"Full scale of plastic in the world's oceans revealed for first time: Over five trillion pieces of plastic are floating in our oceans says most comprehensive study to date on plastic pollution around the world."
"The Outstanding Public Debt as of 11 Dec 2014 at 05:04:25 PM GMT is: $18,002,246,046,963.38."
There are 3.6 times as many dollars in the national debt as there are pieces of plastic floating in all of the oceans of the world — and most of those pieces of plastic are “micro plastics” measuring less than 5mm. For comparison purposes: all of the dollars measure 100¢.
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I'm old enough that I remember how upset everyone got when the debt reached $1 trillion under Reagan. Then how pissed off I was when Bush doubled it to $10 trillion.
Obama is doing his best to double it again to $20 trillion.
Can you say Weimer Republic?
I believe the debt was about $1T when Reagan took office and close to $2T when Reagan left office.
"...most of those pieces of plastic are “micro plastics” measuring less than 5mm. For comparison purposes: all of the dollars measure 100¢."
Droll, Althouse, quite droll.
I used to think this was important (the debt), but obviously, it's not.
Until it is.
Or not.
According to these articles, the combined weight of all this plastic is a tad over 250,000 tons. That is equivalent to the weight of two of the most modern U.S. aircraft carriers, and just slightly less than all of the aircraft carriers (11) engaged in the WWII battles at Coral Sea and Midway (7 of them were sunk). This amount wouldn't even register as a percentage of a percentage of a percent, considering how many ships have been sunk since man first started going to sea thousands of years ago. It's next to nothing.
All those dollars measure 46 1980 cents.
A post full of macroaggressions.
The dollar is only as strong as American Air and Navy might is still needed to preserve order for world trading.
The day a stronger military is available, like a stronger Chinese Navy and Airforce,is the day the dollar assumes its inflated value at about 30 cents. That is why Obama has worked so hard to destroy the military.
If I was 30, I'd be scared shitless. As it is, I fear I still might live to see the Apocalypse. On the plus side, my medical prognosis is iffy.
An interesting example of the tyranny of large numbers, used rhetorically as a kind of half truth doing the work of a complete lie. You're not supposed to notice that, in context, the large number is quite small.
Gruber could have cited this as another example of someone's relying on the stupidity of the American voter not to notice.
@Original
I used to think I'd be long dead by the time the s*** hit the fan.
Now I think I was wrong about that. Although, I could die soon. Not sure if that would be a win.
Not to worry. The deficit is the lowest it's been in 5 years (or some such inanity).
"I used to think this was important (the debt), but obviously, it's not."
-- Just like homelessness!
"An interesting example of the tyranny of large numbers, used rhetorically as a kind of half truth doing the work of a complete lie. You're not supposed to notice that, in context, the large number is quite small."
-- The tyranny of numbers has to do with connections in computers, that is, an actual, physical problem. It was a work/engineering problem that needed to be solved, not a problem with thinking about big numbers.
The tyranny of large numbers has to do with trade-offs/probabilities; it also popped up regarding how businesses need to maneuver to grow [a large business needs to make large growths to be worthwhile/noticeable.]
None of these have anything to do with "people be too dumb to get $18 trillion is a lot of money." That's general innumeracy.
It was Dick Feynman who pointed out that "astronomical numbers" should be called "economical numbers" because the numbers in economics are now larger than any in astronomy.
In fact economics has surpassed even chemistry: the exchange rate of Zimbabwe dollars to US dollars reached a maximum of 6 * 10^24 ZWD to 1 USD.
The national debt can be determined without statistical sampling and inference. Its global consequences can be estimated as a proportion to its overhang of economic productivity, and local or individual consequences in proportion to private and redistributed capital holdings. The global economy is a far smaller pool of liquidity than the world's oceans.
Not to worry. The deficit is the lowest it's been in 5 years (or some such inanity).
That was last year, when the deficit was only $500 billion, instead of $1 trillion, like it was Obama's first five years, and it will be this year.
(can you say government shut down?)
That's particles the size of sand, of which NPR estimates that the Earth has 7.5 quintillion grains (7.5 x 10^18).
So, by comparison, 5 trillion pieces of plastic (5 * 10^12) is not very much plastic. That's one piece of micro plastic for every 1 million grains of sand.
Admittedly that includes desert sand as well as beach and ocean sand.
a) The link does not appear to work.
b) As they counted the plastic, did they remove it? Or did they put it back? If they put it back, they are a$$holes. If they removed it they should have said "Over five trillion pieces of plastic were floating in our oceans". If neither then they were just "making shit up".
The global financial economy is huge and has an immense demand for debt securities of varying maturities. It doesn't matter whether, for example, New Zealand debt is a better risk than US debt, because New Zealand (or Switzerland, or any other fiscally responsible country you want to plug in) doesn't issue enough bonds for anyone to care.
Maybe another large economy, like China, could someday issue enough bonds to compete with the US. Still, do you think enough people have enough faith in the Chinese government's commitment to timely repayment that the risk would be commensurate to buying US bonds? Not until they have established a long track record.
So in the meantime, the world needs US debt (as we saw when the US Surplus under Clinton led to a halt in the issuance of 30-year bonds), and that need keeps the price up and the interest rate low.
The oceans are vast, as are the spending ambitions of the politicians.
True Lucien.
It's the private debt that is more likely to get us into serious trouble.
A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
Actually, most of that plastic is being used by various organisms in a positive way, for new habitats, food sources (big fish eating little fish clinging to the plastic bits) etc. The positives may not outweigh the negatives, but it certainly reduces a yawn to a deep snore
@Todd:If neither then they were just "making shit up".
There are all sorts of ways to estimate quantities within a specified precision besides counting--which itself is not free of error. And they are not "making shit up".
If I tell you that in 29g of copper there are 6.0*10^23 atoms, I'm not making shit up, but I sure didn't count them.
If I tell you that in 29g of copper there are 6023777434996383479493219 atoms, I am almost certainly lying to you.
See the difference?
Remember some years ago when the story was that there was "an island of plastic" in the middle of the ocean, a "plastic vortex larger than Texas", and other such claims? It is for reasons such as these that the environmental lobby has zero credibility.
And of course after these claims came out politicians rushed to pass new laws against plastic grocery bags in many areas. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Gabriel said...
There are all sorts of ways to estimate quantities within a specified precision besides counting--which itself is not free of error. And they are not "making shit up".
12/11/14, 2:38 PM
"1 in 5 women in collage are sexually assaulted."
"The world will be in catastrophic failure due to over population by the year 2000."
"We are at peak oil."
"As island of plastic in the ocean 2x the size of Texas."
"Man made global warming will must be stopped within the next few years or..."
"Women earn $0.77 for every $1 a man earns."
"Your insurance costs will go down by $2500 per year."
Often it is "just making shit up".
No mention that the debt is plastic too (a giant credit card)?
Aw.
"So in the meantime, the world needs US debt"
Yeah, I started hearing this argument from my liberal friends soon after Obama got elected. "We're saving the world!"
Link fixed.
@Todd:Often it is "just making shit up".
On the contrary, it is almost always a true statement misinterpreted.
Add all the income women earn and divide by all the income men earn, and you do indeed get 77 cents per dollar.
However, people who get indignant about that misinterpret it, or misrepresent it, to mean that for every man and woman who do the same job, a woman earns 77 cents on the dollar, and that is not true--but that's not what was stated.
Nothing was "made up".
All of those statments you quote are estimates, using assumptions, based on rules, with a calculated precision (which is never cited in the media). They are not just "made up".
They have limited utility and are easily misinterpreted, like the 77 cents on the dollar statement.
Or they are projections based on incomplete information, like peak oil or ocean levels.
Or they are highly imprecise numbers with the precision omitted, like the 1 in 5 statistic. Based on the sample size from the studies, that estimate has such a low precision that it could be anywhere from 1 in 100 to 1 in 2--but nonethless it isn't just "made up".
The reason I argue this point is not to defend progressive who misuse science and statistics--it is so we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that because statistics are not perfectly precise they are therefore made up.
I get your point and I use statistics on an ongoing basis. I just naturally doubt statistics that don't show where the numbers came from.
As to the Plastic...
Phrases like this don't help their cause: Each of the major oceans have plastic-filled gyres, including the well-known ‘great Pacific garbage patch’ that covers an area roughly equivalent to Texas.
Not that it is fantastic but the the reality is: Once a day, they drag a very fine, specialized net behind the boat. On one such sampling trip, she and her team found plastic pieces in 117 out of 119 random samples. On another, they found plastic in all 28 samples they took.
There was no, is no garbage island as some in the environmental movement claimed. These groups give the appearance to the entire environmental movement that they are less pro-environment and more anti-people.
http://io9.com/5911969/lies-youve-been-told-about-the-pacific-garbage-patch
Willis Eisenbach's take on it at Watts Up With That is instructive:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/10/big-numbers-small-numbers/
The ocean is a very big place.
For what it's worth, I have a PhD in Oceanography, and I understood this instinctively.
If all the pieces were 5mm*5mm, they'd cover a square of
sqrt((5*1000*1000*1000*1000*5*5)/(1000*1000)) square meters ~= 11km square, a little less than a 7 mile square, round up to 50 miles square.
Which is 0.0000353 % of the ocean surface area.
The percentage of ocean covered by 18,002,246,046,963.38 dollar bills is an exercise left to the reader.
In "...*1000)) square meters", an extraneous "square" snuck in. My entire staff is fired.
"Studies show that..." is journalistese for "I am about to lie to you."
It would take more than 158,500 years to count 5 trillion anythings at the rate of one per second.
Sounds like more statistical bullshit to me.
This reminds me.
I should go and buy that wheelbarrow.
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