I got a comment the other day telling me I should stop spreading nonsense about the dangers surrounding the Gulf Oil Spill.
The reason given was, an identical spill occurred in 1997 and it turned out to be “no big deal”. I never delete comments – except spam. I think all opinions are useful in some way. The first thing I thought of after reading the comment (after I wondered why people use comments to try and tell other people what to do) was think about the earth being a closed system.
Someone (around Faraday’s time), when scientists were just inventors and experimenters, made a closed system to find out if mass/weight changed in matter through evaporation. (if you’re familiar with this experiment you might add something for clarification purposes)
What he found was, although matter goes through changes in form it doesn’t – go away. All the water that was on the earth a million years ago is still here. On one hand this is great. If it wasn’t this way planets wouldn’t be a habitable. But the nature of the system – the nature of nature – also sets the stage for our extinction.
One trait that is common to mankind is it’s ability to ignore things. In the case of life in a closed system a lot of people operate on – out of sight out of mind thinking. I can’t see it so it’s not a problem. You see in the gulf right now people looking at the crude and saying, “This is bad, we need to do something – Now”. But who remembers the oil spill of “97″?
I didn’t, but of course I was very loaded. I’ll admit I never even heard about it that I can remember. My question is this: If all this oil poured into our closed eco-system via the gulf and people dumped a bunch of chemicals on it and lit big fires – where did all that stuff go? It didn’t just go away, whether we can see it or not, it’s here.
I found this story in my mailbox today. It came right on time for me to use it in this post. I want to put a thought in your minds eye before I go. Here it is, what if car exhaust was red? What if you could see toxins? Would people react like they’re reacting to globs of crude?
BP Is Only the Latest Killer of the Gulf
by: Max Ajl, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
First, the marine ecosystems of the Gulf have been literally dying for decades. Most summers, an immense zone of oxygen-depleted seawater runs from the Louisiana continental shelf to the Texas coast, what aquatic ecologist Nancy Rabelais characterizes as the “largest such zone in coastal waters of the Western hemisphere.” Severe oxygen depletion has two levels: hypoxia, less than 2 mg of oxygen per liter – or 3 mg in some systems – and anoxia, 0 mg of oxygen per liter.
Oxygen depletion in the Gulf
Oxygen depletion in the Gulf comes from the confluence of several biological and physical processes. First, nutrients which arrive on the waters of the Mississippi and flow out into its delta and beyond, into the Gulf, cause intense biological activity, which leads to oxygen depletion. The Mississippi’s waters are unusually loaded with nutrients, mainly nitrogen, but also phosphorus, because they are dumped onto farmland in the form of fertilizer further upstream and inevitably percolate into the water table and the tributaries that converge into the Mississippi.
As Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute adds, “About half the global riverine nitrogen input (50 to 80 Tg of [nitrogen per] year) is anthropogenic in origin … and anthropogenic nitrogen deposition is concentrated in coastal waters downwind of industrial and intensive agricultural regions.”
Then the detritus remaining from the algal blooms that are fed by nutrient oversupply and the fecal pellets produced by zooplankton decompose. The decomposition process uses oxygen and that rate of oxygen use exceeds the rate of oxygen resupply. This process is exacerbated by the way freshwater flows in from the Mississippi, leading to marine water stratification – separation of the water into different strata, or levels. This occurs year round due to differences in the salinity level of freshwater and seawater, but is worsened in the summer due to warming of the surface waters and calming winds, which prevent intense mixing of the waters – at least until hurricane season begins. When fish or other sea life enter these hypoxic or anoxic zones, they literally suffocate due to inadequate oxygen supplies. These zones expand every year. Globally, there are more than 400 such coastal hypoxic systems. The area they cover is more than 245,000 square kilometers and as Doney adds, “Population growth and further coastal urbanization will only exacerbate coastal hypoxia without careful land and ocean management.”
More broadly, it is not just the Gulf of Mexico that is experiencing changes in its chemical composition. The ocean itself is chemically transforming due to the rise of atmospheric CO2 levels, which have risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution to about 390 ppm today. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere leads to some of that excess CO2 dissolving in surface seawater, through what Doney characterizes as “well-known physical-chemical reactions.” He adds, that the “global uptake rate is governed primarily by atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the rate of ocean circulation that exchanges surface waters equilibrated with elevated CO2 levels with subsurface waters.” Scientists estimate that the total ocean intake of carbon since the start of the industrial age amounts to about 25 to 30 percent of total human CO2 emissions. The ocean has been a major sink for human-produced CO2, but maybe not for long, and not without tremendous ecological cost.
When oceans absorb anthropogenic CO2, their chemistry changes. They become more acidic (lower pH levels) and have “lower chemical saturation states” for calcium carbonate (CaCO3) minerals. Sea-based organisms use those minerals to make their shells and skeletons. The two forms which are most frequently used by those organisms are aragonite, used by most mollusks and coral generally, and calcite, used by coccolithophores – single-celled algae, protists and phytoplankton – foraminifera and other mollusks. Surface seawater is currently supersaturated with those forms of calcium carbonate, while its quantity decreases with depth. When water is undersaturated, shells and skeletons can start to dissolve.
Scientists believe that an increase in ocean acidification, an inevitable consequence of increasing atmospheric CO2, will probably reduce the growth of shells and skeletons for such species as corals and mollusks. At 550 ppm of atmospheric CO2 – a level we will hit if we continue on the trajectory plotted by every planet-killing compact the world has considered in recent years at its soirées in Copenhagen and Bonn – coral reefs begin to erode, instead of grow, because of oceanic acidification and the warming of surface waters.
Right now, at this very moment, “ocean pH is lower than it’s been for 20 million years and it’s going to get lower. The acidification resulting from the current carbon dioxide emissions is massive and rapid,” comments science writer Richard Kerr. It would be a world without coral, because we insist on bumbling around in SUVs and having 11 carrier-strike groups trawling the world’s oceans, securing the supply lines for a substance that is destroying life within the realm they motor above.
Ecocide
The fantasy of a pre-Deepwater Horizons’ blow-out world ends up looking pretty bleak. Ecocide still takes place – it’s just that there aren’t 300-foot high flame jets blowing out of ruptured oil rigs to alert us to its presence. It’s quiet death: slow acidification of the oceans, to the point that oysters and other organisms have trouble forming their shells, coral can’t accrete and metastasizing hypoxic zones, in which small immobile organisms asphyxiate when they enter and fish either circumnavigate or enter and die. And there are no “top-kill” or “relief well” techno-fixes to resurrect the ocean when we’ve killed it, a pleasant way to punctuate the arrival of the Anthropocene era, as a group of scientists dubbed the current geological era.
So, in a morbid way, we can be thankful for one thing: At least powerful people are looking at the Gulf of Mexico and the ongoing horror there. The question is how to make them see all of the problems and their interlinks and fix all of them and not bluster and blather about climate change bills that won’t change anything, and techno-fixes that are hyper-elaborate, Promethean devices that attempt to treat the symptoms when the problem isn’t safely extracting oil. It’s that oil extraction isn’t safe because oil isn’t safe.
The people in the global South have it right: There’s already too much CO2 in the atmosphere. The question is how to bring the increases to a screeching halt, now. Will Obama take that up at the Cancun summit in late fall? I doubt it. I doubt it unless we make him.
4 comments ↓
Living next to the gulf, I also never heard of another oil disaster that happened here before. And I wish people would stop calling it a “spill”, like someone knocked over a glass of water (oil). I do remember getting oil tar between my toes when visiting the beach at a younger age; and mom simply told use to clean our feet before getting in the car. It was never easy to get the tar off.
I hate the way this person talks to us in this paper about the depletion of oxygen; like why worry about the oil when we have the oxygen to worry about. Or, maybe this article suggests why do anything because it is dead already. I think someone who cares should shoot some life into this person. This oil disater will take oxygen from the water, and render the area a dead sea. More over, ther is going to be a lot of fighting here on the coast between the people who work for oil companies, and the people who do not. confrontation, telling others to be responsible is what is needed now. And people playing this down better run too. This is a mess, and nothing compares to it in history; look it up. Furthermore, it is not a set amount of oil coming out of the manmade hole; the hole is getting sandblasted by dibree, making the hole larger each minute. The best estimates I heard was given about a week an a half ago, and it was 100,000 barrels a day. Meaning that in every 4 days it is equal to the Exxon Valdez oil spill (which still is not cleaned up).
I heard some say that an atomic bomb would be used to stop the flow. If they do this, then I personally will mask groups of people to stop this. When I read that, I like to fell on the floor. People doing stupid things will just have to stop at that point; our problems are caused by the very so called scientists that put funding above morals. Stephen Hawkins was asked what he thought of the oil in the Gulf, and he said that people are igsignifacant in the stars. So while steven is looking at the stars, us people are worried about feeding our kids, and probably having to migrate to areas that offer food and safety. maybe we should move to a town where some of the CEos live. How is that for tearing down ideology. I really think that this big oil in a big oil town is going to be a bigger mess at our jobs. People may start to use their senses to determine that the money working for an oil company is not worth it anymore. And their friends are going to hold them to the fire. This asking them if they work for the enemy, if so; then get away from my family and if we see you again you better run.
Right now, advertisers, and PR firms are working over time to make this disaster sound like no big deal; like it might even be fun, or help the economy. Man, we have not seen the peak of it yet; people here are pissed. I talked to one oil man’s wife and when I met her, she said her husband worked for an oil company. Then quickly, she added that people do not like us anymore, that people are telling us things. I didn’t say anything, I was in shock with what she said.
I agree with Doug here, all this stuff we pollute is hard to put a face on, not all the stuff is black oil which is very noticeable. But even if we added red dye to the mix so we see it; people who make money on red dye will tell you that the world is good (at least for them). Then there will be cowards that agree that the red dye is wonderful. Activists will write letters to the due manufacturer and the polluters asking them to a BBQ, and ask the criminals to please stop or they will be blogged about. People will blog, not adding anything to the idea, not being interactive as though the blog site is owned by someone who also benifits from red dye and pollution. And people feeling helpless or guilty will blog on the site to just feel better about themselves. And we will all surround ourselves with people who will not confront us on what we have done or enabled. Well, I say the emperor has no clothes, and could care less what you could have offered me to keep my mouth shut. And you are going to see allot of others who could care less about your beliefs and ideologies; that is, when what you do affects me and my families future. That is where we draw the line.
I feel sites where someone was wise enough to lay down the foundation for all to communicate; I feel we need to evolve to the next thing. Maybe making it open source. Let us steer the ship, and not the site owner. Everything is valid. If someone lashes out, then that person is having a difficult time with the shocking information. If someone has ideas, well, that is what we want. Maybe we can make a running blog where people add and fine tune ideas. Or maybe it is used to organize people and give them a feeling of not being alone when you finally put your neck out. We need practice, we have not behaved for some time. We need practice, we are going to fall. But we need to do something that is not controlled by others. After all, activists are also in their own ideology. I will never forget the drawing that had nothing but these words “Me” on it, covering almost the whole paper. But in a small corner, was the words “WE’ written only a few times.
What of technology, do we not need some cutting edge tech to our art. A blog on tech would be a good idea, show us a path to the next great thing in news and interacting, and implementing. There is so much that can be done when you just leave the keys in the car, and let others borrow it; after a while you see that one person replaced the battery for you, the windshield wipers; all while the owner was worried about someone stealing the car, inmstead it cam e back better than when he loaned it out.
I would even like to have conference calls, can this be part of the blog. Can we all pitch in and rent pavilions where we can meet, or fund anothers project far away. We can monitor the progress on the net, that would be neat. I want more, we need to move this pace up a bit. We need someone to be a moderator on a blog and let it ride, only speak out when someone is stuck in an ideology. Kinda of a parent to us if you will. We need lots of ideas, we need to encourage them. We need to encourage people. Having a spine right now, and knowing how to talk about the things, and having others tell us that we are misinformed; we need people to holed others accountable. But we also want them to have some space so that they can work their way from the dark side, to the light. After all, I use to be an idiot too. I said the people in Somalia should rent moving vans and go somewhere where the soil is fertile. Little did I know that my country deployed satellites from my home town to see the minerals under the soil of other people’s countries so that we may invent reasons to go over there to steal them.
There is a great old movie called the “Magnificent Gunfighter” with Yul Brynner. He was hired by the rich crooks and middle class of the small town. He then comes to realize that he was on the wrong team. This bad guy decided to help the poor of the town. When the class massed around him in the town square, Yul said this to them “Who have you betrayed in your town to get the things that you have”. I think we should all watch this movie. It made the spanish people look better than the average white man; and the movie went to great lengths to make all these points. It is my favorite movie, and blows away the Matrix movie for the anthem for political activism.
The last thing I want on this 4th of July is more of the same. I do not want independence, I don’t even know what that is. I do know about dependence, codependence, and devolution. What we need is a revolution, to finally evolve to our potential. Righty now we are playing their game.
I can not help being a little scattered brained when talking about our problems. My mind is racing, and it is hard to cover all this in the right way. But I am getting better, and this is a good lesson for others. It takes practice, and even then; we still have more to learn and also learning better how to talk to others about it. Then, we need to do some implementation. In nursing they call it the “plan”. First, you make a base line assessment of the problem, you set obtainable goals so you feel progress; then rationale to say that your ideas of implementation are sound, then evaluate the progress, and finally rewrite your goals to make them more realistic. That is what we need; a plan.
It would also be nice to have a open blog for people who want to write off topic, or scatter brains like myself trying to talk about it all at once. We just need more. To try things that we know are not going to work. I say “through safety out the window”. Let all of us have a chance at confronting these people, or adding ideas.
This tar is still all over my feet, and still no one wants to question why this happens in the first place. These ideologies are about to hit the fan.
Welcome back….
Thanks Doug for all that you are doing. I always feel that after I write, that it all looks and sounds terrible. I need lots of practice, and I guess this would be a good time to tell you that it is wonderful that you let me practice here.
I really like the topics you have covered for the past couple of weeks. Where others are stuck on one topic, you on the other hand, cover an array of things (all relevant, on topic with the times). Thanks for helping all us out. Tonight I felt really hopeless about all this, and felt reaching out with my feelings may help not just me, but maybe others also feel the way I do and want to speak. I am not talking to “get things off my chest”, I am writing to find brothers in arms who want to do something about our problems. Thanks again, I hear fireworks outside and wondering what we really have right now worth celebrating. But soon, we all will have something worth popping fireworks for, maybe it will be the day we all see hope with our efforts.
Timothy Leary – Wikiquote, My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I’m not telling kids just to quit school; I’m not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.
“….detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games” – Everybody that slows down and steps away, comes back with the same message.
I rarely write anything in one sitting. I (99%) of the time, re-read what I’ve written, at least once.
There really are a lot of people doing cool things, I figure it’s a numbers game. There’s a good example of this in the dairy industry with hormone use.
I have something on it at the health blog.
I doubt I’ll do much by talking. I mainly spread all the good stuff I find as far and wide as I can with tools at my disposal.
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