How bad is ocean garbage, really?

Posted on April 6, 2016 by DrRossH in Plastic & Wildlife

Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, has been trying to answer a dismal question: Is everything terrible, or are things just very, very bad?

via How bad is ocean garbage, really?.

Rochman and her colleagues examined more than a hundred papers on the impacts of marine debris that were published through 2013. Within each paper, they asked what threats scientists had studied—366 perceived threats in all—and what they’d actually found.

In 83 percent of cases, the perceived dangers of ocean trash were proven true. In most of the remaining cases, the working group found the studies too shoddy to draw conclusions from—they lacked a control group, for example, or used faulty statistics.