Before and After images of Pakistan flooding (via NASA Earth Observatory and The Map Room)
Please donate what you can. I prefer the World Food Programme because they do get the job done. Please please help. It’s to get a lot worse.
NPR | Hungry For Oil: Feeding America’s Expensive Habit
A nice quick look at America’s current hydrocarbon extraction technologies.
But this:
New technology has changed oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico too. As seen in the wake of BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf, companies have sophisticated technology like remote-controlled submarines. That means they can explore for oil in places humans can’t even go. Sometimes the projects resemble a space mission.
I seriously thought the next line was going to be “Can you say hi to Gaston The Gator, kids?” Oh dear. Where do I start? Remote-controlled submarines have been around for decades. Inside the crust of the earth, where humans could never go, is normally where hydrocarbons come from. Remote sensing, seismic … oh, never mind. Yes, operating in deeper water depths is cool. Now move along.
While I developed and utilized some hella amazing and new Sophisticated Technology as an oil worker, the way NPR and the rest of the media utters the phrase, you’d think it is a special, infallible weapon bestowed on us mere mortals by a fearsome sky god. Oh, drill rig of omens, give me petroleum beyond petroleum.
Technology is not magic, it’s a set of tools and processes developed by humans to address our problems. Thus, anthropomorphizing it, imbuing it with super-human powers and, worst of all, not questioning its effectiveness is not exactly productive on the part of the news media. Why? Because even the most Sophisticated Technology on the planet is only as good as its human operator. Again, the potency of any technology ultimately comes down to the humans in control of it, all the way from proper design and maintenance to not cutting corners and taking the proper, prescribed safety precautions during a malfunction. If the humans in charge are lazy, incommunicative, penny-pinching shitheels with limited imaginations, chances are the technology will not do what it was made to do and maybe even … wait for it … fail. So quit ooohing and aahing at a company’s New-Fangled Technology and investigate and report the human culture behind its use.
Speaking of chance, there’s something amiss about the usage of “low-probability, high-cost event” to describe this oil spill. One problem with such an event is that it doesn’t occur in isolation and the effects of many events of varying magnitudes are cumulative in a finite-resource environment. Another issue I have with it is, all things remaining equal, one doesn’t figure out the probability of recurrence until another such event occurs. Will it? Won’t it? Who knows? If this can’t be answered with a certain degree of confidence, calling it a low-probability event is probably a waste of time. I offer to our esteemed media that the language shift to that of true prevention and effective, scale-sensitive disaster management, away from probabilities of recurrence and other buzz-concepts dropped by corporate PR departments.
And then this: “Focus on the low-probability side of that equation … The fact that you can count on one hand the kind of blowouts that have occurred in the face of these tens of thousands of wells is a pretty remarkable testimony to the safety and the risk management that the companies provide.” Gee, think of all the blowouts that could have happened! We’re doing you a favor. Even if it’s our job, ferchrissakes! You tell them that on our behalf, NPR!
It appears a possible BP pipeline leak is being investigated up here in the Midwest. Not low-probability and not high-cost when compared with the Gulf. But not Sophisticated either, I fear. We have a long way to go.
As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, an online hub which explains science news and implications to laypeople is in the works. And not a moment too soon. For the schist is up to here, folks (you can thank D for this one).
While more of the same continues in Washington, the general public is less and less informed of what’s going on, parrots the media soundbites of the day (“I hear the oil has vanished, Maitri. Herp derp.”) and is unconcerned about things like independent and unfettered scientific analyses for their own benefit.
This pisses me off and should you, too.
* DOJ gags scientists studying BP disaster
… ecosystem biologist Linda Hooper-Bui describes how Obama administration and BP lawyers are making independent scientific analysis of the Gulf region an impossibility. Hooper-Bui has found that only scientists who are part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process to determine BP’s civil liability get full access to contaminated sites and research data. Pete Tuttle, USFWS environmental contaminant specialist and Department of Interior NRDA coordinator, admitted to The Scientist that “researchers wishing to formally participate in NRDA must sign a contract that includes a confidentiality agreement” that “prevents signees from releasing information from studies and findings until authorized by the Department of Justice at some later and unspecified date.”
* University of Southern Florida says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings
“I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil,” USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF’s public announcement, he said, comparing it to being “beat up” by federal officials.
The USF scientists weren’t alone. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a similar effort that met with a similar reaction.
***
In related energy news, I am happy to report that my house did not explode “into a fireball so massive observers saw it 20 miles away” thanks to my early detection of a leak in the fixtures surrounding the external gas meter and an extremely faint gas smell in the basement. This morning’s conversation with the gas company’s emergency worker went like this:
Gas man: The meter doesn’t detect a leak. Not even a slight bump. You sure you’re not smelling one of the local gas wells?
Me: I smell it right now. Right *pointing at leak* here.
Gas man: Oh whoa, there it goes! You’re right!
Me: Duh.
Gas man: They say women have better noses.
The old South Indian Sense Of Smell TM. Never doubt it.
The PepsiGate-induced exodus from Science Blogs and asinine California serpentinite-asbestos rumble, while waxing social, political and scientific on the BP oil spill for the last 110 odd days, have me convinced that the public outreach component of the science community, and geoscience in particular, needs a lot more work. In planning and design of cities, buildings, dams, levees, energy structures, highways, drilling for water and hydrocarbons, groundwater issues and so much more, geoscientists can play very important roles in shaping infrastructure. And these folks are the ones ignored first and furiously.
So what can we as geoscience bloggers do as a part of the solution? I’m not the only one with this concern. July’s Accretionary Wedge was a call for posts on the role of the geoblogosphere and, more recently, the Highly Allochthonous post on the evolving science blogging ecosystem elicited some very honest comments and ideas on the work we have cut out for us. As I said in the comments of the latter, the problem of the geoscience community is two-fold: Not Enough Geoscientists and Geoscientists Talking Amongst Ourselves, and suggested a policy blog that talks geoscience as a way for our offerings to gain traction in the public mind.
Ron Schott, (former fellow geology graduate student and housemate) and Father of the Geoblogs, organized the first Current Issues in the Geoblogosphere online discussion via Skype this past Saturday; several bloggers and I participated. We talked about the above issues in much detail (see Ron’s post for the great notes taken by Katharine). You can also listen to the audio here.
Dichotomy, artist unknown
Ed Darrell points out at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub an interesting 2008 exchange between Speaking of Faith’s Krista Tippett and Cal DeWitt, professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies of the University of Wisconsin at Madison on the history of environmentalism. According to DeWitt, it would seem that human beings stopped viewing themselves as part of their environment, in order first to conquer it and then to protect it. I’d love to learn more about this philosophical fork in the road given that it involves more than us seeing ourselves as separate from the creator; this is divorcing the human self from the rest of creation.
Cal DeWitt tells an interesting story about the origins of the word environment. It emerged, he says, from a term coined by Geoffrey Chaucer: environing. This became a linguistic way of distinguishing our human selves from the world around us. Previously, DeWitt avers, human beings had thought of themselves as part and parcel of the same creation. At best, this implied a certain responsibility and relationship that has been absent in the modern Western approach to the world.
Western Christianity itself has, ironically, been a potent historical driver of enmity between humanity and nature. But after careful study, Cal DeWitt found the Bible to be an “ecological handbook.” And he has long put it into practice in this way, beginning with the marsh beneath his feet.
… DeWitt also points out that the stereotype of environmental activism as liberal and secular has never been accurate. Devout evangelicals have long been in positions of environmental leadership. And on this program last year, the chief representative in Washington D.C. of the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik, stunned many of our listeners with his passionate declaration that he is a “convert” to the science of climate change. As it turns out, Cal DeWitt was one of the organizers of the global gathering that exposed Cizik and others to the science of climate change. DeWitt describes an intriguing theory of his this hour, that evangelical and charismatic Christianity may be better equipped than other Christian traditions to change and galvanize and lead on an issue like this.
I repeat: The oil has not vanished. The Gulf of Mexico’s summertime dead zone is twice as big as last year’s.
Think about it: How can 206 million gallons of crude vanish in 19 days? 205.8 million gallons of oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico = 2.37 million gallons per day over 87 days. Reported average use of Corexit is 3,365 gallons per day over approximately 92 days (sometimes more, illegally, and scientists question its effectiveness beyond the surface). You do the math.
Update: Businessweek reports that 800,000 barrels (33.6 million gallons) of oil have been skimmed or burned by BP to date. That’s 16% of the total oil released into the Gulf. Keep going with the math.
Because someone keeps asking, here’s why static kill and bottom kill are both required.
Kenneth Feinberg is an insult. And so is every politician “working” for the Gulf Coast: Oil Disaster Boon to Gulf Politicians. Every last one: Menendez negotiating behind the scenes to come to a compromise on oil spill liability language.
But, let’s please continue fighting amongst ourselves.
Help Oiled Birds
Please help some innocent living things by supporting the efforts of The International Bird Rescue Center in locating, rescuing, and cleaning wildlife affected by the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Click on the pelican to donate.
