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SEA PLASTIC SAVES LIVES

This may be of interest to Peter Garrett:

The skipper of a fishing boat used to rescue two men from an upturned catamaran off the New South Wales south coast yesterday says the two are lucky to be alive ...

The boat capsized and drifted south to a location off Ulladulla where it was spotted by a passing fishing trawler.

The captain of the trawler, Rocky Pirello, says a reflection in the water caught his eye.

“It was only a little dot virtually and a reflection on a bit of plastic they were waving ... so that’s when we notified the coastal patrol,” he said.

Try saving your life by waving some fair-trade coffee. It won’t happen.

UPDATE. Sea levels are reduced by dams. So let’s build more of them. Out of plastic, if possible.

Posted by Tim B. on 03/17/2008 at 01:21 PM
  1. What?  No dolphins came charging to the rescue?  It must be that they are angry with us for damaging the environment as we have.  And we all know why the environment is being damaged and who is responsible for it!  Why did these men almost drown?  George Bush.

    Good lord, that was easy.  I need to stop hanging out in the English department.  It’s damaging my logic.

    Posted by MikeTheLibrarian on 2008 03 17 at 01:44 PM • permalink

  2. There’s a really entertaining and informative podcast on fair trade coffee here , if you want the economic argument against it.

    All the Munger podcasts are entertaining, if you like that one.

    Posted by rhhardin on 2008 03 17 at 02:15 PM • permalink

  3. If not fair-trade coffee, then what about 5₤ shopping bags?  Surely those will work!

    Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 03 17 at 02:30 PM • permalink

  4. Suspense, Terror… and Romance
    with Paco and Mole on the High Seas!

    Paco and F-Mole
    Were harpooning whales
    When Mole lit a stogie
    And up went the sails.

    But then, as the Pequod
    Slid under the waves,
    A clunker from Greenpeace
    Saved them from their graves.

    ‘We’re looking for whalers,’
    Said Drew and Nicole;
    ‘Those bastards, I’ll kill ‘em!’
    Vowed frollicking Mole.

    Cate turned to Paco
    And he shed a tear:
    ‘We’ll help you to find them,
    If it takes all year.’

    Posted by lyle on 2008 03 17 at 02:57 PM • permalink

  5. Lyle, “F-Mole” is simply classic. You’ve done it again.

    Posted by Dr Alice on 2008 03 17 at 04:38 PM • permalink

  6. O/T:
    From previous

    Aunty’s descriptor: Marcia Langton: A new agenda for Indigenous relations 2008-03-15

    Daniel Browning’s intro: According to Langton ‘Everyday suffering of aboriginal people has become a kind of visual and intellectual pornography.’

    Langton: [c. 20 min mark]

    With a radical right-wing government in power from 1996 under the leadership of the Right Honourable John Howard it was the acceptance of some of Noel’s (Pearson) key ideas by the Liberal Party members to whom he spoke that enabled the changes in policy.

    There were many Australians inimical to the Australian Labor Party’s vision and policies and especially the Right Honourable Paul Keating’s so-called ‘Big Picture’.

    But these Liberal Party members never-the-less eschewed old frontier racism of the kind Howard and his acolytes Geoffrey Blainey, Christopher Pearson, Andrew Bolt and others spewed into the national debate ...

    Posted by egg_ on 2008 03 17 at 04:51 PM • permalink

  7. ry saving your life by waving some fair-trade coffee. It won’t happen.

    buwhahaha

    Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2008 03 17 at 05:04 PM • permalink

  8. The catamaran was flipped by global warming. Global warming causes sudden and rapid rises in sea level. The scientific name is waves.

    Posted by Contrail on 2008 03 17 at 05:14 PM • permalink

  9. #5

    Thanks, Doc. I had to dig deep.

    Posted by lyle on 2008 03 17 at 05:16 PM • permalink

  10. So - the water trapped by dams is what percentage of all water on earth?

    I love a good moron.

    Posted by mojo on 2008 03 17 at 05:35 PM • permalink

  11. Update.
    Gee, it’s a self-solving problem.
    Build more dams and the effects of AGW can be offset… wow! Who’da thunk?
    Hands of my emissions!

    Posted by kae on 2008 03 17 at 05:43 PM • permalink

  12. Re update:  From the LiveScience link....

    But other scientists caution against making the leap from the amount of sea level rise to the rate at which it has risen. “That may be one step too far,” said Vivien Gornitz of Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research, who was not involved with Chao’s study.

    All of the ways in which humans manipulate water on land must be considered, Gornitz says, from groundwater pumping to the increased runoff from cities covered in concrete, which isn’t as permeable as soil.

    “You have to consider all of these aspects together,” Gornitz said, and some scientists think these effects may cancel each other out in terms of their impact on sea level. This view was noted in the last IPCC report.

    Emphasis is mine.  Gornitz is dead on.  For example, there’s also a not-so-little factor known as “evaporation”, which is a direct function of surface area....of which, the oceans have far more than man-made reservoirs.  Not to mention the entire hydrologic cycle* seems to have been ignored. 

    Indeed, water reservoirs are a key element in that cycle, with the oceans holding a huge amount of the water on this planet.  The difference between the oceans and man-made reservoirs is staggering, IMHO.  Enough that I think I’ll read the original article when I get home tonight....there’s seems to be a major silliness factor applied to this “study”.

    =================================
    *:  Wiki grain o’ salt alert....but this looks reasonable as far as the figures are concerned, even if does quote that IPCC 2007 “report”, and actually uses the phrase “scientific consensus”.

    Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 03 17 at 05:52 PM • permalink

  13. When I saw the picture of a dinosaur on the Dams/Sea-Level page, under the Live Science Store section, my first thought was that they were going to warn us about them as well.

    Even considering that the dinosaur is only a model does not reduce the probability that they are raising a scare.

    AGW is only a model, and the scarenistas have gone to town on that one.

    Posted by Toiling Mass on 2008 03 17 at 06:29 PM • permalink

  14. Try saving your life by waving some fair-trade coffee.

    Or using a paper bag as a flotation device.

    Posted by Achillea on 2008 03 17 at 07:14 PM • permalink

  15. Re #12, I looked for the report at Science magazine, but it’s apparently behind a subscription only firewall. 

    And I say “apparently” because there’s no such article listed in the March 14th Table of Contents.  But it might be only a few short paragraphs under some regular column. 

    Either of which leads me to believe that this study isn’t all that significant to begin with, especially if their computations didn’t include such effects as the hydrologic cycle, or the relative volumes of water. 

    But that’s just my opinion.  I ain’t paying for a subscription just to read some footnote on page 137.

    Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 03 18 at 01:31 AM • permalink

  16. Is it just me who read the post header as SEA SPASTIC SAVES LIVES?

    Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2008 03 18 at 06:30 AM • permalink

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