Airborne Microplastics May Be Warming the Planet
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
So...they may be doing something. Or not. But if they are, it's not much. More study is needed to keep this ball in the air.
> Researchers say that climate models may need to be updated to account for the warming effect of plastic, but the new study is far from conclusive.
So it's not scientific make-work, they are looking into whether climate models are missing something. That seems important. Perhaps local effects in India are more severe than "a fraction of the impact of soil" - India produces a huge amount of new plastic while also scavenging and recycling international plastic imports, all with very poor oversight and corrupt regulation.
Implying the goal is to keep research money flowing in as opposed to learning things about the world. Which is overly cynical bs.
Despite this, someone decides to do a study, and finds that, to no one's surprise, airborne micro plastic is not in fact making a significant contribution to global warming. So that should surely settle it, right?
Nope. Instead, they declare that it's far from conclusive, leaving the door open for another round of the same grift, taking away funding that could be going to things that actually _are_ contributing to the problem.
And somehow _pointing_this_out_ is "overly cynical bs"?
That's _why_ I'm so opposed to hype, grift, misrepresentation of results, p-hacking, and all the other nonsense. Science is measured in explanatory progress and facts discovered, not in number of nonsense papers published and funding.
Perhaps we end up with plastic based clouds to even reflect sunlight and combat global warming