I listened to the Stuff You Should Know podcast about oil spills a while ago and ever since I’ve been telling people that the BP Oil Spew in the Gulf really isn’t anywhere close to the largest oil spill in history.  People always raise a skeptical eyebrow to me, but check this out:

That doesn’t make it any less tragic or devastating to the people who live in the Gulf, I know, but if you were judging the size of the spill by the amount of press coverage, you’d definitely get a different impression.

I saved this from FFFFound, but if you know the original source, I’d love to link to it.  (It kind of looks like an infographic from Wired Magazine to me, but I couldn’t find it in the quick few searches I did.)

Update: Commenters have provided the source of this graphic, so do note that the author has pointed out that it is no longer accurate/up-to-date since he created it.

While I haven’t been following the Oil Spill in the Gulf news closely (mostly because I don’t have access to broadcast news) I have stumbled across a little bit of new information.

First, I’ve heard that there may have actually been some incompetence on the part of BP in managing the capping of this well.  I haven’t sought out any corroboration of the story, but what I understand from the brief summaries I’ve read and heard, they were apparently trying to cap a well so they could move to another location, but they were behind schedule and were rushing to get the old well capped and that’s what led to the explosion that caused this spill.  Some people have suggested that there was also an effort to obscure the facts of the situation from public view.

Regardless of whether it was an accident caused by incompetence or circumstances beyond their control, I don’t disagree with those who call for BP to be financially accountable for damages that this spill has caused.

What I questioned in my last post on this topic is whether BP should be morally condemned for the spill as so many people have already done.  I’m still not certain about that.  (I’m still appalled by the number of people outright accusing BP of theft and murder out there.)

BUT! I did just learn about some of the comments that CP CEO, Tony Hayward, made about this.

“I’m sorry. We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I’d like my life back.“

This one has caused a LOT of outcry. I can see what he was going for there, but this statement was poorly timed and poorly worded.  This is because most who hear this statement will just hear the last sentence and conclude that he just means that he is tired of hearing people whine. He wants to get back to bathing in champagne in the back of a stretch Lambourgini and smoking cigars made of $100 bills.  And how about the 11 people who DIED in this accident? I’m sure they’d like their lives back, too.

Judging from the context of the statement, he probably just meant that he is distressed over all of the destruction this spill has caused not only to people and wildlife in the Gulf, but to businesses all over the world including BP and he wishes life could get back to normal.

The point I would make is that I don’t think it’s really appropriate for a CEO to air his wishes to the world. CEOs should not walk around indulging in wild wishful thinking like that.  That’s MY opinion on that remark.

I was also told that Mr. Hayward made the comment “Louisiana isn’t the only place that has shrimp.”  That’s false. Mr. Hayward didn’t say that.  Apparently, that comment was made by BP representative, Randy Prescott.

On its face, that remark is callous to the point where I wonder if Mr. Prescott is a sociopath.  It’s so callous that I had to keep googling and see if I could find that comment in context.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any reliable news source on Google reporting on this comment, let alone putting it context. The intarwebs are overflowing with comments suggesting that people call or email Mr. Prescott’s office.

If anyone can point me to the context of that comment, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks!

People are going around as if BP somehow planned to lose billions of dollars into the ecosystem.  That simply isn’t the case.

This oil spill was an accident and I’ve yet to hear that it was the result of any sort of gross negligence or malfeasance on BP’s part, so why do people act as if it were some sort of horrible moral failing by the people in that corporation?

I’ll tell you why: Because so many people in our culture have bought into the notion that oil is some sort of inherent evil and anyone involved in the production of oil is also evil.

Never mind that oil has brought us a frenzy of life-enhancing, wealth-producing, comfort-creating advancements over the past hundred years or so and that it remains an essential part of our lives and industry. I see nothing particularly objectionable about being “dependent” upon oil any more than it’s objectionable that we were “dependent” upon wood for sailing ships two hundred years ago or that we’re “dependent” upon sand for concrete and glass and other such wonderful things.

Anyone who advocates flipping a switch and cutting off oil in our economy hates human life because such a decision would mean widespread destruction and misery.

No one has ever offered a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at hundreds of universities in dozens of countries would bother to engineer a climate hoax. Nor has anyone been able to explain why Mother Nature would keep playing along; despite what it might have felt like in the Northeast these past few months, globally it was one of the warmest winters on record.

That’s from an article in the New Yorker, which I found over at Kenneth in the 212.

Although I remain in the category of people who simply do not know enough about the science here to make an informed claim about the existence of anthropogenic climate change, I personally count myself among the skeptics because the evidence in support of the proposition has remained utterly unpersuasive to me and the scandals like Al Gore’s hockey stick graph and the “Climategate” thing have stood in support of skeptics.

Contrary to that author’s assertion that no one has offered a plausible account of why all those people would go along with it, the answer is simple: money.  I would compare this assertion to saying no one has offered a plausible account of why people invest in the stock market.

We’ve been laboring under some fundamentally bad ideas about man’s place in the environment for several decades now. I would wager that most people of my generation seem to accept without question the implicit idea that human beings are a blight upon the planet. It’s probably even possible to argue that acceptance of this idea is prevalent in the population extending some generations before me.  Just look at Al Gore. He credited that debunked anti-DDT book for inspiration.  My point: Support for specific environmental claims may waver and jump around, but the basic premises have been put out there and accepted.

Billions and billions of dollars every year are stolen from tax payers and milked out of donors and given to people who propose to study anthropogenic climate change. Nowadays, even in the commercial world “green” is perceived as an added-value to products ranging from cars to toilet paper.  If anthropogenic climate change were proved to be false, a great number of people would have to find something else to do for a living.  I’m not saying they couldn’t or wouldn’t, but why bother when there’s a barrel of fish to shoot at?

Further, the claim that mother nature is playing along, combined with a citation of a single season’s weather, is exactly the type of foolishness that the pro-climate change people mock the anti-climate change people for doing every time there’s an extra cold winter or mild summer.  It’s hypocritical and patently foolish to do so.

I know that article is an opinion piece, so it’s not intended to present a balanced, rational argument for the claim. It’s almost exclusively rhetoric.  That’s fine.  I just have a difficult time when so patently dishonest or hypocritical statements are paraded around as fact.

When I was little, I was taught that the scientific method goes like this:

1. Observe
2. Hypothesize
3. Test
4. Record
5. Conclude

At least, I think that’s what it was.  The foundation of the process is careful observation. You see something happen, you propose an explanation, then you test that explanation by observing the results of various conditions.

But with climate science, we only have one planet.  It’s not like you can just go out and fill up a nearby Earth with CO2 and see if it gets hotter.  And because the process of climate change is so slow and globally varied, we simply do not have enough data for all the apparently (and unapparently) relevant conditions going back through time for various results.

This leads climate scientists to make observations (good!) and then build data models to use statistical analysis to predict the outcomes. (whoa.)

I am not a doubter of math, now.  Don’t mistake me.  Math is good and wonderful and statistical analysis is a perfectly logical and valid approach toward things you can’t just run out and observe direction.

My problem is that many of these models are complicated and secret and even the historical data are often derived from statistics.  So, if the past values are probabilities and the future values are probabilities, I am not clear about how that can be used to clearly establish any causal relationships between the factors in question.  Now, I would imagine a scientist could use a model to figure out what he should be observing in the climate and if his observations support his model, then it makes his model more trustworthy.

Of course, that brings us back to one of our original challenges about observing the earth completely enough to get good evidence for testing our hypothesis.

Scientists seem awfully comfortable in this approach, so I will take their word for it.  But I can’t form my own evaluations on the topic without knowing how that process actually works.

The whole “Climategate” (I have to agree with this, by the way.) scandal is getting a lot of attention now, but not nearly the amount of attention I expected.

So, basically, some criminals hacked into one of the top climate research lab’s computers and took a bunch of files and emails and made them public.  Review of the files reveal what appears to be a conscious and concerted effort to mislead the public and scientific community about the existence anthropogenic climate change. The Telegraph calls it the worst scientific scandal of our generation.

Now, I know it’s causing ripples around the world and, in fairness, I don’t actually follow the news on television or through any comprehensive news sources.  But I really expected to hear a LOT more about this craziness. On the other hand, I’m not really sure how much attention this really deserves.  More on that point in a minute.

Jon Stewart didn’t mention it on yesterday’s Daily Show.  Stephen Colbert had this fellow, Dan Esty, on his show who tried to excuse these apparent fraudsters saying:

I think what they tried to do is simplify a story. …

The truth is the facts still remain. That we still know some things with absolute certainty. That the Greenhouse Effect exists, otherwise our planet would be uninhabitably cold. That the level of  greenhouse gases as risen from pre-industrial times. But there are some things that we’re more uncertain about. How fast climate change might occur, where it might occur, how big it might be.

So, the fudging of the data is not the right thing to do, but it was simplifying a story because they thought the public wouldn’t get it and the media might oversimplify in the other way.

I know the Colbert Report is not hard-hitting journalism, but it surprised me that Stephen Colbert couldn’t find a way to mock such patronizing audacity.  Maybe he was just so shocked that he drew a blank.

Notably, Dan Esty is not a doctor of environmental science. He is a professor of Environmental Law and Policy.

I’m not sure where he gets the idea that they were trying to simplify a story for the sake of the public’s clarity and the media’s portrayal of the facts.  I haven’t heard about there being any such statements in the hacked documents and the alleged actions themselves do not imply such motives.  The logic of such a defense is preposterous.  I can see it now: “We bullied our peers and lied to you so that you might know the truth!”

I’ve said before of the issue of anthropogenic climate change: I don’t care. If it exists, we can deal with the alleged problems as they become actual problems. It would be immoral to burden people with attempting to reverse it — IF it exists.  But I do not know that it exists.  Some of the ideas put forth in supporting the argument appear to me to be obviously untrue and the conclusions from some of the premises are either non sequiturs or the premises strike me as insufficient to the charge.  I am not interested enough in the topic, though, to pursue additional information.  I’m a sort of wary apathetic agnostic.  So, I repeat: I don’t care.

The people at Real Climate care. Scanning through their posts on this issue, it seems to me like they’re concentrating on addressing some of the specific, fact-based challenges brought up by the released documents, which is exactly what I would expect real scientists to do, but they are also downplaying the importance of these documents and engage in a little bit of speculative woe-is-me-ishness.

From their initial post addressing the event, here are some key points I picked out:

• A number of the papers and even scientists in question are not widely respected even though they do support climate change. (For people like me who are skeptical of how the pro-climate change community seems to behave as a monolith, it’s convenient that these papers and scientists are not more publicly excoriated by peers who do support the conclusions if only to show me that these are real scientists actually practicing science.)
• These emails actually show how science is really done.  “People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.” (But the parts of this getting attention aren’t those parts.  Those aren’t parts that surprise anyone.  But, because I’m fair, I should also point out that the post in question is an initial address on the topic and not intended to be an exhaustive rebuttal of all the charges implied in the THOUSANDS of hacked documents.)
• Any incriminating remarks in those documents are probably cherry-picked to make the writers look bad.  And even though the writer may have worded his remarks poorly in a private email exchange, his practices may actually be appropriate.
• Ultimately, this is not likely to reveal anything all that damning about the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis.

I also can’t help but how snide portions of the address are:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

But then they turn around and question the timing of when these documents were released and state that one of the lessons learned is that climate change scientists need to increase the security around their private emails.  What? So, there’s allowed to be a conspiracy against global warming but not a conspiracy for it? (Of course, this is a blog.  They’re allowed to be snide and snooty if they please.  That makes blogs fun.)

One thing I WILL point out in support of the climate change supporters is this: these emails and documents may very well be forged. I have no idea and I have no way of making that determination. They were obtained by criminal activity and I don’t think anyone doubts that they were released to the public in order to discredit the proper owners.

Which is why I’m not sure how much attention this really warrants — if any at all.

You can’t unring this bell, so I do think individuals who subscribe to the notion of anthropogenic climate change should take care to re-examine the evidence and data they have that persuaded them of the case.  This may lead them to present their case to others more clearly and with greater scientific rigor.  But beyond that, I can’t bring myself to argue that any further action should be taken against the people whose computer systems were hacked.

I do think a criminal investigation should be launched against the hackers, of course.

But because we presumably have no means of verifying these documents to see if they weren’t forged, edited, or otherwise manipulated, I am inclined to believe the contents should be otherwise disregarded.

Let this serve as a reminder to people about what is demanded of the scientific process.

Update: added a question mark to the title.