At least the walruses are safe, and any day now @Nifty will save the Gulf

British Petroleum isn’t so awful after all — it turns out that they have an almost 600 page long emergency response plan to deal with blowouts on their offshore oil wells. All the answers are in there, and I’m sure that they’ll soon be implemented. You can read those plans yourself and feel the warm glow of confidence that all is in good hands.

  1. Lists “Sea Lions, Seals, Sea Otters [and] Walruses” as “Sensitive Biological Resources” in the Gulf, suggesting that portions were cribbed from previous Arctic exploratory planning;

  2. Gives a web site for a Japanese home shopping site as the link to one of its “primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region [for]rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis”; and

  3. Directs its media spokespeople to never make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal,” implying that BP will only commit candor by omission.

I have reviewed the plan myself. It’s amazing.

  1. The walruses in the Gulf of Mexico are all safe. I repeat, the walruses are safe. This part of their plan was executed perfectly. We have to give them credit here.

  2. The site for primary equipment providers is extremely technical, and it’s also almost entirely in Japanese, so I’m afraid I can’t extract all the details. It does say in English “@nifty” on many of the pages, and nifty sounds like exactly the quality I want in my industrial gear. I think this is a picture of the rapid response team, dressed for deployment to the warm Gulf waters:

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    I poked around a bit and found this cryptic diagram of a mysterious machine of some sort. I’m pretty sure it’s the device that will be lowered deep into the ocean to seal off the gushing wellhead. It is in Japanese, so I can’t tell how it will work, but it definitely looks nifty.

  3. That third part of the plan is also a whopping success. Candor is completely absent. BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, has in fact done a sterling job of being an unctuous, lying ass, saying that the spill will have only a “very, very modest” impact on the environment, and doing a fabulous job of trying to get his life back.

One other relevant point is that they do list worst case scenarios for various wells, and they’re spot on. The worst-case oil spill for any well is the sum of the amount of oil in various flow lines plus one day’s output from the well, and I’m sure it would be accurate if, as they assume, every catastrophic failure were quickly fixed within one day. Or in some cases, the well is simply instantly shut off. That it’s been flowing for 7 weeks instead of a single day is a fairly trivial difference, and even that estimates are in the range of 20 million barrels lost instead of the predicted 20 thousand barrels, is easily explained if we simply assume that there are creationists in charge of the schedule. We can even estimate when the pipe will be closed by simply using the kind of creationist math with which I am familiar, so we can be confident that the gusher will end within 134 years.

I think we can safely say that BP’s response to this disaster has been as effective as promised in their official response plan, filed almost a year ago. It is so eerily accurate I’m almost ready to credit them with psychic powers. They have the competence of a Sylvia Browne, the infallibility of the Pope, the steely-eyed acumen of Pat Robertson, and the forthright honesty of a Republican senator’s opposition to gay marriage.

I shall sleep well tonight in the knowledge that industry has prepared many such environmental response plans.

Monckton dissected

Christopher Monckton, that pompous know-nothing who professes to be an expert on climate change and doesn’t believe in it, gave a talk here in Minnesota last fall, at a little Christian college called Bethel University (which curiously has a biology department that manages to never once mention evolution in its curriculum, just to give you an idea of what it’s like). That talk infuriated a professor at another Christian university — but one that doesn’t try to hide away from the evidence — who has put together a rebuttal of Monckton’s claims. Would you believe that essentally all of the studies Monckton cited as supporting his claims about the nonexistence of global warming actually said the exact opposite? It was so bad it’s impressive — it’s as if you don’t have to actually read and understand research papers if you’ve convinced yourself that they say what you want them to say.

John Abraham has put together a thorough presentation on the follies of Monckton. Good stuff!

A constructive suggestion for retribution against BP

Look at this: BP knew about problems at that burning oil rig 11 months ago. They screwed up with bad decisions in the short interval immediately before the explosion, but documents have come to light showing that they were worried about “loss of control” months before the disaster — and what they did in response was to ask for delays in testing (which they got), and then they fudged the tests by using a lower pressure.

This is basically criminal misconduct. But hey, what’s the point of getting upset over 11 deaths and a mere environmental catastrophe? We need the oil. Let’s just help the oil companies get beyond this.

Here’s a map of the approximately 4000 oil rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Everyone is fixated on that one burning mess in the Gulf, which is probably exactly what the oil companies want — they are probably sweating pungent carcinogenic petrochemicals at the thought that someone might look around and notice all of those other rigs, which almost certainly have a paper trail of shortcuts and risks and shoddy management. While BP is struggling to catch up with its responsibilities and close off the well and clean up the poisons, I think a great thing for the Obama administration to do would be to descend on each of those other wells with a force of elite regulatory accountants, documenting all the potential and extant problems, and telling each company to fix them. Now. Without cheating, without getting any special dispensations. If they can’t fix them, shut them down or hit them with massive penalties.

I have a very low opinion of oil company executives. I doubt that they have any sincere regrets about the loss of life or the destruction of the environment. But having to fix every place where they shaved corners, and pay out money to bring everything up to legally mandated standards — now that will make them cry.

Hmm. Here’s another site with a count of US oil and gas rigs — it says there are about 1500. I can’t account for the discrepancy, unless there has been a rapid decline in the last few years (this site is more current), or there is some other criterion for inclusion in this particular list.

It doesn’t matter, of course — except that a smaller number makes it easier to review them all.

Thank you, BP; thank you, Transocean Ltd.; thank you, Halliburton

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While the parties responsible struggle to shift the blame, the Gulf oil spill has reached the shore, as this tragically long photo essay shows. There is a cost to these risky ventures in offshore drilling, and they are not adequately paid by the companies doing the dirty work.

Those who would profit need to pay the price. There are clearly at least three companies that shouldn’t be arguing…they should be coughing up the cash, and recognizing that their businesses will have to be slightly less profitable.

Where were you, 30 years ago today?

May 18, 1980 is when Mount St Helens blew its top.

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I was newly married, in my first year in graduate school in Eugene, Oregon — far enough south that we saw little of the ash, typically only seeing cars filmed with gray every day. My in-laws, though, all lived right in the shadow of the mountain, in Longview and Castle Rock, Washington, so we got regular reports on days dark as night and shoveling paths through the mess.

National Geographic has a fine article on the recovery of the region. Biology is bouncing back in the few decades since the disaster.

As a natural lab to study the rebirth of ecosystems, the blast zone has no equal. “It’s the most thoroughly studied large-forest disturbance in the world,” says Crisafulli, examined from nearly every angle, at nearly every scale, from molecules to ecosystems, bacteria to mammals, steaming geothermal vents to waterlogged meadows. Almost daily, callers inquire about the lessons of St. Helens. One woman is interested in salamanders, another in toads. Officials in Alaska and Chile want to know what to expect after eruptions of their own.

There’s also the dramatic story of Spirit Lake:

Before the eruption Spirit Lake was, like many subalpine lakes, unproductive and nutrient-poor, with clear water and few shallow spots. When the volcano top slid into it at 150 miles an hour, it became choked with what Crisafulli terms “pyrolyzed forest constituents”–organic material burned in the blast. The water was warmed to body temperature, filled with dissolved carbon, manganese, iron, and lead. Visibility went from 30 feet to six inches. Bacteria flourished. The first scientists to take water samples came down with unexplained ailments. There was a rapid succession of microbes: aerobes, which quickly used up all the oxygen; anaerobes, which require none; then nitrogen-consuming bacteria; and then forms that fed on methane and heavy metals. For 18 months Spirit Lake was ruled by chemistry, home to “hundreds of millions of bacteria per milliliter,” Crisafulli says. Finally, the microbes had consumed so much that they began to die off, and streams and snowmelt came in, and the water cleared.

Once light penetrated Spirit Lake, algae and other phytoplankton colonized, followed by zooplankton, which fed on the phytoplankton, followed by aquatic insects and amphibians. By the early 1990s, macrophytes grew in shallow shoals–ideal trout habitat that didn’t exist before the eruption. Gorging on tiny midges and freshwater snails, the rainbows were reaching a record four or five pounds in two or three years. The post-eruption lake followed a pattern Crisafulli would see many times in the blast zone. New organisms colonize the virgin environment with dramatic success, only to burn themselves out or be checked by predators, parasites, or competitors. This was the second revelation of St. Helens: When there’s a blank slate, ecological succession is a cycle of boom and bust.

If you’d just like to see some dramatic photos of the eruption and aftermath, here you go.

Climate denialists should fear this fellow

If you’ve been following the climate change ‘debate’ at all, you should be aware of the excellent YouTube channel, Climate Denial Crock of the Week, which always has excellent take-downs of the denialists, professionally made and always devastating. Here’s one example:

The author is in a competition for a $5,000 grant. All you have do is register at that link and vote — let’s promote good science presented well!

Who to blame for the oil spill?

Everyone knows by now that there has been a catastrophic oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the biggest oil spill in American history…and it is still spewing and people are still talking about expanding offshore drilling. The actual causes of this accident stem from deregulation and exceeding legal restrictions, but you know, that assumes that no one wanted this environmental disaster to occur; we are presuming that it actually is a horrible accident.

It takes a mind unfettered by the constraints of reason and evidence to assume otherwise. It requires the brain of Rush Limbaugh.

The cap and trade bill was strongly criticized by hardcore environmentalist wackos because it supposedly allowed more offshore drilling and nuclear plants. What better way to head off more oil drilling and nuclear plants than blowing up a rig? I’m just noting the timing here.

Limbaugh’s official transcript is different (don’t ask me why), and even crazier — he babbles about SWAT teams sent down to the Gulf and Al Gore inciting civil disobedience to further his crazy claims.

I think he’s been reading too many Michael Crichton novels.

That settles that then, I hope

That recent episode in which hackers broke into computers at East Anglia University and extracted private email from climate researchers was the subject of much triumphal rejoicing by the climate change deniers. The UK set a parliamentary Science and Technology Committee to review the affair and see if there was any substance to the claims of the denialists, and the report of the inquiry has been released.

On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails—”trick” and “hiding the decline”—the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.

Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.

The Committee found no reason in this inquiry to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, that “global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity”. But this was not an inquiry into the science produced by CRU and it will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel, announced by the University on 22 March, to determine whether the work of CRU has been soundly built.

Well. Case closed, right? Or is this another sign of the Global Conspiracy to Hide the Truth™?

The committee did have one mild criticism of the Climate Research Unit. They said that while the policy of holding some of the raw data privately is in line with common research practice and not grounds for complaint, they would like the policy to change…and I agree. Openness is always good in science.