisfied by any but the most massive of corporate entities, though a healthy market can easily reach that level. Given that absent government intervention, carbon dioxide emissions are a clear economic externality, I am curious as to why everyone's knee jerk response is that it is not the role of government to regulate this. As I practice libertarianism, indeed, the government's most specific and important purviews are the defense of its people from external threats and the internalization of economic externalities that otherwise threaten the well being of its populace. I am just curious, then, as to why it is not generally seen as the government's role to bring about the rapid development of such a market for carbon sequestration through the use of regulation - if not, indeed, by going a step further with the establishment of appropriate grants and research funding with the aim of developing a healthy carbon sequestration industry that can remain economically feasible absent further government intervention.
You had some credibility up until just after this statement:
It occurs to me that I prefer the Bush administration's strategy of suppressing publication of NOAA work products that they found objectionable.
Anyone who seriously prefers government censorship to the normal peer review process has simply lost his mind. Why should any president suppress publication of things he finds "objectionable"?
I don't see much substance to your argument anyway. It really all stems from the word "patch" and "flotilla"? That's the big "scientific conspiracy" and politics at play here? All you have to do is read the damn article and it clearly says the plastic is microscopic. Great conspiracy you've got their.
Your other point seems to stem from the number of animals killed a year due to garbage. You sure spout off a lot of claims about non-peer reviewed and use a lot of inflammatory language, but I sure don't see any evidence to support that. Does the truth or falsity of a single fact in a 574 page paper really bring into question the whole story? Sorry, but this critical thinker is far more skeptical of you than I am of the NOAA.
AccountKiller
The answer: nobody has calculated precisely. The best we can come up with for the purpose of answering questions to non-specialists is an extremely lowball extrapolation from old data that only includes one species of marine mammal.
Now that that silliness is out of the way, what possible impact could this have on the question of whether the credentialed experts who work for the NOAA are actually "scientists" or rather part of a political cabal driving the work of real science underground out of fanatical loyalty to their glorious leader Mr. Obama?
Wait a minute, you green screaming nachos.
What you're telling me is that there is essentially a whole honking lot of naturally (Sun's energy!) ground, cleaned and water-emulsified plastic just sitting out there? And this is somehow *bad*?!
Gee whiz, post-processing (say recycling) plastic in this form has removed perhaps 90% of effort (cost, energy, whatnot) involved in reclaiming post-consumer plastic waste. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, any cost of actually reclaiming this will be comparable to say the cost of hauling crude oil in tankers. Nobody screams bloody murder about the oil tankers (except when they leak).
This may be one of the best things Nature has handed us. There seems to be a natural process where the plastic waste ends up in a water emulsion, and it doesn't involve building a power plant and a big factory next to it. Large scale plastic reclamation, after the wetware part (read on), is still pretty energy hungry, and is currently very limited since the wetware is not 100% competent at separating stuff out.
Separating the various plastics out of a water emulsion is easy. You centrifuge the heck out of it, and you end up with the stuff already separated out and concentrated. The seawater can then be dumped back out. Now, *grinding* plastic trash to a form where it could be water-emulsified, takes a hell of a lot of energy, and generally isn't done for just that reason.
The typical plastic "recycling" plant involves rather stinky, somewhat hazardous, low-paid, manual labor. Industrial scale recycling really means thousands of people in hangar-sized buildings -- that's the front-end to the process. Very wetware if you ask me.
Then there is a lot that isn't obvious enough, and ends up on the "trash" pile. The rule in plastic recycling is the purity of output: either you're sure of the classification, or to the landfill it goes. And now that all of this mess seems to be handled by a wholly natural process, where the "last mile" can be done on a processing ship, where the crew has but to run the ship and keep the plant operating.
Plastic, due to being petroleum based, does not "dissolve". It can a) bio-degrade or b) become a suspended solid, provide the particles are small enough (as well as obvious combinations of the two).
And it is, apparently, doing both.
The size of this garbage dump itself is not a problem, the problem is that it's likely still increasing. If it remained static, or was left alone, it would continue to degrade back into other compounds (some harmful, others not).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The answer is: we don't know. But NOAA published a B.S. number that hit every major news source in the U.S., and will hereafter be referenced and repeated as fact, because *NOAA* said it. You appear quite comfortable with that. I would guess it suits your politics. It is not, however, the stuff of science.
As for all that rubbish in your second paragraph, those are your demons, not mine.
Seeing no evidence of disagreement between us here, I'll guess that I made the mistake of touching one of your Sacred Cows.
That sounds very interesting... I'm gonna look into that book.
I, too, agree that there is an obvious neccessity (whether we accept it and change or deal with crashing consequences) to accept zero profit and stabilize productivity.
Chris Martensons "Crash Course" makes the future quite obvious, and to my joy, presents the arguments with clear facts and dialogue that can be understood by an 8th grade education (because so many people opposed to changes in life are often quite educationally limited).
It is anthropogenic. Enough said. Believe it or not...
Yes, I preferred the Bush strategy. Though it doused "objectionable" propaganda, it did not succeed at suppressing good ol' scientific findings. (And it's not clear to me that it was intended to do so.) Recent U.S. presidents have known very well the differences between science and politics. So though they may censor press releases and conference presentations, they do not censor the contents of scientific studies nor their findings. That's what's so beautiful about good science: it's way too narrow and modest to drive anything other than incremental improvements in understanding. A well-written study is, by itself, of little use to a politician. Politicians (a.k.a. political activists) have much more ambitious objectives to change the world in some mostly predetermined way; science only offers mechanisms by which to increase understanding of the world (and is somewhat less predisposed to outcome).
I sat yesterday morning at a table of random common people, some of whom had read the day's newspaper. Their understanding was that, much to the shock and dismay of scientists, a giant floating garbage island has been discovered that poses heretofore unrealized threats to life. They missed the points about the particulates. They read THE HEADLINES. They recalled THE DEAD MAMMALS. They understood that it is a 1,700 MILE FLOATING PATCH OF GARBAGE.
So they misunderstood the nature and degree of the problem, and in so doing, understood very well what this story intended them to understand. Idiots, you might say? Nope. Just ordinary people who got the gist of this story.
A conspiracy? I don't see one. This is just environmental politics. No conspiracy. Just a story intended to drive the electorate to support funding of additional research and political action intended to reduce messes such as this one. That's all. And to me, it's anything but evil.
Oh, and if the public has to be a little misinformed to drive action, well then, that's fair game. Yes? I mean it's fair game in environmental politics, in health care, in foreign policy, in war. It's fair game in the State Department, DOD, the Treasury, NOAA. It's a sea of politics where "spin" (a.k.a. misleading information) is justified by the outcome, yes? (Please do see my dripping sarcasm here.)
I DON'T WANT BULLSH_T COMING OUT OF NOAA.
And in arguing this simple point, I have to put up with arguments based on half-cocked presumptions of "whose side" I'm on and what my "real" motives are. Why is that? It is because most people are only offended by misinformation that counters their political preferences. That, they call "lies." But when misinformation supports their political preferences, well, that they call "spin" and forgive with vacuous rationalizations that allude to "the practical realities of what it takes to get things done."
Practical shmactical. Misinformation is not the stuff of science. It should not be the stuff of NOAA. Leave other agencies to do that "practical" crap of which we speak.
NOAA should be a bastion of Science (i.e. the practice of the scientific method and the prevailing good practices associated therein). For the most part, I believe it has been. And all the people arguing against me here agree with these points. So where's the disagreement? It emanates from NOAA having propagated a poorly constructed, pretty much bullsh_t statistic: 100,000 mammals killed per year by ocean debris. (Yes, if you read the NOAA wording carefully, they successfully propagated this "fact" while covering their asses with qualifying clauses that are quite expectantly ignored and dropped during the course of dissemination.) I know very well from the quality of the construction of your posting that you also know that's a B.S. number. And yet, because it's part of a propaganda campaign that I suspect somehow supports your notion of goodness, you choose to turn a blind eye to the incorrectness of this incidental bit of spin, this unimportant statistic.
NOAA should not be a propaganda tool. Alas, it sometimes is. So we should advise people to view statistics issued by NOAA with a due amount of skepticism. Should we not?
Sheesh. This is so freakin' depressing.
Right, it's a good thing you've sufficiently backed your assertions with facts...
Oh wait, you're one of those screeching idiots who says stupid shit like "I think" and then hammers SOMEONE ELSE for using information you "doubt it is sufficiently backed by facts", but provides exactly nothing in the way of facts to support your "I think" statement.
Why do you stupid motherfuckers make such obvious and moronic mistakes like that?
Well the guy didn't provide and resources and the things he said demonstrate ignorance to the highly prevalent resources that make evident the contrary argument. It was only safe to assume so...
My assertion is that he is getting information from corporation-influenced biased mouthpieces. I'm not with the guy, but it would be interesting to hear him say otherwise --- like that he has extensive experience in the field and/or can reference numerous scientific publications to support his opinion.
I doubt it, though. Most people who disagree with global warming estimations and theories are simply echoing false memes and exaggerated doubts that are coming from big financial institutions. And those same people point at extremely minor (in comparison to the contrary) publications as *proof* that the extremely major consensus is wrong.
No, I can't prove he gets his news from big corps. I can't back that. But he didn't post any valid sources, either, so until we see it I'll err on the side of knowing that his argument is backed either by outlier observations or spun media.
If you sail down there bring a microscope.
There ? Try pretty much anywhere. Plastic doesn't degrade. A lot of it just breaks down into small chunks. If you use a plankton net, 60% of what you'll catch will be little fragments of plastic. In pretty much any sea today.
Nobody knows what impact this has on marine life but it has lots of people quite a bit worried.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Well, mother nature will find a way to deal with this. Species will evolve, which thrive on plastic.
/now/ before mother nature starts taking care of this, because that could endanger our food supply in the long run.
Isn't it an excellent defense for the group to be poisonous to most predators? In turn some specialized predators will evolve which have ways to deal with the 'poison'.
However, to us it could pose a huge problem as it could turn out that plastics could eventually start to rot faster as they do now.
All that being said, it's best to clean this up
How about the environmentally concerned people already out there in their boats? Surely this is a much better use of their time/resources than attacking fishing and whaling vessels.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Where's the Japanese Miracle when you need it?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Awesome; now we can sit back and do nothing!
You're the one who brought up the conspiracy theories and connected them to this one statistic (which, regardless of your claims of politicization, is, as I have demonstrated, a relatively decent benchmark figure to use since it is guaranteed to be an extremely lowball estimate extrapolated from real data). It has nothing to do with politics and you're an idiot if you think it does -- you think Obama came to power with a nefarious plot to distort the number of seals strangled by nets? Are you fucking serious? And then you tell me *I* have "sacred cows"? Not really; it's just that I am generally inclined to trust the word of actual scientists over some moron on slashdot who thinks he's being clever by nitpicking about a study mentioned in a footnote in a 500-page document.
1. How long do you think that would take exactly? 2. How much energy would that take? 3. How are you going to transport the debris that is collected? 4. Where are you going to put it? 5. Is the solution more "green" than the problem?
1. Since the problem area is expanding, the answer is 'a lot less time than if we just continue to ignore it, regardless of the logistics issues'.
2., 3., 4. Logistics issues which would need to be solved, not sufficient to handwave the problem away.
5. The real crux of the issue. How much damage is this causing? What methods can we propose to stop adding to the problem, and fix the existing area? If we slow down the additional pollutants enough, will the problem take care of itself?
I dont understand why you would see the phrase 'bigger than Texas!' and then just assume the problem is insoluble, throw your hands up, and walk away. Maybe it's an American thing? Lots of things are bigger than Texas...