How big is the gulf oil disaster? It’s too early to tell (short rebuttal of Time greenwash)

[jpak]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/07/how_big_is_the_gulf_oil_disast.html

Michael Grunwald writes in Time that government officials and the media have exaggerated the scale of the gulf oil spill. It’s bad, he writes, but not anywhere near the greatest catastrophe the Gulf of Mexico has faced. He has a point -- lots of the oil has apparently degraded without making landfall, and nature is surprisingly resilient. Plenty of the rhetoric about the spill was overblown. But be careful not to overreact in the opposite direction. There’s still a lot we don’t know.

Grunwald compares the BP spill to the Exxon Valdez, pointing out that the latter resulted in a lot more dead wildlife. Bacteria also took a lot more time to break down oil in cold Alaskan waters, whereas in the warm gulf, they seem to be feasting on the crude.

But I think a more apt analogy is to the 1979 blowout of the Ixtoc 1 rig, also in the Gulf of Mexico. See, for example, the New York Times’s reporting on how the residual effects of that decades-old event continue to addle nearby coastal ecosystems, killing off oyster populations and stunting the growth of mangroves. Grunwald talks about how he saw sprouting in Louisiana’s oiled mangrove swamps. Perhaps the state’s flora will avoid such harm. Or perhaps lingering toxicity will have effects similar to those after Ixtoc.

Possibly much more significant, though, is the depth at which the BP spill occurred. It’s hard to quantify how much oil remains dispersed in deeper, colder waters, let alone the nature of its effects on the gulf’s ecosystem writ large -- not simply on coastal areas, on which Grunwald focuses. Oil can linger in strange, unexpected places, doing damage that isn’t quick, obvious or dramatic but is nevertheless worrying.

<not much more>

[DCBob]

1. No doubt this is true and there may be long term residual effects no one can foresee now..

but clearly its not the mega disaster many were predicting.. ie the death of gulf, ruined beaches, millions of dead animals, etc. It has not happened.. thats the significant story now. There may be new devastating story developing that we are unaware of but at the moment things are looking much better.

[jpak]

2. you cannot say that - we will not know the true impact of this spill for years to come

please tell us about the impact on Kemp's Ridley turtles, blue fin tuna, whale sharks, sperm whales - and the deep water squid they feed upon - sargassum and sargassum communities, mahi mahi, bill fish, the smaller pelagic fish they feed on, oyster beds, and the concentrations of dissolved oxygen in the subsurface hydrocarbon plumes.

and the long term impact of oil exposure on oil spill workers

just for starters

clue - the mean residence time of deep water in the central Gulf of Mexico is 250 years.

[DCBob]

3. I agree and that's pretty much what I said..

please read again.

[jpak]

4. " its not the mega disaster many were predicting" is what I read and that's not true

we have no idea about the acute direct effects on marine and human life or the long term effects on marine and human life

[DCBob]

5. The Gulf is not dead, the beaches are not ruined, there aren't millions of dead animals...

That's the mega disaster many were predicting and it has not happened.. unless you have some additional information none of the rest of us know about.

[jpak]

6. There is oil buried on those beaches and marshes that will be there for decades

You cannot tell me you know the extent of deep hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico due to this spill there is no data

You cannot tell me about the effect of dispersants on marine organisms in the Gulf because nobody knows.

You cannot tell me anything about the effect of the spill on shrimp, oysters, crabs or memhaden becasue there is no data.

You cannot tell me anything about the effect of the spill on pelagic fishes like mahi mahi, or blue fin tuna or bill fish or Kemp's Ridely turtles (only 720 nesting females left in the world) because there is no data

You cannot tell me the number of marine organisms that have died in the Gulf and have not been counted becasue they were too small to see from an aircraft or have sunk to the ocean floor.

You cannot tell me about the toll on neuston or Sargassum or Sargassum communities because there is no data on that - but you can be sure that great masses have been oiled and destroyed by skimmers or burning.

You cannot tell me that is NOT a megadisater becasue there is no data to back that up.

And that is what BP is counting on

The Time article was greenwash

yup

[DCBob]

7. How do you account for these statements from the Time article?

"The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the birds killed by the Exxon Valdez.

Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but, so far, wildlife response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of any mammals.

Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted.

And, yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but, so far, shorelines assessment teams have only found about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.

==========

Are these just flat out lies or misstatements or exaggerations or what?? Do you have some additional reports that refute these statements? Or are you just pissed off and just ignoring reality? I suspect its the latter.

[Angry Dragon]

8. What you say may be true to the extent to what is visible

Has anyone scoured the Gulf floor?? Counted the animals and fish on the bottom??
Has anyone traveled the depths of the Gulf and looked at the oil plumes beneath the surface??
Until this is done nothing is for certain.

[DCBob]

9. Typically dead fish, dolphins, turtles, etc will float to the surface..

due to gases that acumulate inside the body during decomposition.

[Igel]

10. Your post is 90 days late.

The point is that as far as the long-term pollyanna predictions are concerned it's too early too tell, right?

But we can tell that the horrendous long-term predictions are right? If they're right, then it's not too early to tell if the long-term all-will-be-well predictions are right--they can't be. Both may be wrong, of course. But it's too early to tell as far as either kind of prediction is concerned.

In fact, the short-term predictions have been nicely falsified in the space of 90 days, and that should provide a fecund source of humility. After all, it wasn't too early to tell 90 days ago that the horrendous predictions were right. Of course, they weren't right. Sure, there's damage. There might be extensive hidden damage. But the thoroughly contaminated beaches, the decimated wildlife, the death of the eastern Gulf, the fouling of Miami and of Virginia's beaches was predicted to be imminent and just hasn't happened. The prophets are shown false.

Work for the best, wait for the outcome. I'm not going to grieve the death of the Gulf before it happens. "Sufficient unto the day" and all that.

[marions ghost]

11. Here comes the spin

"Everybody can just go back to what they were doing now."

Most people who understand ocean ecology and biochemistry realize the effects of what has happened so far cannot be quantified yet.

(So who reads Time magazine for real information?)

And, um...the well is not killed.

:shrug:

The truth will come out...as repressed truths do...eventually.