2007 a Year of Weather Records in US
WASHINGTON - When the calendar turned to 2007, the heat went on and the weather just got weirder. January was the warmest first month on record worldwide - 1.53 degrees above normal. It was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe’s average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year.
And as 2007 drew to a close, it was also shaping up to be the hottest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere.
U.S. weather stations broke or tied 263 all-time high temperature records, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. weather data. England had the warmest April in 348 years of record-keeping there, shattering the record set in 1865 by more than 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
It wasn’t just the temperature. There were other oddball weather events. A tornado struck New York City in August, inspiring the tabloid headline: “This ain’t Kansas!”
In the Middle East, an equally rare cyclone spun up in June, hitting Oman and Iran. Major U.S. lakes shrank; Atlanta had to worry about its drinking water supply. South Africa got its first significant snowfall in 25 years. And on Reunion Island, 400 miles east of Africa, nearly 155 inches of rain fell in three days - a world record for the most rain in 72 hours.
Individual weather extremes can’t be attributed to global warming, scientists always say. However, “it’s the run of them and the different locations” that have the mark of man-made climate change, said top European climate expert Phil Jones, director of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in England.
Worst of all - at least according to climate scientists - the Arctic, which serves as the world’s refrigerator, dramatically warmed in 2007, shattering records for the amount of melting ice.
2007 seemed to be the year that climate change shook the thermometers, and those who warned that it was beginning to happen were suddenly honored. Former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Oscar and he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of thousands of scientists. The climate panel, organized by the United Nations, released four major reports in 2007 saying man-made global warming was incontrovertible and an urgent threat to millions of lives.
Through the first 10 months, it was the hottest year recorded on land and the third hottest when ocean temperatures are included.
Smashing records was common, especially in August. At U.S. weather stations, more than 8,000 new heat records were set or tied for specific August dates.
More remarkably that same month, more than 100 all-time temperature records were tied or broken - regardless of the date - either for the highest reading or the warmest low temperature at night. By comparison only 14 all-time low temperatures were set or tied all year long, as of early December, according to records kept by the National Climatic Data Center.
For example, on Aug. 10, the town of Portland, Tenn., reached 102 degrees, tying a record for the hottest it ever had been. On Aug. 16, it hit 103 and Portland had a new all-time record. But that record was broken again the next day when the mercury reached 105.
Daily triple-digit temperatures took a toll on everybody, public safety director George West recalled. The state had 15 heat-related deaths in August.
Portland was far from alone. In Idaho, Chilly Barton Flat wasn’t living up to its name. The weather station in central Idaho tied an all-time high of 100 on July 26, Aug. 7, 14 and 19. During 2007, weather stations in 35 states, from Washington to Florida, set or tied all-time heat records in 2007.
Across Europe this past summer, extreme heat waves killed dozens of people.
And it wasn’t just the heat. It was the rain. There was either too little or too much.
More than 60 percent of the United States was either abnormally dry or suffering from drought at one point in August. In November, Atlanta’s main water source, Lake Lanier, shrank to an all-time low. Lake Okeechobee, crucial to south Florida, hit its lowest level in recorded history in May, exposing muck and debris not seen for decades. Lake Superior, the biggest and deepest of the Great Lakes, dropped to its lowest August and September levels in history.
Los Angeles hit its driest year on record. Lakes fed by the Colorado River and which help supply water for more than 20 million Westerners, were only half full.
Australia, already a dry continent, suffered its worst drought in a century, making global warming an election issue. On the other extreme, record rains fell in China, England and Wales.
Minnesota got the worst of everything: a devastating June and July drought followed by record August rainfall. In one March day, Southern California got torrential downpours, hail, snow and fierce winds. Then in the fall came devastating fires driven by Santa Ana winds.
And yet none of those events worried scientists as much as what was going on in the Arctic in the summer. Sea ice melted not just to record levels, but far beyond the previous melt record. The Northwest Passage was the most navigable it had been in modern times. Russia planted a flag on the seabed under the North Pole, claiming sovereignty.
The ice sheets that cover a portion of Greenland retreated to an all-time low and permafrost in Alaska warmed to record levels.
Meteorologists have chronicled strange weather years for more than a decade, but nothing like 2007. It was such an extreme weather year that the World Meteorological Organization put out a news release chronicling all the records and unusual developments. That was in August with more than 145 sizzling days to go.
Get used to it, scientists said. As man-made climate change continues, the world will experience more extreme weather, bursts of heat, torrential rain and prolonged drought, they said.
“We’re having an increasing trend of odd years,” said Michael MacCracken, a former top federal climate scientist, now chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington. “Pretty soon odd years are going to become the norm.”
© 2007 The Associated Press.
The weather has been weird for a while but ask Exxon and they will say it’s just natural fluctuation.
Seth Borenstein says:And yet none of those events worried scientists as much as what was going on in the Arctic in the summer. Sea ice melted not just to record levels, but far beyond the previous melt record. The Northwest Passage was the most navigable it had been in modern times. Russia planted a flag on the seabed under the North Pole, claiming sovereignty.
Strange how economical viability makes everyone thing that they can stake a claim on Canada’s property (cut and pasted from wikipedia):
SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE H0H 0H0
CANADA
Now back to more serious stuff - The National had a special on both the adverse environmental consequences and positive economic benefits which may result from an arctic melt called “The Big Melt”:
http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/special_feature/the_big_melt/index.html
“Pretty soon odd years are going to become the norm.”
This is the scarest line of the article. Imagine how people, especially those in the U.S., will react to the new norm. Because people here have such short attention spans and because the education system has been taken over by corporate interests who have no incentive to teach history, people will forget how the new normal came about (because of THEIR ACTIONS) and will continue on the path of doing nothing about it.
I’m sorry, dearest Mother Earth - giver of all Life. I’m sorry that we have brought you so much pain. Thank you for your gifts that we have not deserved. Cleanse yourself of us who take such advantage of you - and please forgive us at the same time.
IOWAIRISH: I second the apology to Earth Mother. Last year in North Florida it seemed like an early spring had arrived and flowers began to bloom. Then a frost came in and killed everything. Right now it’s close to 80 degrees outside, and that is not normal for winter here. I wonder if it will confuse the trees, the ones given to rest in winter? And if cycles flux between hot and cold, harvest cycles will be interrupted. One can only imagine what it does to animals who are keyed into weather warming cycles to recognize mating time and/or when to begin migrations. This tragedy is not entirely in slow motion, it’s almost like a form of mass denial that most people want to continue consuming on, even though the lifespan of that activity is tantamount to mass suicide.
My electric bill this month was $23. Unheard of. I live conservation as much as I can. Bring the same cloth bag to the supermarket, the same plastic container to get the water refill, shop at thrift shops or 2nd hand shops when I need anything, and eat small amounts of food (mostly vegetarian). I bike where I can, but must travel periodically and that is my one regret; although my Toyota is great on mileage. Many in this forum do what they can to cut back, it’s those who don’t read CD who still let the MSM manufacture their needs (thneeds as Dr. Seuss referred to these false desires) for them.
Nature will replenish and come up with interesting new animal and plant forms, the ones that can adapt to sea saw changes… human kind? That’s yet to be determined.
Dear fellow billions of frogs in the Gaia pressure cooker,
Do not worry, we will soon get used to these slight increments of warming. A few percent of a degree warmer each year will quickly become normal, only be prepared for some big leaps once all the ice has been melted. We can happily go on basking in the warmth, wrecking all that was before us away, and burning the coal for maybe a century to come before the only creatures that can survive will be the mythical devils of hell. Eat, drink and be merry for coming new year, there aren’t too many of them left. When the going gets tough, we still won’t be able to kill ourselves off quickly enough.
Happy new year!
The Arctic ice melt is the most serious problem and it is nothing for me to make any funny or sarcastic comments about. Here is a very recent article on what methane gas releases are capable of. Some top scientists believe the arctic methane may “burp” wihtin as soon as five to ten years. That possibility is most serious and for me at least, puts DU use as number two on a priority list. Which is hard for me to accept. Facts are facts however and ‘reality’ is just that.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071221222544.htm
Siouxrose,
As to your question about animals & mating cycles, its already happening. In northern Wisconsin the rutting season for deer has gradually (over the last 10-15 years) come later and later, slipping nearly three weeks and impinging upon the usual Thanksgiving hunt. The timing of bird migrations has changed as well. Maple sap is running earlier than anyone can remember up here - not just for one year, but year after year. Bees have died off (possibly related/exacerbated by GW). Invasive species are moving further north, and seem less likely to die off in the winter (previous natural defenses).
I bring this up, since there are many (otherwise) conservative rural voters who have seen these effects firsthand and are questioning the happy-talk heard from right-wing sources. Having left the farm and moved to a liberal town (Madison) I used to get lots of grief for being a “tree hugger” and a Bush basher when I would return. Not anymore. Even some of the small town evangelicals have turned.
Lets hope its not too late.
just saw news story about plastic.plastic now outweighs plankton in the ocean.another fine neocon invention,i agree that we might as well blame everthing on them,why not ?they deserve to be scape-goats ?but on a personal and local and intimate level- something we should all try to do-not use plastics.(as much as possible)
pentagon outlines their stranglehold on all electromagnetic waves….hmmm, what’s black and white and red all over ? infra-red polar bears.
With global warming comes the urgent need to build heavier, more powerful private passenger vehicles for the safety and comfort of Americans. Now hiring “extreme weather engineers”.
-General Motors
We look forward to the challenge of supplying General Motors with the extra steel reinforcement needed for their vehicles to withstand “extreme weather events” in the coming decades.
- US Steel
Berkshire Hathaway is meeting the “extreme weather event” challenge head on with increased investments in our insurance businesses. We sell peace of mind to anyone who can afford it.
- Warren Buffett
I’m with Warren!
- Hillary Rodham Clinton
This has all happened during a solar minimum. Maybe Dr. Hansen and the climate models are wrong. The point of no return isn’t 450 ppm CO2 in 2048. Maybe the point WAS 380 ppm in 2007.
Can’t really blame anyone. Bush and the neocons are scoundrels, but we have been heading for this uncharted territory for 200 years. Watt, Fitch, Newton, the Lunar Society, Pasteur… gave us the knowledge and tools to come to this point. Free enterprise gave us the motivation.
I guess the next big shocker will be the solar maximum in a few years at almost 390 ppm CO2. If that doesn’t spawn a Kyoto-like agreement with some teeth in it and US participation, we’re done. If the currently increasing CO2 and flat methane concentrations start spiking, we’re done.
Looks like Edwards is the only candidate with a clue about what is happening and also willing to buck the lobbyists. Maybe he will answer the call in 2012 or so. Will the American public let him? It will be a call for major sacrifices in our lifestyle.
Diversion time. Pats/Giants and PSU/A&M.
HabitatVic, I’ve had similar experiences in upstate NY. There are mockingbirds breeding here now and I’ve seen overwintering Carolina wrens, as well.
This summer I went for a walk down an abandoned railroad track that was densely lined with flowers, and flowering shrubs and trees: chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, black chokecherry, goldenrod, honeysuckle and etc. The noise from bees should have been practically deafening. The reality of it was that I saw one honeybee and two bumblebees in a three-mile walk through a corridor of flowers in the middle of summer.
You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know that something’s not quite right. All you have to do is look around you.
HabitatVic:
I guess I should have known my beloved Wisconsin would not be spared by the effects, but though it’s great to hear from a fellow (well, I’m an ex- now, ex-patriat, even) Madisonian, most especially that the rural communities are starting to wean themselves of the Koolade, I can only begin to imagine how the north woods are going to change these next few years. Are the bees gone from SoCentral WI as well? I can’t imagine a Farmers Market without not only swarms of bees scaring the wits out of allergic people like me, but also swarms of kids sucking on those honey-sticks. Corn is wind-pollenated, so the AgriBusinesses probably don’t give a crap that pesticides (exogenous and endogenous) are wiping out the friendlies. Take away everything that isn’t wind-pollenated and you’ve got a pretty bleak situation, delicious fresh sweetcorn notwithstanding.
Gosh how I miss Saturday mornings on the square. It’s thoughts like that which get you through the snowy months. Speaking of which, had enough of it this December yet?
rtdrury:
GM: the pitch
USS: the swing
WARren Buffett: the emesis.
Thanks for making me toss my cookies this fine morning. Excellent post.
G.W.Bush = Global Warming Bush
Gee, I was kind of looking forward to the in-house ICH global warming skeptics to post here and explain how this is all just a vast conspiracy by climate scientists and other shadowy powers to hoodwink us.
Actually, I think we would all prefer if global warming turned out to be a phantom but I’m far more suspicious of the motives of the “debunkers” then the advocates. It is, in fact, the vast majority of climate scientists who are the most deeply alarmed about what they see happening in the natural world.
I try to read as much of the “skeptics” arguments as I can but I find the majority unconvincing.
What Really Happened will post the most flimsy and dubious articles attacking “Global Warming” but NEVER posts any of the reasonable arguments that support it. Consequently, I’ve lost a good deal of respect for the site. It’s not that I object to someone holding a different perspective on an issue, rather I object to someone very selectively manipulating evidence and refusing to even present other sides of complex issues.
ICH seems fairly open-minded on a range of issues and it’s one of the reasons I recommend it to the politically and economically naïve.
Anyway, since the in-house global warming “debunkers” have failed to post as of yet, let me, in the interests of fair play, post this piece from New Statesmen telling us that global warming has stopped:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200712190004
Of course, the article didn’t seem to offer much in the way of evidence.
We do have this:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
What is irrefutable is that we have massive loss of glaciations around the world as well as radical melting in the polar region. I’m not sure how to reconcile that with the notion that global warming is a sham or conspiracy.
I have a family member, a cousin—Jeff Dozier–who is an award-winning expert in snow hydrology.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18282
He is absolutely certain that global warming is unfolding and sees it in every area of his research. And yet he takes remarkably little interest in the politics of the issue. I can’t imagine anyone less likely to engage in political manipulation of data or a conspiracy of scientists.
whoops — my foolish mistake — I meant “Common Dreams” –not ICH (which many of you probably also check out on occasion). I haven’t had my coffee yet!
Thank you for those links and the fun but very appropriate post MIFTIN.
GLOBAL WARMING ARROGANCE
The US rejections of Kyoto, and now the Bali Conference, underscore the dangerous control that special interests exercise over this administration’s policies. Their distortions of scientific data typifies their unconscionable war on science. Evidence linking carbon pollution to warming has long been as close to certain as science can be. Its causes, consequences, and mitigation requirements have been documented by many dedicated environmental organizations including The Union of Concerned Scientists.
Special interests argue that the current warming trends follow historic warming cycles, and hence reflect natural weather patterns–but they omit obvious differences: The earlier warming trends developed at slower rates which permitted the ecosystems to adapt. Morever they resulted from temporary natural events, which allowed transitions back to normal temperature patterns–by contrast, the current warming patterns result from artificial causes that will only intensify unless mitigated.
By all indicators, global warming will self perpetuate as the melting ice sheets absorb rather than reflect heat, as the melting permafrost releases more CO2 & methane, and the list goes on. Inundation of low lying areas, spread of tropical diseases to temperate latitudes, sea life destruction from changing ocean chemistry, & currents, are only some potential consequences.
Often overlooked is the fact that, the same measures needed to mitigate global warming would be necessary even if it were no issue. Conservation, alternative energy development, anti- pollution refinements, etc are essential for other vital environmental reforms such as air and water quality, reductions in toxic waste generation, land preservation, etc.
Contrary to right wing assertions, measures to reduce greenhouse gases could only improve our economy by lessening our trade deficits, and improving our security by reducing our dependance on foreign oil. We could also regain some of our lost world respect that has resulted from our rejection of Kyoto while arrogantly contributing disproportionally to carbon pollution. With our participation in international efforts, China & India could no longer use our non-compliance as an excuse for their non-participation.
The environmental and social damage from our indifference to carbon pollution can only worsen if we allow this administration, guided special interests, to continue their war against our planet.
Did somebody mention plastic? Ever wonder where it goes? Seems the corporate commies must be dumping it at sea:
22 May 2007
Plastic Ocean
Filed under: Political, Zen, Environment — wizzard @ 10:38 am
Our oceans are turning into plastic…are we?
By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal
Feb 20, 2007 - 12:03:05 PM A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.
Be sure to click here and see the pictures, source: http://blog.wizzard.com/?p=91
Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.
Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.
The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.
It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.
How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.
“Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune. Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.
This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. “How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?” he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. “We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump,” he says with a shrug. “That’s what we wanted to see.”
Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.
At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.
Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.
This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.
In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables are scary. For instance, if you’re thinking that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) isn’t something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn, you’re right. Recently, the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upped its classification of PFOA to a likely carcinogen. Yet it’s a common ingredient in packaging that needs to be oil- and heat-resistant. So while there may be no PFOA in the popcorn itself, if PFOA is used to treat the bag, enough of it can leach into the popcorn oil when your butter deluxe meets your superheated microwave oven that a single serving spikes the amount of the chemical in your blood.
Other nasty chemical additives are the flame retardants known as poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss in preliminary animal studies. In vehicle interiors, PBDEs—used in moldings and floor coverings, among other things—combine with another group called phthalates to create that much-vaunted “new-car smell.” Leave your new wheels in the hot sun for a few hours, and these substances can “off-gas” at an accelerated rate, releasing noxious by-products.
It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.
On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.
As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.
This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.
“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material. It also doesn’t help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.
Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as though the person doing the burning realized partway through the process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the fumes). “That’s a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you’re producing some of the most toxic gases known,” he says. The color-coded bin system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.
Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.
The United States banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.
The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.
One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”
Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. That polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek, if it doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled a precursor to man-made plastic called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt set out to make a synthetic replacement for ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: Save the elephants! After some tinkering, he created celluloid. From then on, each year brought a miraculous recipe: rayon in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap, versatile—plastic seemed like a revelation. And in many ways, it was. Plastic has given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants. It has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. And who among us doesn’t own a Frisbee?
Plastic has its benefits; no one would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of its recent press releases, titled “Plastic Bags—A Family’s Trusted Companion,” reads: “Very few people remember what life was like before plastic bags became an icon of convenience and practicality—and now art. Remember the ‘beautiful’ [sic] swirling, floating bag in American Beauty?”
Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance gracefully across the big screen also lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa, and Australia, have banned, taxed, or restricted the use of plastic bags because they clog sewers and lodge in the throats of livestock. Like pernicious Kleenex, these flimsy sacks end up snagged in trees and snarled in fences, becoming eyesores and worse: They also trap rainwater, creating perfect little breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.
In the face of public outrage over pictures of dolphins choking on “a family’s trusted companion,” the American Plastics Council takes a defensive stance, sounding not unlike the NRA: Plastics don’t pollute, people do.
It has a point. Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves.”
Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. “What kind of people are we that we would design like this?” McDonough asks. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities using “the building materials of the future,” including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, nontoxic polystyrene.
Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media hits such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, awareness of just how hard we’ve bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing. After all, unless we’re planning to colonize Mars soon, this is where we live, and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our days getting pumped full of drugs to deal with our haywire endocrine systems and runaway cancer.
None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggressively using satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak about “marine debris and hormone disruption” at a meeting in Sicily convened by the science advisor to the Vatican. This annual gathering, called the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss mankind’s worst threats. Past topics have included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.
The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which lives in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it’s floating, a sturdy, eight-foot-long two-seater. Moore stands on Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.
“That’s probably a $600 kayak,” Moore says, adding, “I don’t even shop anymore. Anything I need will just float by.” (In his opinion, the movie Cast Away was a joke—Tom Hanks could’ve built a village with the crap that would’ve washed ashore during a storm.)
Watching the kayak bobbing disconsolately, it is hard not to wonder what will become of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than battleship gray. The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 50 pounds of nurdles extruded into an object that nobody wants, but that’ll be around for centuries longer than we will.
And as Moore stands on deck looking into the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the same thing 800 miles west, in the gyre. You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on earth. And then below, you can see the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and discarded things. As Moore looks over the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives low and then boomerangs over the horizon. Gone.
PACPLYER — Thank you for the profound (scary) synopsis and crucial knowledge of the truly devastating impact of humankind’s folly.
So many (6 billions) people rely upon the sea for sustenance, either directly or indirectly, and this casts a sour prognosis for the health and vitality of our future generations.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
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