Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I read a paper today that said that there are no less than 270,000,000 kilograms of plastic in the ocean, which is about half a billion pounds plus of plastic. So … is this a big number or a small number?
The story is at the Guardian, and they’ve illustrated it with the following picture:
Regarding the story, as usual the Guardian doesn’t disappoint—it hypes the danger of the half-billion pounds of plastic. Hey, good news doesn’t sell newspapers, so I can’t fault them. In any case, they say:
More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain, new research has found.
Now, I suppose that the good folks at the Grauniad think that with their picture they are showing the “damage throughout the food chain” that they claim plastics cause in the ocean … but look at the picture and think about it for a moment.
Does it look like a) that chunk of plastic is inimical to sea life … or does it look like b) that chunk of plastic is acting a substrate upon which abundant sea life is living and serving as fish food? Call me crazy but I’m going for Choice b), you can see the little striped fish chowing down. Now I know that not all plastic is good for sea life … but that plastic certainly is.
However, I started out with the question about whether 270,000,000 kilogrammes is a big number or a small number. Looking at the extent of the ocean gives us a very different picture … because it turns out that the 270,000,000 kilograms of plastic works out to 200 grams of plastic per cubic kilometer of the ocean. Or in old-school measurements, that’s just under two pounds of plastic per cubic mile of seawater. (Some commenters have noted that most of the debris is at or near the surface, so if you prefer, it’s about 900 grams of plastic per square kilometer of ocean surface.)
Now, I’m willing to agree that there are some kinds of plastic that are likely inimical to sealife. Nylon fishing nets that have been lost and gone adrift, for example, continue to kill fish. But the fish aren’t wasted, they’re eaten in turn by a combination of larger and smaller fish until the net washes ashore. So the nets are just another predator. Not saying I like that, I don’t, particularly when they catch whales and other sea mammals … but it’s not the end of the ocean.
And as for the other small pieces of random plastic … well, I just can’t get all that passionate about the dangers of 200 grams of plastic for every BILLION tonnes of sea water, or if you prefer, the dangers of 900 grams of plastic for every square kilometre of ocean surface (1 cubic km = one billion tonnes).
Now, I can hear you thinking, but Willis, what about the great Pacific Gyre, where the plastic collects? First, it’s not like most people think, where you could walk on the plastic and there are islands and such. The density is much higher than the global average, but it’s still only about 2-3 kg per cubic kilometre, or about 5 kg/square km.
However, as a long-time fisherman, I’d bet big money that there is MORE sea life in the Gyre than in equivalent blue-water ocean near the Gyre. The blue water is a desert, in part because there’s nothing for life to grow on. Many kinds of sea life require a “substrate”, something solid to attach to so it can grow. As a result, anything that floats, and I mean anything, will rapidly attract life, just as in the Guardian’s “scary” picture above.
In closing, I don’t like plastic in the ocean, and I’m very, very conscious about it when I’m at sea. I never throw plastic into the ocean. However, as an ocean problem, it’s way, way below things like overfishing and pollution. Those are the real dangers, not a couple hundred grams of plastic in each billion tons of sea water. That’s a small number.
Best to all,
w.
PS—If you disagree with someone, please QUOTE THEIR EXACT WORDS so everyone can be clear just what your objection might be.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
LOL Dilution is STILL the solution to pollution! They’re still crazy after all these years.
Their Guardian reporting/opinion on certain issues such as climate/eco concerns, dietary concerns, race and feminism are all over the top. Inflammatory hyperbole on it’s best day. To take them literally is to conclude old white men in general and conservative white young men are pillaging the environment, creating extreme weather for generations to come, killing blacks and raping women. If the National Enquirer covered the same issues they become the Guardian. I really don’t know whats become of left wing media in the last decade, maybe it’s the Rush Limbaugh affect, leftward media in striving to emulate his financial success have devolved on the journalistic evolutionary scale.
A fine illustration of the importance of context, and superbly attention-grabbing by taking a big number and asking ‘is this a big number?’ Entertaining and edifying.
When presented with statistics in a discussion I always ask, “What if I told you I could double your chances of winning the lottery immediately?” They become quiet at that thought, and I tell them to buy 2 lottery tickets instead of 1. Somehow having a 2 in a 5 million chance of winning over a 1 in a 5 million chance does not match the promise of doubling your chances.
The issue is context. The same game is played with cigarette smoking, as in the lottery example, the likely hood of getting lung cancer is without question increased with smoking, but I believe people need to know what those risks are in context. Why isn’t it communicated simply: smokers chance of lung cancer is x in 100,000 while a non-smoker is x per 100,000. What about explaining the vast majority of lung cancer deaths occur after age 70 where there are a whole host of other afflictions that kill people after that age?
I myself am pretty tired of being in an age where fear mongering is the primary method of institutions communicating to the public. Doesn’t sound like an enlightened age, more like medieval.
“…could double your chances of winning the lottery…”
But, since lottery numbers are randomly generated, if you bought all of the tickets printed you still wouldn’t be guaranteed of winning. And, because the Government always takes a free slice or two, even if you did win, the payoff would be less than total ticket cost.
So buying two tickets just increases your chance of losing. Slightly. 🙂
Not clearly stated: “So buying two tickets just increases your chance of losing your money“.
The smoking data is readily available, in male, current, 60-64yo smokers the mortality rate per 100,000 person years is ~400, whereas for ‘never smokers’ of the same age it’s ~9.
Lung cancer is just one of many potential health penalties associated with smoking.
From the CDC:
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/effects_cig_smoking/index.htm
And….
More here:
http://betobaccofree.hhs.gov/health-effects/smoking-health/
Good article. It really demonstrates “Puny Human Syndrome” (I just made that up) where we vastly over estimate our size and impact in the universe, even though we are so insignificant that a billion of us is hardly noticable.
Did someone above mention greenpeace. Seems they’ve done it again, as in causing more harm than good. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/peru-indignant-greenpeace-stunt-nazca-lines-27488218 They’ve already poisoned the people of Peru against them. I hope the ‘Chariots of the Gods’ return and dissect a few as revenge for destroying their ancient art work. 😉
Willis, like global warming alarm, this is just another among hundreds of scary topics (the thread digressed into radioactivity, another topic with more than 200gs of ink/km^3 of sea water spent on it).. We are awash in this nonsense and I believe the greens and newspaper supporters are counterproductive to their cause in turning so much of this stuff out.
One of the main things that all this hype has polluted is the internet. Type in the word asbestos. If you are hoping to find a lot of articles on the mineralogy and mining of it, you are out of luck. It was another over-hyped topic some 40 years ago and it hasn’t abated much with time. It was taken out of asbetos-cement pipe for conducting potable water, even though there was more abestos and abestos-form mineral concentration in natural river waters in the Canadian north where it was derived from the metamorphosed rock formations of the Canadian Shield. I drank lots of it over many decades. Here is an EPA report on filteriing asbestiform particles out of Lake Superior water (I hate these long links).
http://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/2000FXPU.TXT?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&Client=EPA&Index=Prior+to+1976&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A\zyfiles\Index%20Data\70thru75\Txt0000001\2000FXPU.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h|-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=p|f&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=1&SeekPage=x&ZyPURL
Asbestos was another environmental scam. The only danger that the mineral posed was as an aerosol in pulverized form. But then it was deadly.
My Father did a fair bit of work on this in the 70’s. Asbestos in general is only as bad as coal dust, silica dust, wheat dust, sawdust etc. for health concerns. UNLESS. If it is a hollow fibre asbestos. If the fibre is hollow it allows a lot of biological things to happen protected from the immune system. Cancers are one of the possible results. Asbestos comes in many different types and chemical formulations. The good have been cursed by the bad due to the same name.
To make little links out of big ones, go here:
http://tinyurl.com/
Put the big link in the box, hit the button, then copy the little link and paste where you want it.
Seen some documentaries where, like your pic shows, fish (especially tiny fry) use anything, including floating plastic, as protection where usually there is none. So like most issues there are several aspects, good and bad.
“270,000,000 kilograms of plastic”
Yup. It is all about perspective. Willis puts the number up against the ocean and the alarm bells ring more softly. The Guardian wants alarm bells clanging in your head by getting you to visualize 270,000,000 kilograms of plastic as if you were taking it out to your curbside recycling bin.
Numbers and perspective; one flea in a sleeping bag is one flea too many.
It’s that other theory of relativity.
As someone posted above, it would be nice if some of the $ wasted on fictitious CAGW could be directed to cleaning up the mess.
Some species like the laysan albatross use natural plastics as part of their diet and isn’t necessarily harmful, although it would be so much better if the US and other nations didn’t use our oceans as a dumping ground.
This article is in Living Bird magazine by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and their blog.
http://blog.allaboutbirds.org/2014/09/26/facing-into-the-wind-the-complicated-fate-of-the-laysan-albatross/
“They don’t eat plastics by mistake,” Flint said, “They seek them out and swallow them on purpose because they’re a substrate for flying fish eggs. If you walked around an albatross colony in the 1950s, you would find albatross carcasses full of pumice and sticks and wood.
“They’ve been eating natural plastics all their life,” she said, referring to the hard, sharp beaks of squid that are the albatrosses’ main food. Flint stressed that plastics do pose problems: they harm species lower on the food chain. They also accumulate toxins from the water and can pose a chemical threat when swallowed. But they do not necessarily cause albatross chicks to starve. Before fledging, most albatross chicks cough up plastic and squid beaks alike to clear their stomach before taking their first flight. Kaloakulua successfully regurgitated her “bolus” of stomach contents on June 1, 2014. The following video shows a Kauai Albatross Network volunteer examining the plastic that it contained:
Willis:
Part of the issue with all the plastic pollution in the oceans is the fact that it is washing up on the shores of Pacific islands like Midway Atoll in the northwest Hawaiian islands chain. Midway was closed down as a U.S. naval base some years ago and is now a federal wildlife refuge.
The problem according to reports and the images below is that the bird life on these islands mistake the small plastic pieces for food and consume them. Their digestive systems cannot handle the digestion of the plastic and it ends up killing them.
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=plastic+on+midway+island&qpvt=plastic+on+midway+island&qpvt=plastic+on+midway+island
I am making no claim here regarding the legitimacy of these reports or the seriousness of the problem, and many of the images above do appear to show plastic pieces having been placed on the bird carcass before the photos were taken. As a animal lover however it is disturbing to see those photos of dead birds, and keeping the shores of Midway and the rest of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands (which are all wildlife refuges) free of the plastic is a never-ending chore. According to reports, much if not most of the plastic is actually coming from Japan rather than the U.S.
Just wanted to make everyone aware.
Good points. An aside: Many birds seek out strange stuff to consume as part of their natural process of digestion and ridding their guts of indigestible bits like bones, squid beaks, etc. Owls and other raptors routinely cough up ‘pellets’ and many birds consume grit, pebbles and even stones to help the digestion process. Yes, have to be careful regarding some photos, especially from sites that have an agenda or axe to grind.
….if the federal government took just a fraction of the money it squanders on the fictitious CAGW “problem” and the money it wastes on the wind and solar energy industries, the money could fund a program to control this problem–at least in U.S. waters including around the Hawaiian islands.
Unfortunately, with Washington politicians having their heads up their butts, I don’t see this happening anytime soon.
Yes, there’s a epidemic of proctocraniosis in Washington, but it’s even worse in London.
I heard an interesting radio interview several months ago, and apparently there is an issue with the presence of microplastics collecting on the ocean floor – the reason being that they are ingested by both small and large marine organisms, and have been shown to concentrate toxic chemicals that are already present in sea water. These microplastics get there in a variety of ways – microbeads in cosmetics, plastic bags that fragment instead of degrading, even washing our polyester-containing clothes (microscopic lint is shed from the clothing into the waste water and eventually ends up in the ocean). Tiny organisms ingest these bits of plastic, bigger organisms eat them – and so on. Currently, the cumulative effects are not known, although they are being studied.
Pure conjecture and exaggerated hype from the eco-greenery culture – that wants more money, and feeds internally off of fear and projections. For example, these critters are supposedly getting harmed by sub-microscopic “dirt” – that is “articificial dirt” and grit really – when they LIVE ON the muck, sand, grit, and soil erosion and billions of tons of organic residue drifting down over the waters from above? The “muck” dropped down to the bottom by the time the ocean floor reaches the continental shelves is thousands and thousands of meters deep. And that is where these bottom-feeders live!
But “artificial plastics” are supposedly building up and harming them? What? They have never heard of pearls before? Of sperm whales’ coating squid beaks? Of fish swallowing fish whole – then “fish poop” falling below?
I can live with the odd bit of plastic. My main rule is to avoid any stretches of river or ocean downstream of where Professor Garnaut, former Climate Change advisor for the Australian Government, has been engaged in gold mining.
Seems like this is a good case of “the danger is in the dose”.
BTW, maybe some of these billionaires who are spending so much money trying to buy elections for the green side could afford an expedition to clean up some of this stuff. Really, a ship, a vacuum…how expensive can it be? Put Leo d Caprio on the boat (add some “models” if you want to make a show of it for TMZ) and voila!
@ur momisugly M Manhas
“… apparently there is an issue with the presence of microplastics collecting on the ocean floor – the reason being that they are ingested by both small and large marine organisms, and have been shown to concentrate toxic chemicals that are already present in sea water. …”
Ah! So another way of putting it is that the microplastics are CLEANING the sea water and burying the toxins safely under the sea bed…?
How very environmental…
We can argue about how important it is till the cows come home but the simple fact is that nowhere on this earth is there a truly pristine beach. And it is one thing to show a pic of plastic in an Albatross carcass. It is another to watch those birds die a horrible death. “Goony birds” is what the sailors on Midway during WW II called them. The birds were unafraid of man even when that atoll was covered with people and aircraft. A person could walk up to one and help launch it into the wind. Now Midway is a trash heap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUM58LIU2Lo
On Betio Island of the Tarawa atoll fragments of bones of marines that fought and were blown to pieces there in that concentrated hell are found among the piles of trash and plastic on the beaches to this day. Portions of the beaches where so many died taking the most concentrated defense the fanatical Japanese would mount during the whole war are nothing more than trash heaps. http://www.raidersmerciless.com/showthread.php?t=8812
I could go on with other examples but I think you now get where I stand on this issue.
There is a, possibly apocryphal, story i once heard from a western climbing expedition on the trek to K2 base-camp: At one of the intermediate campsites approaching the Baltoro glacier the expedition decided that there was too much refuse left by other expeditions. They gave their many porters some sacks and ordered them to go and pick up all the trash. The porters came back with sacks full of twigs and leaves.
I might have felt the same way, but ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
Thank you, Willis. Your perspective is always helpful. Despite that analysis, I still worry about two aspects of the ocean-borne plastic problem.
The first is microparticles. Much of the plastic in the ocean is not the big, still-identifiable styrofoam cups and water bottles – it is plastic that has been ground down to the size of dust. Permit a short analogy – there is a great deal of dirt on the land. I don’t worry about any of it, however, because only the small fraction that’s of the right size to stay airborne will affect my asthma. That fraction, however, affects me very much. And it doesn’t take very much per km3 of atmosphere to keep me indoors.
My second remaining concern is the unstated assumption that the plastic is and remains biologically inert. If, as some research as suggested, plastic can decompose into hormone-like compounds, it again could have effect disproportionate to its apparent quantity. (My hypothesis, by the way, would be that such breakdown components would disperse more easily than the original solid plastic artifacts and that therefore any hormonal effects could be felt even in areas with no apparent solid pollution.)
And what type of emissions should count as pollution?
It cannot be sewage, that is after all just plant food, like CO2. The main ingredients in sewage are Nitrogen and Phosphorous which is also the main ingredients in fertilizers. Acid rain contains SO2, i.e. Sulfur which is another ingredient in fertilizer.
Is it only heavy metals that counts as pollutants? Most of the heavy metal pollution comes from burning of coal by the way.
/Jan
Jan, always a bit sketchy to generalize to something as large and biodiverse as the oceans. One example. Sewage ( and more generally organic runoff) is a major ‘pollutant’ of coastal coral reefs. As the prganic matter decomposes, it gives off trace hydrogen sulfide (swamp gas) whichnis an acute toxin to marine organisms in the same way and formthemsame reasons that cyanide is for humans. The LD50 of H2S for corals, crabs, and such is about 30 PPB!
Acid rain is a problem for fresh water lakes in metamorphic or igneous geologies where there is no carbonate for neutralization, like New England. Ocean dissolved carbonate neutralizes it, so not a big ocean concern. And so on.
Cost/benefit analyses need to be reasonably granular to be meaningful.
Is ocean plastic really “forever” or just food for a yet-to-evolve bacteria?
Three observations. First, Willis’ post is a good example of the need for information perspective, a topic explored in that chapter of The Arts of Truth. Much of the current media commentary about ‘shale oil’ and the Saudi ‘price war’ on it suffers from lack of perspective (as well as lack of Petroleum 101 geophysics).
Second, the plastics estimate. Never trust media (especially like Grauniad). The article reports on a new paper in PLOS/1. No paywall, good SI. Really interesting. Result of 14 separate expeditions to all major ocean areas, 680 towed fine mesh (0.3mm) net transects (to depth of 2 meters) and 891 large object visual transect counts by 9 plastic object types. Net samples actually sorted and measured for volume and weight by particle size class. Large visual object samples measures for volume and weight by type class. Massive experimental results fed into US Navy’s world ocean model surface layer for currents and winds to generalize the sampled transects to the globe, producing the generalized 269,000 metric tons estimate. Solid science IMO. Glad Willis brought it to our attention. And showing Willis’ gedanken used a wrong assumption. It should be square km of surface to a depth of two meters, NOT cubic km.
Third, ROM’s comment above identified two very interesting papers on how bacteria and other microorganisms colonize (and at least in some cases consume) the smaller plastic bits. Why is that important? Because it completely explains biologically the biggest surprise finding of the PLOS/1 paper. Actual samples matched the generalized Navy ocean model result really well (statisticly, for all oceans and gyres) for all visual types and all particle sizes (light and wave turbulence plastic degradation) except for the smallest particle class. There, the model produced an order of magnitude more plastic than observed. As the plastic bits get smaller, they get biologically recycled, something the ‘physical’ ocean model did not incorporate.
That good news is something the Grauniad probably would not report, since it means ocean plastic–while not good–is much less alarming than Grauniad implied, for reasons independent of Willis’ quantitative perspective.
Then there is this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210474/Forgotten-hazards-Unexploded-WW2-bombs-chemical-weapons-pose-threat-oil-drilling-Gulf-Mexico.html
Millions of pounds of unexploded bombs dumped in the Gulf of Mexico by the U.S. government after World War Two pose a significant risk to offshore oil drilling, warn researchers.
It is no secret that the United States, along with other governments, dumped munitions and chemical weapons in oceans from 1946 until the practice was banned in the 1970s by U.S. law and international treaty, said William Bryant, a Texas A&M University professor of oceanography.
Last year, BP shut its key Forties crude pipeline in the North Sea for five days while it removed a 13-foot (4-metre) unexploded German mine found resting cozily next to the pipeline that transports up to 40 percent of the UK’s oil production.
Hundreds of dolphins washed ashore in Virginia and New Jersey shorelines in 1987 with burns similar to mustard gas exposure. One marine-mammal specialist suspects Army-dumped chemical weapons killed them.
“The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste – either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.”
http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/2007/06/11/munitions-dumping-at-sea/
Most of the present day ocean trash dumping (much like any other dumping including chemical) is probably done illegally by those just saving a buck, and not particularly caring about any consequences (10 percenter’s).
Need I re-quote George Carlin from the 5 December post here on WUWT?
“And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” “Plastic… asshole.” -George Carlin
The consequences of pollution are inevitably measured in context and in proportion to concentration. Even the much maligned oil is a nutrient that feeds the base of some ecosystems.
I used a different approach, but obviously came to a similar result. I think using cubic km is a bit over the top. the stuff is ‘floating’ after all. I used cubic meters multiplied by surface area in meters to get the weight of the top meter of ocean.
My proposal: take the IPCC funding and have the UN fund the clean up. These are international waters after all and something the UNITED NATIONS should be responsible for.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/20597