Nowhere. Just broke up. Disappeared. Dissolved. Dispersed. Puff.
“The vast majority of it,” according to Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate adviser, in what must seem as confounding and amazing and heaven sent to the White House as it does to us, “is gone.”
The scientists are apoplectic but, on the other hand, can’t find the oil either. Still, they believe it’s there: “50% to 75% of the material that came out of the well is still in the water,” said John Kessler of Texas A&M University, who led an on-site study. “It’s just in a dissolved or dispersed form.” Which is, for the environmentalist trying to make an historic stand in the Gulf, a problem. It may be everywhere, infused, inculcated, in the ecosystem blood stream, but it is otherwise, apparently, not in evidence.
Now, people do not believe the government, which has hardly had a good record of coming clean about the spill, but they don’t particularly believe ecologists, either, who haven’t managed to sell global warming very well. Curiously, this White House used to believe in global warming, but that might change if the ecologists continue to search for that giant orb of oil in the sea.
Of course, the White House is just hoping against hope that they won’t find it.
This is a narrative problem that doesn’t seem to serve either side very well. It suggests the more fundamental issue of our time, even beyond bad government and environmental calamity: nobody knows what they are talking about.
And, too, that in the face of all logic otherwise, everybody will insist that their position is the true and obvious one.
The White House is now the cheerleader for good times and breezy nights and all the miraculous good fortune in the world, and, too, its own probity, good sense, and measured reactions (what had heretofore been a model of what-not-to-do in crisis management).
The scientists are now the fumfering ones, insisting that it is true because it must be true, that we all must believe it because it’s something that can’t be known — there are long-term consequences here and will be for years to come. The future is scary, as environmentalists can always be counted on to say.
The greater crisis is, as it has long been: the lack of a reliable narrator.
*This article first appeared on Newser
Not if you read what I wrote hereabouts on 31 May, to wit:
Which just goes to show, these days it’s when you prophesy that they’re not all doomed that you turn into Cassandra.
A few corrections, Michael – “Ecologists” have little to say about the fact of global warming, that’s a job for atmospheric scientists and climatologists. More broadly, I fail to see where it is in any scientist’s mandate to “sell” anything. Indeed, the pernicious creep of consumer ideology into all facets of life, including academia, is cause for real alarm.
Just like the absorption of long-wave light by carbon-dioxide is a physical fact, so to is it a physical fact that matter does not disappear. If it is being consumed by microbes, then those microbes will also consume oxygen, possibly leading to a dead zone. If the Gulf of Mexico is able to absorb the largest ecological disaster in U.S. history and recover nearly immediately (a prospect I find possible, but nearly fanciful) I think we can all rightly breathe a sigh of relief. That doesn’t make scientists somehow complicit in the story of the Gulf.
I can agree with both posters here (hey that’s you Mark D!). It turns out BP may have been correct (who knows if it was wisdom from their own scientists or sheer panic) in using all that dispersant. I do not know (does anyone?) but am hoping that indeed the bugs ate it all. If so, I kind of hope that the great unwashed public might learn a lesson: the incredible power of the biological world to conquer all sorts of problems. (In case this is too obtuse, I mean that in Climate Warming and many of our planet’s environmental woes, we should seek to allow biological solutions.) Of course we may yet see some nasty consequences of all that dispersant, and maybe there are still large reservoirs of oil emulsion in deeper colder waters?
Syzygium, you are correct. These media types still do not really understand how scientific research or the communication of the results, works. Since so much of the public domain from politics to media is so partisan and so distorting of reality. (Michael Wolff has been a “media business entrepreneur.”)
I remember reading an article fairly recently by an expert. sorry can’t recall her name, who was very angry with the dispersant being used in the clean up; she stated that the oil so treated would end up on the sea bed, with disastrous results for the ecology of the Gulf.
It’s worth remembering the that the oil from the Exxon Valdez spill years ago is still present on the shore if you dig down a few inches.
Some political spin is in the offing1
@Stephen Martin “the oil so treated would end up on the sea bed, with disastrous results for the ecology of the Gulf.”
Hmmm. Generally there isn’t all that much ecology at a depth of 1500 m.