Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The Overblown Giant Pacific Garbage Patch

As I said recently, attempted expeditions to the supposed "Giant Pacific Garbage Patch" or "Plastic Vortex" have been disappointing to environmental alarmists. National Geographic is promoting the latest such voyage with a hype that strikes me as downright nutty. Take this photo:

Yes, there are plastic bottles in the ocean. But look at the water in the background!

Or this, which they use as their lead:

Is that a giant Pacific garbage patch, or just a lost fishing net with some other stuff caught up in it?

Pollution of the oceans is a major problem, but creating this image of a giant garbage vortex that looks to the rest of us like, well, an ocean, is going to backfire and make environmentalists look like liars.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 10, 2009 at 10:10 PM

    I got an impression from recent news stories that plastic bottles etc. do not in fact survive indefinitely in ocean water, but break up rapidly into tiny fragments--which is in fact much worse for the environment.

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  2. JohnSeptember 11, 2009 at 7:33 AM

    Right, I blogged about that. I am simply annoyed/amused by this "great trash vortex" stuff, which I think only makes environmentalists and the National Geographic Society look silly.

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  3. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2009 at 8:23 AM

    The idea IS kind of cool though. It's like the Sargasso Sea--this giant floating world in the middle of the ocean.

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