Every time Rush Limbaugh speaks about science I get nervous. Rush did it again today. He was talking about the chemical contamination caused by arctic seabirds. Rush didn't read the story linked above very carefully because he was thinking that the contamination was natural and the bird droppings did not contain any man-made compounds. The abstract of the study in Science betrays this point:
Long-range atmospheric transport of pollutants is generally assumed to be the main vector for arctic contamination, because local pollution sources are rare. We show that arctic seabirds, which occupy high trophic levels in marine food webs, are the dominant vectors for the transport of marine-derived contaminants to coastal ponds. The sediments of ponds most affected by seabirds had 60 times higher DDT, 25 times higher mercury, and 10 times higher hexachlorobenzene concentrations than nearby control sites. Bird guano greatly stimulates biological productivity in these extreme environments but also serves as a major source of industrial and agricultural pollutants in these remote ecosystems. [emphasis mine]
DDT, Hg, and HCB are not naturally occurring compounds. The study makes the exact opposite point that Limbaugh does. In addition to atmospheric drift, seabirds are vectors that contaminate the Arctic even though it is far away from the original source of the contamination.
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