Here’s why we should be skeptical of scientific studies quoted by liberal celebrities like Chelsea Clinton, in 3 acts.
Act 1: Tweet your love of science, because science is awesome:
I have a doctorate in international relations so, yes. Grateful to the #marchforscience today &to all who support science (&facts) every day https://t.co/zxtUx5fX3t
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) April 22, 2017
Act 2: Tweet something sciency as a fact and include picture of a child doing the science, because everyone loves science facts and children…
Kayla made a beautiful fish out of trash to raise awareness that by 2050 oceans will have more plastic than fish pic.twitter.com/6fM1lIiZYS
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) April 23, 2017
Act 3: Leave out the fact that the statement, “by 2050 oceans will have more plastic than fish” is disputed, which means it’s not a “fact.”
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s the BBC fact-check of Chelsea’s bogus claim. First up, the intro:
A recent claim that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050 was intended to highlight a pollution crisis in the oceans. The problem really does exist, but do the figures hold water, or is there something fishy going on?
The prediction was made by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum, in a report called The New Plastics Economy, which looks at the amount of plastic that ends up in the sea.
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Link to the study here.
It’s a rather long fact-check, but in summary, the assumptions used by the foundation in both its original report and a follow-up intended to address criticisms are seriously flawed (they used the amount of plastic in San Francisco Bay to extrapolate for all the oceans, plastic use past 2025 is hard to predict and the number of fish could be much, much higher than they’ve modeled):
His new study does not distinguish between fish and other marine predators, but it concludes that there may be between 2 billion tonnes and 10.4 billion tonnes of marine creatures in the oceans. “We’re not absolutely confident in our methods to determine what proportion of this is fish at the moment,” says Jennings. “It’s a very uncertain number to predict.”
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s revised predictions for plastics also deserve further attention. Jenna Jambeck, who led the study into plastic pollution that was cited, told the BBC that she would not feel confident projecting her work forward beyond 2025 to 2050.
So how much plastic is there in the ocean, and how much will there be in 2050? We don’t know, but probably a lot. How many fish? We don’t really know but certainly a lot. And when will one overtake the other? We definitely do not know. But it does point to a very real problem. We do know that plastic, once added to the ocean, does not decay for decades, possibly centuries. It is constantly increasing.
Is plastic contamination of our oceans a really bad thing? Yes. But so is alarmist fake-science that’s used to push a particular agenda. Liberals don’t get that.
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