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Does anyone remember the ‘Yellow Rain’ environmental scare? In 1981, it was claimed that a sticky yellow liquid supposedly falling from planes or helicopters in Indochina was a ‘chemical warfare’ agent. The ever-reliable UN tentatively backed the claim, saying their investigations were “suggestive of the possible use of some sort of toxic chemical substance in some instances”.
There was only one problem: it was all bullshit.
Or, more accurately, bee shit. It was eventually concluded that the ‘yellow rain’ was nothing more than apian mass-shitting episodes, kind of like the alleys around a London curry joint.
It’s just one of a litany of environmental doom scares that turned out to be just so much hot air. Mass starvation in the US by the 1980s, urban dwellers having to wear gas masks by 1985, life expectancy of just 42 years by 1980.
Now, it appears, we can add microplastics to the list of non-existent disasters. All those millions of particles of microplastics researchers have been finding everywhere? It turns out much or all of it was likely simply coming from their own gloves.
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny pollutants, according to a University of Michigan study.
The study found that gloves may unintentionally contaminate lab equipment scientists use to measure microplastics in air, water and other samples with nonplastic particles called stearates. U-M researchers Madeline Clough and Anne McNeil suggest cleanroom gloves, which release fewer particulates, be worn instead.
Stearates are salts, or soap-like particles. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with stearates to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them. But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.
They’re not giving up a good scare story that easily just yet, though.
That’s not to say that there is no microplastics pollution, the U-M researchers are quick to say.
“We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none. There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem,” said McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering, and the Program in the Environment.
As microplastic researchers looking for microplastics in the environment, “we’re searching for the needle in the haystack, but there really shouldn’t be a needle to begin with,” said Clough, a recent U-M doctoral graduate.
It’s more true to say, it appears, that they’re searching for needles in a box of needles – and being shocked, shocked, when they find a whole bunch of needles.
The researchers used air samplers which are fitted with a metal substrate. Air passes through the sampler, and particles from the atmosphere deposit onto the substrate. Then, using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are able to determine what kind of particles are found on the substrate.
Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find.
Funny that.
The researchers designed an experiment to figure out how widespread the problem is. They tested seven different kinds of gloves, including nitrile, latex and cleanroom gloves, as well as the most common techniques that microplastic researchers are using to identify microplastics […]
They found that on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.
Note that they don’t put that into percentages. Because the claims are that, for instance, up to “1.9 million plastic pieces per square meter have been recorded on the seafloor”. If there are 2,000 false positives per square millimetre, that scales up to a whopping two billion false positives per square metre.
In other words, there may not be any needles at all in the entire haystack, apart from the ones the researchers are depositing themselves.
Here we see the stark difference between a really rigorous field like physics, and a rubbery-soft ‘science’ like environmental science. In 2011, some physicists claimed to have measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The claimed anomaly was vanishingly small – 60.7 billionths of a second – but still other physicists refused to accept it. Rightly so, as it turned out to indeed be a laboratory error.
Compare that to how quickly and loudly environmental ‘scientists’ trumpet their doomsday claim du jour, even when it’s been debunked.
