Evolution Saves The Gulf (page 2)

leavingwt

Where's all the oil?

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-crisis-that-wasnt-wheres-all-the-oil/

IMHO, it's way to early to think the problem is 'gone', etc. It would be nice if this were the case, however.

wannabefree

Evolution? How about creation. God created the earth to regenerate itself. Amazing isn't it? Isn't God's creation marvelous?

leavingwt

Questions Mount About White House's Overly Rosy Report On Oil Spill

Two congressmen on Thursday questioned why the Obama administration made a major announcement about what happened to the oil in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this month without the science to back it up .

Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey demanded that NOAA surrender the data and algorithms behind its increasingly controversial estimate, so that independent scientists could assess the credibility of its conclusion that the vast majority of the oil BP spilled in the Gulf is gone,

At a subcommittee hearing he chaired, Markey said the report was premature, has led to false confidence, and could be flat wrong.

And California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa accused the White House of releasing the report prematurely for PR purposes. "This is yet another in a long line of examples where the White House's pre-occupation with the public relations of the oil spill has superseded the realities on the ground," the ranking member of the House oversight committee said in a press release.

"It is deeply troubling that White House officials apparently preempted the completion and review of a scientific study on the oil spill by NOAA scientists in order to tout conclusions that many experts believe may be deeply flawed."

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration director Jane Lubchenco, meanwhile, dismissed the growing controversy as "a tempest in a teapot."

"The report and the calculations that went into it were reviewed by independent scientists," Lubchenco said in a conference call to reporters. "And we are pulling together the full background information that would go into a more comprehensive report." The due date for that report: about two months.

Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at NOAA and one of the lead authors of the report, continued to defend its findings in his testimony at Markey's congressional hearing. But Lehr also made clear that the report -- called an "oil budget" -- was put together in a hurry and that its purpose was to inform the emergency response, not the general public.

As a result, it focused on oil that could still potentially be recovered, he said, and it also had not yet been thoroughly documented or reviewed.

. . .

The White House also spun the report in a particularly favorable way. Deciding whether most of the oil is gone or not depends primarily on one's views about oil that's dissolved or been dispersed. When the report came out, administration officials encouraged the view that the approximately 50 percent of oil estimated to be dissolved or dispersed no longer posed a risk -- was, essentially, gone. By contrast, some independent scientists have been saying for months that subsurface oil is likely causing massive environmental damage, even if it can't easily be seen.

Since the oil budget went public, several independent scientists have called for the release of its supporting data. Others have reached their own, conflicting conclusions.

One group organized by the Georgia Sea Grant this week calculated that 70 to 79 percent of the oil remains underwater, and concluded that "the media interpretation of the report's findings has been largely inaccurate and misleading."

Scientists from the University of South Florida have found oil deep on the Gulf seafloor that they say may be more toxic to marine microorganisms than previously believed.

And in a major, peer-reviewed article in Science magazine, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Thursday described their discovery in June of a plume of hydrocarbons that is at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. That's about the size of Manhattan.

Furthermore, the scientists found that contrary to the NOAA report, the oil was not "biodegrading quickly"-- at least not at that depth.

What seems increasingly clear is that the government's oil budget did not come close to meeting the kinds of scientific standards that Lubchenco herself had previously cited as the reason she for so long declined to officially acknowledge the existence of massive amounts of subsurface oil.

Lehr's statement that the oil budget was initially only intended for responders explains a lot. For instance, its lack of emphasis on subsurface oil is consistent with the fact that, as Lehr said, "it's not available for response, which was the purpose of the oil budget numbers." That's also why the report didn't address how much poisonous methane gas was released by the well, he said.

But that doesn't mean all that oil and gas doesn't continue to do untold damage to the ecosystem. Under questioning by Markey, Lehr acknowledged that most of the oil is still in the Gulf -- even "the stuff that evaporated into the atmosphere is still in the environment," he said.

So why, then, was the report misleadingly pitched to the media and the public as the authoritative answer to the question: where did the oil go? And who exactly made that call? Whose interests did that serve?

Why did White House environmental advisor Carol Browner go on the morning shows and announce: "More than three-quarters of the oil is gone. The vast majority of the oil is gone"? Why did she and Lubchenco tell reporters in the White House briefing room about their "high degree of confidence" and "so much certainty"? Why did they insist that the study had been peer reviewed, when it hadn't?

And why does NOAA still refuse to provide independent scientists and the public with any additional information about how they arrived at those numbers in the first place?

Those questions remain.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/20/overly-rosy-report-on-oil_n_688142.html

Doubting Bro

I wish the governments conclusions about the damage were true but I think they're flat out lying. Remember when the gusher first blew, they estimated a much much lower amount of oil was being discharged into the Gulf than was actually the case. I think the administration wants to get this out of the news as fast as possible.

I find it very hard to believe that all the oil has been dispersed and everything is fine again.

Dark Side

The trumped up hysteria was all about the media needing a story and the government needing a crisis.

It's all about keeping us distracted from the important shit like illegal immigration, border security, unimployment, increased taxes, inflation, government takeovers and bail-outs, forced health care insurance, progressive socialism and so on and so on and so on

Doubting Bro

But the Obama administration looks terrible in this. His approval ratings took a beating over the summer in large part to the inability of BP and the government to get the well under control. If they were going to manufacture a crisis, you'd think they make one up that they could solve quickly.

I know folks impacted by the oil and they all seem to think it's much worse than what the government will admit.

I agree there are plenty of things to be worried about and I just add this to the list.

leavingwt

Government Says Gulf Seafood is Safe to Eat

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i-AXVm8cP_43313arnYIHGV39dNAD9HPUBR80

Study: Petroleum-Eating Microbes Significantly Reduced Gulf Oil Plume

. . .

Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing that reduced the amount of oil amounts in the undersea "plume" by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.

The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries a mystery of the disaster: Where has all the oil gone?

"What we know about the degradation rates fits with what we are seeing in the last three weeks," Hazen said. "We've gone out to the sites, and we don't find any oil, but we do find the bacteria."

The species dominating the digestion of the oil is a newly discovered one, Hazen said.

. . .

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/24/AR2010082403778.html?hpid=topnews

JWoods

Just as a simple question - what does evolution have to do with this? (other than the fact that there are microbes that can break down hydrocarbon petroleum - and that there have been such bugs for millenia)

Surely we are not being told that these microbes rapidly evolved during the 3 months or so after the oil was spilled?

Or, are we?

Farkel

:Surely we are not being told that these microbes rapidly evolved during the 3 months or so after the oil was spilled?

:Or, are we?

I think the gist of it is: evolution solved the current problem eons ago. Since oil is something that is natural in the earth and since oil has been seeping out of the earth for ages before man found a use for it, it is obvious that nature had to find a way to deal with it. And it did!

So when the latest oil spill came along, nature was already prepared for it!

Farkel

metatron

I agree that it's microevolution or evolution in the broad sense. However, you may wish to consider the case of nylon eating bacteria. Nylon was created in 1935 and bacteria adapted to eat its waste since nylon was created.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria_and_creationism

metatron

Evolution Saves The Gulf

Study: Petroleum-Eating Microbes Significantly Reduced Gulf Oil Plume

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