Working the customer base that I do (federal agencies) this time of year is especially busy. Adding to that is my company’s annual sales meeting, currently ongoing. That means I’m in a lot of meetings this week, often without any contact via voice or e-mail. One of my usual contacts told me that the Coast Guard was responding to an explosion on a rig off the coast of Louisiana. I honestly thought he was kidding for a moment but I see, now that I’m out of the latest meeting, that this is a new event:
An offshore petroleum rig exploded and was burning Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay.
A spokesman for the Coast Guard told Fox News Radio that all 13 crew members on the rig are alive and have been safely accounted for. One person was injured in the blast, though the extent of that worker’s injury was not known.
The rig, which is in about 2,500 feet of water, is owned by Mariner Energy of Houston and located 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast.
No details are available as yet as to the cause, whether or not the rig was actually pumping oil or gas, or whether anyone was even aboard. More to come as I hear more.
It is a fact that petroleum leaks out of the seafloor and into the ocean on a constant, naturally-occurring basis. It has for centuries – as best as we can tell, it’s actually been millennia. Oil is present in seawater, in other words, and always has been. When massive quantities of the stuff gets released at once, however, it represents an unsafe condition. We don’t want to be immersed in the stuff nor do we want to be ingesting it, either directly with the water or indirectly by consuming seafood that’s been over contaminated. But if oil is always in the seawater, then the seafood we eat is always in contact with it. It is scientifically impossible to get seafood from the open ocean that hasn’t been in contact with petroleum at some level or another.
Ah, but what level is considered unsafe versus safe? That’s what we’ve done research to figure out and what we developed tests to determine. Given the fact that it’s an absolute certainty that there’s some level of these substances present in any seafood we catch, up to what level can we feel secure in seeing and still consider it safe to eat? Since 1970 we’ve had an agency of the federal government around to look at these matters: the EPA. Along with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the EPA has set levels that cannot be exceeded and still have a given food store permitted into the food supply. Operating under those guidelines, officials tasked with the responsibility to monitor and report on the safety of seafood coming out of the gulf after the BP oil spill are testing the gulf catch and either opening or closing areas of the gulf for fishing. They are confident their testing methods and abilities are sufficient to make that determination.
Some of the fisherman are reportedly not in agreement:
“We are not here to listen to your protocols,” [fisherman Danny] Ross said. “We have questions and there has been a breakdown in the pipeline since this whole thing started.
“Everybody that works these waters is seeing strange things out there and you cannot tell me that with that much oil and dispersant something did not get contaminated.”
So, if the testing we’re doing and the fact that they’re coming up with a “safe” determination “can’t tell him” that a given area isn’t showing contamination, what is he looking for? He says he doesn’t want to “listen to your protocols” but it’s those protocols that are describing the testing being done. If no amount of testing will do the trick, then how does he suggest we proceed? Ban seafood from the gulf permanently?
I also note that there were no examples given of the “strange things” “everybody” is seeing out there that’s convincing them the area’s contaminated. And I think it’s not unreasonable for people to ask for him and his “everybody” to be able to provide those examples in hard evidence. Of course, if we’re going to hold him to the same standard that he’s using, I’m unsure how he plans on getting the hard evidence. No testing is good enough, remember?
Perhaps there were other questions raised at the meeting that just didn’t get reported but I certainly hope there’s more to it than asking “who’s responsible if someone gets sick.” That’s not a question about how to determine safety, that’s a question about who’s going to pay the jury-awarded penalty to the people who get sick. That’s a legal question, not a scientific one, and if the fisherman want that one answered they should address it to the right people in the right venue. These guys are scientists and lab geeks; they talk tests and data.
To simply dismiss the possibility that seafood from a given area might be safe in the face of the best scientific evidence we can muster isn’t rational and the people who have concerns – rightly, I might add – need to understand that. If they have an issue with the process of determining safety they need to lay their cards on the table and explain themselves. They also need to be ready to help us figure out what would be required to allay their fears.
A few days ago I caught wind of an attempt by some environmental activists to have the EPA ban lead ammunition under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. I was trying to perform some actual research on the matter (was this for real, was the EPA really considering it, etc.) and kept getting distracted by the day-to-day stuff including – shockingly – work. Bottom line, not only was it for real, the EPA has apparently decided to do the smart thing and cancel the public commentary period they had opened. They have denied the petition.
The Environmental Protection Agency has denied a petition filed by environmental activists seeking to ban lead in ammunition, saying such regulation is beyond the agency’s authority.
The agency’s decision, announced Friday shortly after FoxNews.com published its report on the issue, sided with hunters and fishermen who had argued that the such regulations weren’t allowed under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.
The TSCA specifically excepts a variety of substances and materials from the EPA’s regulatory powers, including ammunition. The TSCA, in other words, explicitly denies the EPA the authority to regulate ammo. The petition was a no-go on its face. The EPA, recognizing that the law explicitly prohibits it from applying the TSCA to ammunition, decided that a public comment period was a waste of its time and resources. Good call. They were also up front with the notification that no one at the EPA is suggesting that such authority be granted.
Now if we can just get them to be as reasonable about carbon dioxide.
Short answer: no. By applying a bayesian backcast method (well understood and widely used in this kind of analysis) they determined that the data does not produce the sharp spike of temperature now well-known as the “hockey stick.” Check out the graphs side-by-side at Mr. Watts’ site at that 1st link I’ve provided.
The paper itself is scheduled to be published in the next issue of the Annals of Applied Statistics but you can view the submitted paper here. (Download it here, too.)
In short, the authors found that the proxies used by Mann and analyzed with their backcast don’t predict the temperatures any better that a randomly-generated series of numbers. Furthermore, they don’t predict the steep incline Mann’s hockey stick shows. In their conclusion, they state, “[c]limate scientists have greatly underestimates the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions ahd hence have been overconfident in their models.”
Watts reports that certain AGW proponents are actively deleting any comments entered on their blogs and forums that so much as mention this paper which, as he says, “tells you it has squarely hit the target.”
A question of significance in this matter is whether Mann and his team knew about these flaws – or became aware of them amid the questioning of their findings – and simply decided not to reveal that knowledge. If so, then they have deliberately misrepresented the situation even while making greater demands for both public funding of their continued “research” and for policy changes affecting us all. This is the question being pursued by Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli who is seeking access to files used by Dr. Mann at the University of Virginia. Mann received tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds to pursue his work and the question of whether he committed fraud by misrepresenting the truth in his applications for those funds needs to be answered. UVA is attempting to block Cuccinelli’s access to those records. Their attempt to have his request summarily dismissed failed and a judge heard arguments on the matter on Friday. He is scheduled to rule on the matter in the next 10 days.
Whether AGW is correct or not remains an open question, although given that historical records indicate temperatures at or exceeding today’s levels were seen prior to any industrial activity on man’s part it’s not looking good for the AGW team. What we can do about it – and whether we should do anything about it – is a question that can only be answered by real and accurate information about the situation. History is rife with examples of human interference in local environments that began with a woefully incorrect understanding of the situation as it was. Politics needs to be removed from this debate and the matter decided upon not with an eye toward bringing about a desired social state or curtailing practices some of us find offensive but with a goal of understanding the situation as it is. With that understanding, actions can be decided upon in as great a confidence as our limited abilities can provide.
“Cloud fields organize in such a way that their components ‘communicate’ with one another and produce regular, periodic rainfall events,” explained Graham Feingold, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) and the paper’s lead author.
In other words, Feingold found clear evidence of self-organization in the regular patterns of rainfall and repeating growth of those floating puffs of cotton.
“Self-organization” means that he sees active interaction and direction in clouds of water vapor. This isn’t a chemical reaction he’s talking about, such as the interaction between water and iron to produce rust or something like that. He’s saying that he’s observing clouds act of their own volition. They aren’t substances being moved by other forces of nature, forming and moving and producing rain as other natural processes play out to produce these results. They’re actively communicating entities working together to produce those results. Seriously.
Science dictates that there’s only one way that happens: the clouds are alive and possessed of, at minimum, animal intelligence. In case you’re thinking that’s not what he’s really saying, here he is talking to FoxNews.com:
“In a sense what’s going on is that the clouds are communicating with each other by driving down to the ground. If you have a number of clouds doing exactly that, air is forced to go sideways from one cloud and meets the air from another,” Feingold told FoxNews.com.
The clouds aren’t sinking to the ground in response to gravity as they pick up additional water vapor and, hence, mass. They’re driving to the ground. To communicate.
Animism is a primitive construct that held that nearly everything in the world is, basically, alive and animated by some type of spirit or another. Even objects and substances we don’t consider alive, such as rock or wind or water, have an active, intelligent consciousness that guides its actions. Animism is inconsistent with true science. The various laws of nature – physics, chemistry, etc. – rely on the concept that the universe is ordered by rules that can predict the outcome of a given interaction where no living creature interferes. A rock, when dropped from a height, falls to the ground here on Earth. It does so because there is a force that we call gravity. Gravity acts upon any object within its range in pretty much the same way whether anyone wants it to or not.
Animism says the rock falls because it wants to or because it permits itself to do so. Wind blows because the spirit of the wind wishes to, or that a mass of air just wants to see what’s over the next hill. The tides come in and out because the spirits of the water direct it to do so.
And, now, the rain falls because the clouds are conversing. And this is from someone claiming to be a scientist and working for a publicly-funded entity whose job it is to observe atmospheric phenomena and conclude scientific principles thereby. This nonsense about the clouds “communicating” isn’t science, it’s fiction. It’s no better than perpetuating the notion that people fall ill because of “a bad humor in the blood” or that women are inherently unstable because they have a uterus. Perhaps he is seeing some previously unnoticed and unexplained pattern in the clouds. Perhaps what he’s seeing is an artifact of how he’s seeing the clouds, perhaps not. He’d be better off trying some real research if he’s that interested in it rather than ascribing the actions to those of cloud spirits and such. And he should definitely avoid relying on his NOAA position if he’s going to press ahead with that anyway. NOAA doesn’t need the hit to its credibility.
BP says oil has stopped leaking into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time since April, touting the success of its new cap on its broken well.
BP has been slowly dialing down the flow as part of a critical pressure test on its new cap, which it now believes is fully containing the oil for the first time since the crisis began nearly three months ago.
Engineers are monitoring the pressure to see if the busted well holds, but has already said their custom-fitted cap will be a temporary fix before they permanently clog the blown-out well.
I’m looking forward to hearing independent confirmation of this but it’s good news, that’s for sure. If it’s actually true, we must now bend our efforts into cleanup. It’s not technically difficult but it’s a long, monotonous process. The faster we can put all of the assets we have into it, the faster it’ll get done.
In any operation – military, commercial, governmental – there is a limit to how long personnel can be expected to perform tasks productively. In many businesses, there are actually regulations in place that state exactly how long and how often a person can be on duty in a given period of time. Take commercial pilots as an example. They are limited by law to fly no more than 100 hours a month, 30 hours in any 7-day period, and no more than 8 hours a day. Truckers get similar treatment although there are fewer points of enforcement with them. Combat soldiers are rotated to the rear for R&R and given more extended leave on regular intervals.
The point to all of this is that people cannot sustain working a given task, especially one that involves a lot of stress, indefinitely. They get tired, even if only mentally, and tired people make mistakes. Tired people in stressful jobs make big mistakes. None of us are expected to work day in, day out forever with no break at all – weekends or vacations. I’m sure there are examples where people are held to that standard for a period of time but they’re rare. Most of us get downtime to relax and recharge. How we do that in our downtime varies but that’s generally our business and no one else’s.
With that in mind, I find the outrage over BP CEO Hayward’s attending a yachting race over the weekend to be misplaced. Hayward’s company is working this issue right now and there are people busting hump on getting the leak sealed around the clock. What, precisely, are people expecting Hayward to personally be doing that he can’t so much as take an afternoon to unwind? Where was he supposed to be, on the rigs drilling the relief wells? Shoveling oily sand somewhere, permanently and forever? We have laws against forcing prisoners to do that in the country but people are insisting that Hayward be held to that standard?
And if that’s the case, then where was the outrage over President Obama’s hitting the golf course – again – at the same time?Hayward takes time to spend with his son watching sailboats zipping along and that’s an unforgivable slight but our President, whose response to this entire disaster has been slow and unfocused since day one, can get in 18 holes and that’s perfectly OK? We’re not even talking about his going to a baseball game the night before. Where’s the outcry? And where’s the media on this? They make a big deal out of Hayward so much as getting lunch (yes, that’s a mild exaggeration) but Obama takes 4-5 hours smacking the ball around the links that’s just par for the course? (Pun intended.)
I understand people are angry about this whole situation and I’m right there with them. But even the CEO of BP gets to take a day off in the middle of this. I need him more focused than ever and that means he needs to rest every so often. If he rests watching people race sailboats then that’s his call. Like the President, I prefer golf. That or dozing off with a TV remote in my hand. But people need to get the perspective on this. Not everything Hayward is doing is done as a deliberate slap in the face. And let’s try to be consistent with the standard. If we’re going to call Hayward out then the President is far more guilty of the offense and should be similarly called out.
The headline for this story was a bit irritating. My immediate thought was something to the effect of “I really don’t give a damn that it’s cost you $2B so far – plug the leak” but I went ahead and read the story anyway. There’s some good information in there about the work to drill the relief wells.
You might have noticed I said “wells”, plural. Perhaps they’ve mentioned this before but I missed it in the haze; they’re working on 2 relief wells, not 1. That’s good news and I wish those crews the very best of luck in achieving their goal.
However, until they seal that well and stop the oil flow I’m not all that concerned with what the effort is costing them in monetary terms. Talk to me about that after the leak is sealed.
It has now officially been 60 days since the explosion aboard the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico and the start of an undersea oil spill that continues to put – what? – 10′s or 100′s of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. While the last attempt at capping the well was partially successful and they’re actually capturing a significant amount of oil that would otherwise be going into the water, the spill continues and the general sense is now that it’s going to continue until a relief well is completed in August to divert the flow away into a controlled release. Will it work? We’re told it will but how confident are we?
I remain amazed by how much about this event we don’t know. By now the story about how the explosion occurred is fairly well known by anyone who’s been listening. A pocket of methane, a substance that takes on an icy slush consistency at the temperatures and depths we’re talking about, got heated to the point where it started to transform into a gas. As it did so, it began to put upward pressure on the riser mechanisms that formed the drilling conduit. As it rose, it picked up heat and transformed to a gas more quickly which increased both its volume and the speed of ascent. Which, by the way, increased the pressure it was putting on the riser’s compartment seals. When it reached a critical point of volume and speed, it broke through those seals. Continuing up the riser, it blew out all of the safety seals and broke though to the rig’s compartments, eventually reaching someplace where an open ignition source detonated the methane. The rig exploded, killing 11 men and mortally damaging the ship. She sunk in short order and the damage caused, either by the rising methane or the sinking ship (possibly both), broke open the riser in multiple places. The blowout preventer, a device specifically designed to halt a runaway gusher, failed to do its job and oil began pouring into the Gulf.
That’s the story. To this date, I do not recall seeing a report that corroborated any of that beyond saying that’s what they think happened. Very little of anything that’s happened since has any greater degree of certainty.
Something caused the methane to get out of control. We’re drilling in other places that are working the same environment. So are other countries and in waters that are considerably more hazardous than the Gulf (think north Atlantic). Did this operation do something different than the rest did? Did they follow the same procedure or did they cut corners on something? There have been accusations that they did such as the one made last night by BP’s partner in this well. They claim BP used a cheaper, more risky well design. Did they? BP and the Obama administration are actively keeping reporters out of the area. Since we’re relying on Obama/BP to tell us what’s really going on, are they, in fact, doing so? Is BP making the right moves and are they being upfront with the status of the situation in their communications with the administration? How would we know?
I was watching a clip from FoxNews where former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani addressed the matter and he made a couple of very valid points. First, when an experienced executive has an emergency fire up he does everything he can to maximize his knowledge base. That means you assemble a team of experts and you don’t do it from the pool of people already engaged in the emergency. Just as you would with a dire medical situation, you seek a second opinion (or a 3rd or a 4th) from other professionals. You make sure you have clear, unfettered access to the information needed to make the decisions you need to or to assess whether the decisions made by others are sound. President Obama did none of this. His defenders are trying to waive off the fact that for days following the explosion Obama dithered and spent his time, literally, on the golf courses or yukking it up with TV personalities. He didn’t even so much as contact the leadership of the company in question for weeks following the spill and even then only did so because he was getting massacred in the press (something else that was a new experience for him, apparently.) And now, as always, he’s gotten on the TV to, supposedly, address the situation and wound up pressing his legislative agenda instead. Oh, and just to show he’s really concerned, he’s appointing a czar and a commission.
Well, whoop-de-do, Mr. President. You’re only about 58 days late on that one and you should bloody well be assembling a team of experts who knows what the hell they’re talking about instead of a group of politicians and bureaucrats who can attempt to stop the leak in the Gulf by talking it to death. We need real professionals to put aside the matter of who’s going to pay for what and who’s going to wind up in what court room. We need them to ignore all of that and answer some very specific, very professional questions:
What is the actual flow rate still leaking into the Gulf?
How much is actually being captured by the measures taken thus far?
What is the real likelihood that the relief well will actually stop the leak?
Is the relief well being drilled at the best rate possible? (Are they being over or under in their estimation of a completion date?)
Are (were) the measures taken by BP to stop the leak reasonable in their chances of success? Would any of the assets of the federal government improve the chances?
Is there anything we could try now to stop the leak or are we really in a situation where we just have to wait until the August completion of the relief well?
Are there any measures we can take regarding containment/cleanup that haven’t been, either through legal red tape or availability of gear?
These are the question professionals need to answer about the current operations. Either in parallel or immediately following those, we need to know these answers:
Is the explanation of what happened to cause this spill borne out by the facts? If not, what really happened?
Why did the blowout preventer not do the job? Was there something that was supposed to be in place that wasn’t or is there a better design available?
Was this foreseeable? If so, did the operators simply miss the signs or did they ignore them?
Were industry best practices in place and being followed? If so, what do we need to implement right now to prevent this from happening again? If not, what was not being done, specifically?
Was the response to the emergency reasonably timely? Was there any way to speed up that response?
Whatever else the Obama administration has done or not done to date, they can certainly assemble a team of the industry’s best to answer these questions. There is nothing stopping them from doing this right now, today. The only reason you wouldn’t is if your priority is not in dealing with this emergency but rather using it as an excuse to get something you want. Let’s see which way the administration goes on this.
I certainly don’t begrudge the President a golf game. Frankly it’s one of the few outdoor things he really gets to do and we all need that, especially in high-pressure jobs. But tracking how often he managed to find the hours necessary to get in 18 holes of golf before he so much as got on the phone to ask BP’s Tony Hayward what the hell he was doing down there is instructive. And I’ve mentioned before that I doubt strongly the media or the left in this country would have been so understanding had President Bush been hitting the links so often before getting involved in Katrina. In fact, they weren’t.
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