The Garbage Philosophy Behind The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Myth. Why should we all be skeptical of doomsday claims about global warming? Well, there are a lot of reasons. But from now on, I can sum it all up in one simple phrase: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This was an environmentalist scare that became a bit of a trend from the late 1. The idea was that there is a giant floating raft of consumer trash in the middle of the Pacific where ocean currents created a kind of dead spot and all the flotsam and jetsam of the ocean gathered together. It was supposed to be a vast floating indictment! The actual supposed location of the “Garbage Patch” would not be nearly as interesting to photograph. Sure, there are areas of the ocean known as “gyres” that are like stagnant regions within the currents of the oceans where waste and debris and flotsam and jetsam tend to gather. Even if that seems weird or alarming, it’s actually a normal and natural phenomenon, sort of like how those human feet keep washing up in British Columbia because prevailing currents just happen to carry them there. The myth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals the environmentalists' willingness to lie for their cause. This shouldn't surprise anyone. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a big patch of garbage and debris in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. It is caught in the water currents. But scientists have known for a long time that there is nothing like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reported in the media. There is a small amount of noticeable debris in these areas. Take this piece from 2. Yet if you read through it looking for specific negative consequences, you pretty much get something about how these regions have more water strider larvae being laid on all those little bits of plastic. Which is really bad because. Much of the ocean contains little to no plastic at all. Plastic trash has made its way to the Pacific Ocean and its collected in massive amounts out in the middle of a 10 million square mile area known as the Pacific Gyre. The Western Pacific Garbage Patch. On the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean, there is another so-called "garbage patch," or area of marine debris buildup, off the. While "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is a term often used by the media, it does not paint an accurate picture of the marine debris problem in the North Pacific ocean. In the smaller ocean gyres, there is roughly one bottle cap of plastic per 5. Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water. In the worst spot on earth, there is about two plastic caps’ worth of plastic per swimming pool of ocean. The majority of the plastic is ground into tiny grains or small thin films, interspersed with occasional fishing debris such as monofilament line or netting. Nothing remotely like a large island exists. Clearly, the scale and magnitude of this problem is vastly exaggerated by environmental groups and media reports. The problem isn’t just that environmentalists were wrong about yet another scare story. The problem is that that they just don’t care about being wrong. They think it’s okay to make up stories like this and to lie to us in order to stampede us into following their agenda. How do I know this? Because it is stated pretty much openly in a new article by Slate columnist Daniel Engber. The best part is actually the opening, where Engber gives us the origin of the myth: In early August 1. Charles Moore found himself floating through the North Pacific in his Tasmanian- built catamaran. Moore, an oil heir, activist, and yachting captain, had just finished up a two- week race and was heading back from Honolulu to Santa Barbara, California, through what’s called a “gyre”. As he described it in a 2. Natural History, the thousand- mile journey took him through an endless field of plastic. Everywhere he looked he saw debris: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. And when he returned to this “Garbage Patch” a year later, he found a vast “plastic- plankton soup” and a litany of bigger objects: a volleyball, a cathode- ray tube for a 1. TV, a truck tire mounted on a steel rim, and a gallon bleach bottle so brittle that it crumbled in his hands. It gave us all a way to comprehend, or at least hallucinate, what was otherwise a widespread, microscopic devastation. Comprehension versus hallucination? Who knew Shruggie was a symbol of science? A 1. 98. 4 report from the National Academies of Science found no trend of decreasing ozone, and the media declared the crisis over. Then in 1. 98. 5, a team of British scientists in Antarctica published observations of a . Still, the global problem of chlorofluorocarbon emissions, leading to the degradation of the atmosphere, had been focused on a single spot. So it’s okay to lie and exaggerate about the garbage patch, and it’s okay to oversimplify and exaggerate about the ozone hole. Because, hey, people are stupid and you have to come up with an image that will play on their imagination in the press. Naturally, it follows that we need to come up with a similar way to lie and exaggerate about global warming: “it could only help to have a better metaphor for climate change. But the basic contradiction is pretty obvious: if you had to plant the evidence, then how did you “just know” the guy was guilty? Similarly, if you have to lie to the public about the urgent problem of plastic waste, or the ozone layer, or global warmin, then how do you know you’re not also lying to yourself about how big the problem is and how certain you are about it? This is the original sin of the global warming crusade: that it took the assumption that man is destroying the earth as an unquestioned starting point, then found it acceptable to fudge the details to support this “larger truth.”A cop caught planting evidence is considered tainted forever and might see all of his convictions thrown out by the courts. The same thing goes for a scientist, much less for a bunch of liberal arts majors on the Internet who play at telling us how much they freaking love science.
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