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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."
'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,'
I say that every time I have to clean out the fridge. It hasn't resulted in the apocalypse yet. Look, this is a small patch of ocean with a thin layer of plastic scum floating on it (small relative to something as huge as an ocean). Now if they go there and Godzilla wakes up and starts his long walk towards the shore, then I'll be worried. Otherwise, it's just some scientists riding the greenie cash cow and saying "Look! evil sinners! Repent and accept our carbon-taxed ways! Act now and save an additional 20% off your guilt."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
It's not ocean trashing... its .. uhh... "Marine Reinforcement". ... lol... climate change...
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...
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.
And promptly spit back out. Hey, even unspeakable horrors have standards. He's not gonna eat something that tastes like garbage.
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
That They can hold
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.
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
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.
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.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Gyre
"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.
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.
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
Di8. Du+e to the
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.
What could possibly go wrong? ?
Do you mind if it's 0.333% ricin?
LOL, and you're a sucker for the trolls, n00b.
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.
"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
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
dude, fuck off.
Couldn't have said it better
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Yup. In addition to problems with some of their science, I have doubts about using government resources for a memorial.
You Sir get an A for the day!
Hey sure, why not! Oh wait they have done that already! http://ecoble.com/2007/11/18/250000-bottles-amazing-recycled-mexican-island-paradise/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Where's the Japanese Miracle when you need it?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
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.