Slashdot Mirror
'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' Far Bigger Than Imagined, Aerial Survey Shows (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The vast patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean is far worse than previously thought, with an aerial survey finding a much larger mass of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items than imagined. A reconnaissance flight taken in a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft found a vast clump of mainly plastic waste at the northern edge of what is known as the "great Pacific garbage patch," located between Hawaii and California. The density of rubbish was several times higher than the Ocean Cleanup, a foundation part-funded by the Dutch government to rid the oceans of plastics, expected to find even at the heart of the patch, where most of the waste is concentrated. The heart of the garbage patch is thought to be around 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles), with the periphery spanning a further 3.5m sq km (1,351,000 sq miles). The dimensions of this morass of waste are continually morphing, caught in one of the ocean's huge rotating currents. The north Pacific gyre has accumulated a soup of plastic waste, including large items and smaller broken-down micro plastics that can be eaten by fish and enter the food chain. Following a further aerial survey through the heart of the patch on Sunday, the Ocean Cleanup aims to tackle the problem through a gigantic V-shaped boom, which would use sea currents to funnel floating rubbish into a cone. A prototype of the vulcanized rubber barrier will be tested next year, with a full-sized 100km (62-mile) barrier deployed by 2020 if trials go well. "Normally when you do an aerial survey of dolphins or whales, you make a sighting and record it," said Boyan Slat, the founder of the Ocean Cleanup. "That was the plan for this survey. But when we opened the door and we saw the debris everywhere. Ever half second you see something. So we had to take snapshots -- it was impossible to record everything. It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean."
That explains why none of the links in the summary actually have any photos of A MILLION SQUARE KILOMETERS of trash floating in the Pacific. Just one photo would help us to understand.
Maybe they can also get the photo with a Dolphin crying in the foreground.
Wouldn't a huge sieve designed to strain out the plastic catch everything else as well? Like, you know, fish and seabirds and other critters?
Having read the FAQ on the Ocean Cleanup website, what they are proposing is not a seive, more of a barrier - it's intending to collect the larger floating pieces, not the smaller ones.
You might recall that a type of bacteria has evolved that eats plastic bottles. Since plastics are a rich source of energy, they are like cellulose. But for that to work, there needs to be a concentration of smaller plastic particles, the Japanese researchers who found the bacteria, found it in a dump.
The whole issue with plastics was the lack of decay, yet even this lot admit that's not the reality:
“Most of the debris was large stuff. It’s a ticking time bomb because the big stuff will crumble down to micro plastics over the next few decades if we don’t act.”
Really, a plastic bottle every 250ft is not a big deal. If it was a coconut every 250 ft would be a big deal too and tropical islands would be wastelands. We don't worry about starch and fibres because they can be eaten, but then if plastics can be eaten what's the issue?
"there is no island of trash in the pacific"
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_next_20/2016/09/the_great_pacific_garbage_patch_was_the_myth_we_needed_to_save_our_oceans.html
I took as some kind of information, the total lack of pictures of the 'garbage patch' in articles about the garbage patch. How hard would it have been for the people who have been there to pull out their phone and take a picture?
There are good reasons to be concerned about digging carbon out of the ground and burning it. I'm not so sure a patch of microbead pollution in the middle of a huge ocean is something to be concerned with. Certainly nobody has put forth a compelling mechanism by which it will bring about our end.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Nothing published in the federalist ever counts as "debunking" or indeed anything other than "blatant lies to support our fantasy dream world".
You really want to know what a deregulated market looks like ? Think Chicago during prohibition. Now before you go yelling about how prohibition *was* regulation - that's smoke and mirrors, the people who remained in the business after it was illegal - were the ones who didn't care about the law - and so they didn't obey regulations of any kind. A black market is always an entirely deregulated market - the very regulation that prohibits it also makes it deregulated in practical terms.
What do black markets look like ? Killing the competition is a valid way to stay competitive. Shooting your own staff if they underperform is a perfectly viable way to keep workers productive. Turf wars. Torture - and the community living in fear with a rapidly declining life expectancy.
But that's what EVERY business will do if it thinks it can. Because that will always be the most profitable way to run any business. The ones who are run by people that wouldn't *do* that - well they don't stay in business.
Prohibition is not an argument against regulation - it is an argument against prohibition but it's a false equivalence to pretend those are the same thing. It's proof of what deregulation inevitably leads to. It turns every market into a gangwar, every industry into a mafia.
Back during the industrial revolution it was standard practise to rape a female employee every Friday afternoon to keep workers disciplined. Every single factory owner in the UK did it. Every fucking one of them. It was 'rape' of the 'fuck me or I fire you' variety but rape nonetheless. The interesting thing is - a LOT of those factory owners kept diaries. They all admit to doing it in their diaries. They also, every one of them, write about how abhorent they find it. Many of them were once men who would find such behaviour disgusting. So why do it ? Because all the other factory owners do - if I don't, I'll have less disciplined workers than them - I could not compete, I would be out of business. Every single one of them blames all the others for forcing him to become a rapist.
That's business without regulation. Regulation is designed to prevent the most profitiable business practises (which is why libertarians hate it) but that is not a bad thing - because the most profitable business practises are always the ones that kill people. You simply cannot preserve life and the welbeing of others as cheaply as you can destroy it. You simply cannot ever compete more efficiently than to put your competition out of business for the price of a bullet.
And because this is the reality, those who embrace this as an outcome they want must constantly lie about reality. They must pretend that reality is something other than it is. Lying about the bad things rich people will do to get richer becomes standard practise. Once you do that- you will lie about anything that threatens the rich's ability to kill to get richer. There's a problem though - nobody believes a pathological liar... what to do what to do... oh I know, accuse everybody else of being pathological liars, misrepresent what they say, tell clever lies like when somebody speaks of arctic ice melt you link them to an article about the ice growing and hope they don't notice that this is in the antarctic and actually the growth is only in surface area, the volume is decreasing, and even then all the new shallow ice is refrozen melt-off from the arctic (fresh water freezes more easily than salt water).
And in that grand tradition of flat out lying about reality, but doing it very cleverly, comes the federalist with another classic case. There are lots of reasons why microplastics are bad for the ocean and people - their spelled out all over this board by many posters - the article never denies the massive amount of microplastics around, it just says "not many big pieces" and pretends that disproves the shit ton of plastic floating around
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *