Plumes of WHAT? The main outputs of burning vinyl chloride are CO2 (of which there are plumes all over the place coming from any coal powerplant for example, all the time), and hydrochloric acid, which will fall out of a plume as acid rain as soon as it hits clouds of water (is that being accounted for here? Maybe yes since some of the plumes just suddenly disappear)

Or if something else, what?

And if you're referring to the non-burning portions of chemicals, then surely those have a completely different dispersal than the tall plume of hot combustion products going way up in the sky, and would have very different graphing?

They still are, they simply ship their plastic to the Philippines who then dump it. Where do you think the Philippines is getting like 20x more plastic than they themselves produce to dump?

They simply ship their plastics to the Philippines who then dump it. Bans make perfectly good sense, since they reduce the plastic shipped abroad and then subsequently dumped.

It's all involved parties' fault, since the sellers obviously know what's going on too.

A lot of the plastic going into the ocean from Asia was shipped there from the U.S. Necessarily, since the amount produced in the worst datapoint here (Philippines) isn't even as high as what they dump

1. The problem with plastic is not exclusively ocean-trash related

2. A lot of the plastic "from Asia" is shipped there from the West because they don't know what to do with it, then the people they ship it to in Asia sometimes dump it in the ocean. So a lot of that is functionally still from the West

"Let's just go on common sense and off the cuff assumptions instead of measuring anything"

Why are you on a subreddit called /r/science if you don't think science is necessary, bro?

If you think reddit is not an appropriate forum, why did you, the OP, post this thread to reddit...?

> Findings in title are quoted from the linked summary

Yes I know the actual (journal) article was linked, as in the doi.org one by the royal society of new zealand. I looked over that and was already referring to the actual article. But what data did it add to the story? My summary of what I read is roughly:

• We counted that there's more launches than before.

• Launches in general have these handful of chemicals. The relative proportions of which are unspecified, either in whole OR by launch type.

• How many of each launch type there were before or among the newly added launches is also... unspecified.

• How badly each chemical affects the ozone layer is unspecified. We gave a reaction written out of what could happen with regard to ozone, but not how much this actually happens in practice (e.g. after accounting for other side reactions using up that chemical for other products first, before it gets to ozone).

• But it could be really bad! Maybe. If all those unspecified numbers turned out to be bad.

In summary: An unspecified mixture of types of new launches adds unspecified amounts of chemicals per type, and unspecified amounts overall, with an unspecified effect of each on the ozone layer... did I get that right?

> Perhaps correspondence with the authors — environmental physicist Laura Revell, planetary scientist Michele Bannister, and first author Tyler Brown — may be productive.

It's a reddit thread, it is a forum for quick discussion about what's presented already, not weeks long correspondence that nobody will ever see the results of since the thread will be gone for weeks by then itself.

I can't help but notice that you didn't answer the question

> Am I just blind, or is there no actual data here?

Where is the data? WHAT was reviewed by their peers? They haven't actually gone out and done or measured anything to be reviewed, unless I'm missing it in the article. Hence the "am I just blind?" because I was confused how this would be published if so and am doubting myself. The blind part is an honest question

Sorry, sorry. Anyway yes to a degree, but your dynamic range would be scuffed and you'd still make more mistakes. Like by analogy, if I'm a carpenter and I try to build a set of cabinets with a ruler that only has 1 centimeter markings and no millimeters anymore, they're going to be way shittier and not line up quite right ans not close fully, etc., even though I'm consistently using the same rulers throughout. The lower precision will make the answers float around further from the true mark.

It will always just add more and more errors.

edit: or not an analogy, just the extreme version of this actual issue would be full colorblindness, i.e. grayscale. You could still paint in color but you'd have to guess which color. Partial points along that continuum will be some way in between "the right color" and "guessing"

So by your logic, if I'm completely blind, I'm also blind to my equipment, therefore it cancels out and I will paint landscapes with perfect accuracy? This redditor just cured all blindness with facts and logic.

Seeing your paints and gear less clearly would ADD to your problems and DOUBLE the errors and obscurity if anything, not undo your first layer of difficulties.

Uh am I just blind, or is there no actual data here, just some dudes waving their hands and hypothesizing stuff they think is plausible?

And that hypothesis, even, is especially un-compelling IMO when they include hypergolic propellants in the list: that is the source of most of the super toxic shit BUT is also definitely not the propellant being used in the vast majority of those extra 100 launches.

Hypergolics are used for military rockets mostly where stable storage for years is the main concern. Commercial launches use almost entirely vastly cleaner RP-1 refined kerosene, hydrogen, or methane fuels

Not really a proper answer, but a loophole/workaround:

• Make another copy of the whole table, but this time each row normalized (subtract minimum from the row then divide by (maximum - minimum)) so every row now goes 0 to 1.

• Apply a single conditional format to the entire thing, since now each row is apples to apples and you only need one

• Use this to visually navigate instead or to sort, and the left table to see the raw numbers

I figured it all out on reddit but it seems to be > the max 1,000 comments ago :(

There is no such thing as nuclear fallout from civilian power plants.... so say wha?

Literally more people per megawatt have died from even SOLAR from things like falling off their roof installing panels than from all non military nuclear damage.

For coal, its orders of magnitude worse

If you replant and cycle your logging, it's neutral too. Drive around the pacific northwest, you can visually see almost the full loop around a hill range where there are different strips in a row in varying levels of regrowth cycling around.

Only cutting and then just leaving it for pasture or waste or development is one way

Unlimited is probably not included in a graph showing per gigabyte rates. I would imagine on demand but unit-wise plans or fixed plans are to be able to calculate a number. But it should definitely be clarified.

So that you can compare to something you're probably more familiar with? What do you mean?

A hell of a lot more people reading infographics from Cable.co.uk are from.. the UK... than Guatemala.

Just because you contradict yourself in the next half of a sentence doesn't mean the first half is correct. It is not a fixed price per pound.

> Hence you get a pair of piecewise linear functions.

Also known as not a fixed relationship

Its not fixed, or the blue line would be horizontal across

Units. The legend tells you which units per line

Thank god someone's finally taking the actual purpose of this subreddit seriously. Wish I had 10 upvotes.

I'm not redefining time at all, it indeed makes sense and I agree that it requires causality.

The problem is that you have no way to establish that causality was not going on before the big bang, because you don't know any of the laws of physics or what the speed of light was or if there even was a maximum speed of light or if movement had different rules in general, or anything else about back then. Nobody does. Because we have no observations of it.

"Assuming this series of things that I have zero basis to assume, there would be no causality, and time requires causality, so there was no time" is obviously not a sound argument. It's valid (syllogism) but not sound (the premises cannot be established as true)

> philosophy

Science extends to saying "I don't know" to things you have no data for.