More fun for 2020

Argh. Why didn’t I put my money on plastic rain…

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Some additional perspective may add at least a bit of comfort to this. It’s a wonderful unit-multipliers problem for a math class, and anybody else here can have fun double checking my quick once-through calculations to make sure I didn’t punch a calculator button wrong … but here goes.

Using the figures given, and pretending that the entirety of that “1000 tons” all fell exclusively on California alone instead of being spread over the whole “western U.S.”, and taking the 163696 mi^2 of California x 21 inches average rainfall for that state … comes to around 2.3 x 10^14 kg of water falling on California each year. Assuming the “1000 tons” of plastic ‘rain’ are English tons, let’s now mix that 9.1 x 10^5 kg of plastics entirely into just California’s water allotment. That would mean our plastic to water mass ratio should be about 1 part in 250 million.

I’ll bet rain water has much higher concentrations of a whole bunch of other toxic, or disgusting stuff than that. Even just drinking water from plastic bottles might release more plastic particles into the water. But I haven’t here researched that to know for sure. But what I do know (if my ‘envelope calculations had no errors just now’) is that the numbers claimed in the USA Today article would be like adding a single grain of salt (or in this case plastic) to ~ 250 liters of water. Only - even less - because more water falls on the “western U.S.” than just on California.

Not that we shouldn’t find our “plastic contributions” to nature disgusting or disturbing. Don’t get me wrong! But I think our roadways and ditches and otherwise pristine landscapes now host to megatons of plastic trash by itself constitute a dismal environmental impact and an embarrassing shame on all the large corporations whose logos identify and shout out their corporate idiocy from our waterways and ditches.

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Would it be unethical to slip in a finding that it is these micro amounts of plastic in rain water that is bumping up the number of autistic babies being born and not the immunizations? The worriers could come up with ways to avoid that water and still get their kids vaccinated. Win/win?

Seriously? Please post. I’m interested.

I dunno … if they were really worried about that, then I hope they have no plastic water bottles in their house! Or maybe they should be looking into what sort of PVC (or noxious metal) piping may be delivering water to their house, or what sorts of industry and agricultural runoff helps feed their ground water sources. Because I bet unwanted contributions from all that (even within regulated safety tolerances) probably dwarfs any plastic contribution that comes down from the sky.

So the autism must still be from vaccines, most of them from aliens?

I avoid aliens with syringes. Never trust a vaccine that wasn’t developed on earth.

(and where is a tinfoil hat emoji when you need one?)

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