A day or two ago Mitt Romney announced his “Energy Plan.” (I really hate calling it a plan-it's much more like a suicide pact) It was anachronistic, condescending and every bit as simplistic as I expected it to be. What I didn’t expect was its corruptness, dishonesty and venality. The “plan “ is so patently payback for the oil barons (today’s equivalent of the 19th century robber barons but without their social conscience) most of whom had given millions of dollars to his campaign, that it is absolutely mind boggling. The twit’s idea of a plan is so absurd and so ill-conceived so ludicrous and irresponsible that it is going to take another entire article to do it justice but one part, his puerile sell-out to carbon based fuels, oil, gas and coal must be discussed alone.
What we need to know up front about this aberration of a plan is this. In June, 1992, leaders from all over the world met in Rio de Janeiro for The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. It was the twentieth anniversary of the meeting of world leaders in Stockholm for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and, at the 1992 conference, world leaders reaffirmed the Declaration adopted at the 1972 conference. Stay with me here; this does get more interesting. There is still one more chapter in the story of how our leaders have spared no expense and no energy in their efforts to recognize and address environmental threats to our planet. Before we get to the final step, e have to understand what was agreed upon in 1972.
The Stockholm Conference concluded with these lofty goals:
With the goal of establishing a new and equitable global partnership through the creation of new levels of cooperation among States, key sectors of societies and people,
Working towards international agreements which respect the interests of all and protect the integrity of the global environmental and developmental system,
Recognizing the integral and interdependent nature of the Earth, our home,
Proclaims that:
Principle 1
Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.
Principle 2
States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.
Principle 3
The right to development must be fulfilled so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations.
Principle 4
In order to achieve sustainable development, environmental protection shall constitute an integral part of the development process and cannot be considered in isolation from it.
Principle 5
All States and all people shall cooperate in the essential task of eradicating poverty as an indispensable requirement for sustainable development, in order to decrease the disparities in standards of living and better meet the needs of the majority of the people of the world.
It continues in pretty much the same vein through:
Principle 27
States and people shall cooperate in good faith and in a spirit of partnership in the fulfilment of the principles embodied in this Declaration and in the further development of international law in the field of sustainable development.
(Source: Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 5-16 June 1972)
Last month world leaders again met in Rio de Janeiro for the twentieth anniversary of the twentieth anniversary (I'm serious, here)of the Stockholm conference. What had been accomplished in the intervening forty years and what was accomplished at this meeting? Not much and nothing.
Now, this is not to say that our leaders haven't been trying. In December, 2009 they met in Copenhagen for the 5th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Additionally, the 5th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol took place in Copenhagen. Also sitting were the thirty-first sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), the tenth session of the Ad hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP), and the eighth session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA).
Well then, how about this conference. Surely, with representatives of 180 nations accompanied by some 20,000 officials, advisors, experts and journalists participating in so many important sounding committees, meeting in the first carbon-neutral capital in the world, something noteworthy must have happened. Nope. Other than Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Big Oil) flying to Copenhagen to deny that climate change was real and finding no listeners except for a few reporters, including one from Der Spiegel who commented with great perception and accuracy, “you’re ridiculous,” nothing worthwhile took place. To a large degree that was because neither the United States nor China, the two nations responsible for forty percent of the worlds carbon emissions, were willing to make any substantive concessions. The conference floundered and flopped about for two weeks until President Obama stepped up and took the lead in drafting the Copenhagen Accord.
The Copenhagen Accord was largely window dressing meant to disguise the fact that so many had wasted so much time and so much money while accomplishing next to nothing. But, possibly by accident, it did contain one crucially important number. It formally recognized "the scientific view that the (permissible, eventual) increase in global temperature should be below two degrees C(elsius,)” about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit between the base year, 1929, and 2050.
So, what does that mean in a practical sense? Scientists presently estimate that we can pour about 565 additional gigatons (Gtons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below an increase of two degrees. As Bill McKibben writes in Rolling Stone, "’Reasonable,’ in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.”
There are a number of problems with the agreed upon 2 degree (C) increase but a few stand above the others. First, mid-century is twenty-seven years away but the worldwide rate of carbon emission is not falling. It’s not even static. It’s increasing at a rate of about three percent per year and at that rate we will exceed the 565 Gton limit in sixteen years. Stated another way, world Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions are currently around 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e, this includes a host of other warming agents) per year and are growing rapidly. As the terrestrial and marine ecosystems (carbon sinks) are unable to absorb all of the world’s annual emissions, concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere have increased, to around 445ppm of CO2e today and increasing at a rate of around 2.5ppm per year. There have been efforts to use more renewable energy and improve energy efficiency (e.g. curly-q light bulbs, discontinuing the pre-warm up on new televisions) but these efforts have been marginal at best. Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency's chief economist has said that, “. . . new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close." In the same interview he added, "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about 6 degrees (C)." That's almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.”
That’s a pretty gloomy prediction but what if Dr. Birol is only half right? Let’s say the increase over the next fifty years is only 3 degrees (C). At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: "Some countries will flat-out disappear.” Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, believes "Any number much above 1 degree involves a gamble, and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up." Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, contributed this assessment, "If we're seeing what we're seeing today at 0.8 degrees (C)(the amount we've already warmed over the base year), two degrees is simply too much." NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet's most prominent climatologist, was even blunter: "The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster."
A spokesman representing a number of small island nations said that even a two degree (C) increase the world's mean temperature would threaten a great many small islands.
Islands that have already disappeared are:
Lohachara and Suparibhanga Islands: These Indian islands, where more than 10,000 people lived, have already disappeared into the sea (Bay of Bengal). Scientists who have studies this case of disappearance have attributed the cause to global warming.
New Moore Island, an uninhabited, tiny island in the Bay of Bengal, claimed by both India and Bangladesh, has disappeared under a rising sea. In other words, thanks to a global warming caused rise in sea level, New Moore is no more. On the plus side, I suppose, at least the dispute between India and Bangladesh has been settled.
Bermeja Island: This small island which was near Gulf of Mexico has already disappeared into the ocean. It featured prominently in the maps used between 16th and 19th centuries.
The list of endangered islands includes:
Carteret Islands: These islands are also known as Carteret Atoll, Tulun Islands or Kilinailau Islands. Located in the South Pacific, these islands are expected to be totally submerged by 2015.
Maldives, a smallisland nation in the Indian Ocean. The high point is only 8 feet. Other places in the island are much lower. It the ocean level rises further, this island will disappear.
Vanuatu Island, also called the Republic of Vanuatu is another island nation in the South Pacific which may be submerged due to rising ocean level.
Tuvalu Islands, located between Australia and Hawaii, is, at its highest point, only 15 feet above sea level. Home to nearly 11,000 people, they have already started evacuating due to the rising waterline. New Zealand has agreed to grant refuge to 75 Tuvaluans every year. It is estimated that this island will disappear in 50 years from now.
Kiribati Island, officially known as the Republic of Kiribati. It is located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean and also experiencing rising water levels.
Marshall Islands (remember them-Kwajalein Atoll is there. In World War II we lost almost 400 American lives taking Kwajalein alone, maybe we should have just waited)formally called the Republic of Marshall Islands is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This island may become another victim of rising ocean levels.
Tonga Island, officially known as the Kingdom of Tonga, is located in the South Pacific Ocean. If ocean levels rise, this island is likely to be at least partially, if not totally, submerged.
The Tyndall report (Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative to Act) also concludes that the present world’s commitments to reduce emissions are consistent with at least a 3 degree ( C) rise (50-50 chance) in temperature, a temperature not seen on the planet for around 3 million years, with serious risks of 5 degree (C) rise, a temperature not seen for around 30 million years.
Let’s look at the potential impact of these numbers from a different angle. One thing we know for certain is that no life on earth is permanent. Some species, in fact some whole genera, become extinct from completely natural processes. Others are helped along by unnatural causes. There have been five major extinction events in the history of our planet but one is particularly pertinent here, the Permian-Triassic extinction. Occurring about 252 million years ago, the extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary, the most deadly of the five major events, took place with increasing speed over a period of somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years. It wiped out over eighty percent of the genera on land, and over 95 percent of those in the oceans. It took ten million years for the planet to restore the level of biodiversity that existed prior to the Permian-Triassic extinction. While its cause and its course are still open to some debate, a widely accepted theory holds that it started with an increase in the earth's mean temperature of about 4 degrees (C) precipitated by an eruption of the Siberian Traps. I need to be clear here. I’m not predicting that we are all going to become extinct in the near future. My purpose is to give some perspective on the magnitude and power of the forces of nature with which we are tampering.
Here's another very graphic way of looking at how anthropogenic activities can effect a large land mass very quickly. The unexpectedly rapid melting of the Greenland ice cap provides a dramatic and sobering picture of the problem we face. Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. The satellites measured different physical properties at different scales and are passing over Greenland at different times. As a whole, they provided a picture of an extreme melt event about which scientists are very confident.
You can see the actual images at http://2.bp.blogspot.com/...
NASA's cryosphere program manager, Tom Wagner explained that, although this specific event may be part of a natural variation, "We have abundant evidence that Greenland is losing ice, probably because of global warming, and it's significantly contributing to sea level rise." Other NASA scientists agreed with Dr Wagner's assessment saying that, while it is not possible to say definitively that the loss of the Greenland ice is the result of human activity, it is highly unlikely that anything other a significant change in climate could have caused this event.
Other statistics are equally alarming. A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone and the oceans are thirty percent more acidic. Since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter than normal, setting the stage for more frequent and stronger hurricanes and more devastating floods. Kerry Emanuel, a highly regarded atmospheric scientist, a hurricane expert, director of MIT's Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program and a staunch conservative added, ". . . and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up. "
In June, just a week after the conclusion of the Rio de Janeiro conference, Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level ever observed in any June in recorded history, tropical storm Debbie poured over twenty inches of rain on Florida, the largest fire in New Mexico's history burned on and, in Colorado Springs, the most destructive fire in Colorado's history destroyed 346 homes, breaking a record set only the week before.
Harold Wanless, the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences geologist, wrote a paper a few years ago that gives us something of a yardstick with which to measure how fast the sea level rise is occurring. He noted that, according to his research, the estimated sea level rise along Florida's shoreline has accelerated to a rate of 8 to 16 inches per hundred years since 1932. This is more than six times the rate recorded by earlier tide-gauge record and that estimated from geological history for the past three thousand years.
He noted, however, that the EPA has consulted with a large group of leading experts in the fields of climate variability, oceanography and glaciology, generally experts from the National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to estimate the most probable sea level rise that will likely occur in the future. They concluded that the most probable global sea level rise for the year 2050 was estimated to be 0.5 feet greater than the 1995 level.
The bottom line,the EPA believed, was is that if sea level along the southeast coast of Florida continues to rise at the same rate that occurred the past 100 years, then the projected sea level rise between 1995 and 2050 will be between .3 and .4 feet. This rate of sea level rise does
not include the increase in the sea level rise rate that is expected to occur due
anthropogenic effects.
1. Global warming is most likely to raise sea level 0.5 feet by the year 2050 and by 1.1
feet by the year 2100. There is a 10 percent chance that climate change will contribute 1
foot by 2050 and by 2.1 feet by the year 2100. These estimates do not include sea level
rise caused by factors other then greenhouse warming.
2. There is a 1 percent chance that global warming will raise sea level by 3.3 feet in the
next 100 years and 13 feet in the next 200 years. By the year 2200, there is also a 10 percent chance of 6.5 feet contribution. Such a large rise in sea level could occur either if Antarctic ocean temperatures warm and Antarctic ice streams respond more rapidly than most glaciologists expect, or if Greenland temperatures warm by more than 19 degrees (C) Neither of these scenarios are likely.
3. Along most coasts, factors other than anthropogenic climate change will cause the
sea to rise more than the rise resulting from climate change alone. These factors include compaction and subsidence of land, groundwater depletion, and natural climate
variations. If these factors do not change, global sea level is likely to rise 1.5 feet by the year 2100, with a 1 percent chance of a 3.7 feet rise.
Again, the estimate of a one-half foot rise in sea level (by 2050) was based on the assumption that global warm would not increase enough to be a significant factor. We now know that warming did increase and at a much faster rate than even qualified scientists anticipated. Their estimate of a “1.5 feet by the year 2100, with a 1 percent chance of a 3.7 feet rise,” is more in line with estimates being made today (on the bases of ten plus more years of data). Coastal and island tide-gauge data show that sea level rose by just under 20 cm between 1870 and 2001, with an average rise of 1.7 mm per year during the 20th century. The the rate of rise over this period also increased. This is consistent with the geological data and the few long records of sea level from coastal tide gauges
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the most authoritative information on projected sea level change. The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) of
2001 projected a global averaged sea-level rise of between 20 and 70 cm (the limits of the model projections) between 1990 and 2100 using the full range of IPCC greenhouse gas
scenarios and a range of climate models. When an additional uncertainty for land-ice changes was included, the full range of projected sea-level rise was 9 cm (3.5in) to 88 cm(34.6in.)
IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), 2007, the range of sea-level projections, using a much larger range of models, is 18 cm(7in) to 59 cm ( 22.3in) with 90 per cent confidence limits-9 chances outof ten) over the period from 1980-2000 to 2090-2100 . To allow a margin for the ice sheet uncertainties discussed above, the IPCC AR increased the upper limit of the projected sea-level rise by 10 cm(3.9in) to 20cm (7.9in)above that projected by the models, but stated that “larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea-level rise.” From the start of the IPCC projections in 1990 to 2006, observed sea level has been rising more rapidly than the central range of the IPCC (2001 and 2007) model projections and is nearer to the upper end of the total range of the projections.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a German oceanographer and climatologist, and since 2000, a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University, developed a simple statistical model that related 20th century surface temperature change to 20th century sea-level change. Using this relationship and projected surface temperature increases, estimated 21st century sea level rise might exceed the IPCC projections and be as large as 1.4 m (5.4ft). Projections of 21st century sea-level “larger values cannot be excluded,.
Today, a number of properly credentialed scientists are maintaining that a rise in sea level of 1.8 meters (6ft) to 2.7 meters by 2100. They are still in the minority but they may not be for long.
Climate scientists have long predicted that increases in global temperatures would bring about extreme weather events of the kind listed here. They have also predicted that the increased temperatures would effect enduring changes in global weather patterns. As the Earth warms both the northern and southern temperate zones are moving. The northern temperate zone, of particular interest to a very large portion of the Earth's population, is moving farther and farther north. If significant measures to control warming aren't taken "America's breadbasket," the rich farmlands in the latitudes spanning Kansas and Nebraska will be in Canada in just a few generations. As this happens, a great many species of animal and plant life will disappear because they won't be able to adapt quickly enough to the changing climate.
An even more sobering thought on CO2 emissions is that the remaining reserves of burnable fossil fuel far exceeds the carbon budget necessary to keep the world’s mean temperature from rising above 2 degrees( C). By 2011 the world had used over a third of its budget leaving only 565Gt of excessive CO2 to be stored. Unhappily, all of the proven reserves owned by private and public companies and governments are equivalent to 2,795 GtCO2. Only twenty percent of the total reserves can be burned unabated, leaving up to eighty percent of fossil fuel assets technically unburnable in the absence of effective ways to sequester the CO2 somewhere other than in our atmosphere. A number of scientists and corporations are working on carbon sequestration technology but so far nearly all approaches have proven to be economically unfeasible.
In the paragraph above I said “technically” because this 2,795 Gtons of carbon emissions, or at least a sizable amount of it will find its way into our atmosphere simply because it represents about 27 trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry. To a very large degree the fossil fuel industry is already committed to exploiting these reserves. They have used their claim on these reserves as collateral for loans, have used them to calculate stock prices and to entice investors with promises about future profits. Some oil rich countries have based present and future national budgets on anticipated revenue from these fuel sources. We also need to keep in mind that the figures of 565 Gtons and 2,795Gtons don’t include emissions from shale oil and natural gas refined from tar sand. Large scale exploitation of these fossil fuel deposits is too new to have been included in the calculation of the amount of CO2 emissions permissible to maintain a 2 degree (C) increase in world temperature.
Obtaining oil from tar sand presents its own set of problems. Extracting useable oil and converting it to gasoline is an extremely inefficient and wasteful process. Somewhere between two and four tons of tar sand and two to four barrels of water are required to produce a single barrel of oil. Rather than drilling, enormous shovels carve out open pits in the tar sands, scooping out the greasy interior. Next, the sand is hauled to a processing plant where the tar sand is combined with even more water to form a slurry from which bitumen is extracted. To become gasoline, partially refined bitumen is transported to an oil refinery where it is processed further and finally converted into gasoline. Since bitumen is a highly viscous “heavy” oil that doesn't flow as easily as lighter crude, it requires more processing to facilitate its flow through the oil pipelines. Overall, mining tar sands, extracting bitumen and converting it to gasoline releases three times more times carbon dioxide than typical oil production. With water quickly becoming a limited resource a decision will soon have to be made as to whether oil from tar sand is worth the cost to our environment and out quality of life.
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is another controversial method of obtaining oil and natural gas from shale. In a typical fracking operation, "fracturing fluids" or "pumping fluids" consisting primarily of water, sand and a propitiatory (and therefore secret) mixture of chemicals are injected under high pressure into the producing formation, creating fissures that allow the oil or natural gas to move freely from rock pores where it is trapped. As a rule, steel pipe known as surface casing is cemented into place at the top of a well to protect groundwater. As the well is drilled deeper, additional casings are installed to isolate the formation(s) from which oil or natural gas is to be produced. Fracking is a relatively new technology and, while its pros and cons are still being hotly debated, there is mounting evidence that fracking has been responsible for groundwater contamination by natural gas and that fracking has caused small earthquakes. On the other hand, you could say that some folks in New York and Pennsylvania are being treated to a completely new technology, self heating water. Just fill your pot or tub, light it, wait a few minutes, et voila! Hot water for cooking or bathing without the expense of a gas or electric water heater.
There is one other side of this dilemma we need to consider and that is the attitude of the industry itself. "Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do."
Most companies, most industries, pay to dispose of their waste. Your corner garage or mechanic pays to have waste oil and used parts transported to a proper disposal site. Your favorite restaurant pays to have it’s trash and garbage haul to a dump, usually a landfill which will later be reclaimed as usable ground. The carbon fuel industry disposes of it’s waste by exhausting it into our atmosphere and pays nothing for that privilege. Rather than being made to pay to clean up the mess they've made in our atmosphere, American oil companies are subsidized by our government even though they represent the most profitable enterprises in the history of the world. ExxonMobil alone made $10.7 billion in the second quarter of 2011. That's a 41 percent increase over the same period in 2010 and a 161 percent increase over 2009. Shell nearly doubled its profits year over year, taking in $8.7 billion in the second quarter of 2011. Chevron's profits were $7.7 billion, up 43 percent. BP earned $5.6 billion, a far cry from its $17.2 billion loss a year ago. If our congressional leaders are willing to pay subsidies to companies, the five biggest of which earned a combined profit of $375 million per day, or a record $137 billion profit for the year 2011 despite reducing their oil production, we shouldn't be surprised when those same leaders vote to continue paying a subsidy to companies that move manufacturing jobs to foreign countries. These same five oil companies received $6.6 million in federal tax breaks every day in 201 and the three largest oil companies spent $100 million of their profits each day, or over 50 percent, buying back their own stock to enrich their board, senior managers, and largest share holders. On average, each CEO of those companies received $60,110 in compensation per day last year. Ninety-seven percent of American wage earners make less than that in a year. In 2010 the average cost of a home in the US was $272,900. One of these CEOs could have purchased that home with four and one half days salary.
Alright, if I haven’t depressed to point that you are wondering about even getting up in the morning (or you are trying to find out what it would cost to buy one of those condos Newt Gingrich thinks we should build on Mars), I’ve got more bad news. Sorry folks. I don’t create the stuff: I just write about it. There is an enormous amount of methane (CH4) on earth frozen into a type of ice called methane clathrate or methane hydrate. Methane clathrate (the gaseous state of the methane inside a frozen shell of ice and CH4 would seem intuitively to be the most precarious of things. Methane hydrate melts if it gets too warm and it floats in water. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (on the order of thirty times more heat retaining than CO2)and it eventually degrades to CO2. Worse, there is a lot of it, possibly more than all the traditional fossil fuel deposits, not only on the ocean floor, but also in the now rapidly melting permafrost, mostly in the Siberian region of Russia. Without a doubt, climate warming could, and most likely will, release these deposits into our atmosphere if ocean temperatures continue to rise.
Remember the P-T Extinction we talked about a little earlier in this article? Remember how it started with a 4 degree (C) increase in the Earth’s temperature? Well, a great deal, if not most of that increase was the result of methane being released from the ocean floor because global warming raised the ocean’s temperature.
So, there it is. To address climate change our leaders have adopted a goal of holding atmospheric warming to 2 degree C by 2050. Starting with a baseline year of 1929, we have already used .8 (C) of our allotted 2 degrees and the rate at which we are depleting our heat "surplus" is increasing at an alarming rate.
Worse, those same leaders have done essentially nothing to address this emergency. In fact, republicans in congress en mass (do they do anything any other way) are calling for even more reductions in environmental protections. Foremost among their demands are that the president allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Drilling advocates argue that the environmental controls now in place would offer adequate protection while at the same time lobbying to end those controls. Does anyone else see hypocrisy here?
They also insist that we need more offshore drilling in depths greater than those in which the infamous Deepwater Horizon operated. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon was drilling at a depth of 35,050 feet when it exploded. Let’s do some math here. At sea level, you have one atmosphere of pressure (1 atm=14.7 psi). Every 33 ft that you descend adds another 1 atm. Therefore 35,050 ft/33 ft=1062 atm x14.7 atm equals 15,611 psi at the ocean floor. The Deepwater Horizon was equipped with a device called a “blowout preventer.” rated at 15,000 psi. It failed. BP had done no research on capping a blowout at that depth and had no contingency plan other than a 2009 response plan that listed Professor Peter Lutz (and his phone number) as a national wildlife expert and a resource they could call in case of a blowout. He died in 2005. Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan listed marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf. In 2009 the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency responsible for inspecting oil wells, praised the Deepwater Horizon as, “an industry model for safety." BP still has no comprehensive, field tested plan for dealing with a deep water spill.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster spilled 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (an amount almost twenty times greater than the 1989 Exxon Valdez, a massive oil tanker, spill off the coast of Alaska), killed 11 workers, 6,104 birds, 609 sea turtles, 100 dolphins and other sea mammals and an untold amount of plankton, algae, coral and other essential sea life,
We are headed toward an irreversible environmental disaster. It's one we have no idea how to slow much less stop and we lack the will to to stop it even if the technology existed. If we are not convinced by the scientific studies we should be by just looking out our windows. Extreme weather is becoming the norm but so many of us are happy to listen to the naysayers because believing them relieves us of any responsibility for the condition of the planet we leave our children. In America we have already allowed republican economic policies to devastate the middle class that came into being after World War II. We've sacrificed the economic future of our children so that the plutocrats can have more houses, more cars, more yachts more of everything. We've stood by and let one percent of Americans take control of ninety-nine percent of the nation's wealth. Now, we are about to sacrifice our children's environment for much the same reason. The generation that fought World War II is rightfully known as the greatest generation; we are headed toward being known rightfully as the worst.
Resources for this article include:
The Discovery of Global Warming (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine) by Spencer R. Weart
The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate by David Archer
The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion
By Matt Taibbi
Romney’s Energy Plan by Robert Semple Jr, in The New York Times at:
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Beyond Carbon Dioxide: Growing Importance Of Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) In Climate Warming in Science Daily, July 9, 2009 at:
http://www.sciencedaily.com
Methane hydrates and global warming in Real Climate, December 9, 2005 at:
www.realclimate.org
The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming in The Monthly Review, July-August, 2008 at;
http://monthlyreview.org
Global Warming’s Terrible New Math by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone at
What Islands Will Disappear in WikiNut at:
http://news.wikinut.com/
The Great Dying: first it warmed, then it burned by John Timmer in Arstechnia at:
http://arstechnica.com/
Q&A: Copenhagen climate change conference 2009
http://telegraph.co.uk/
Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative to Act at
http://tyndall.ac.uk/
Not only is climate change real, it's turning out worse than we thought. In Deviantart,com at:
http://forum.deviantart.com/
How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions? in Skeptical Science at:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
Unburnable Carbon – Are the world’s financial markets carrying a carbon bubble? in Carbon Tracker at:
http://www.carbontracker.org/
Estimated Impacts of Sea Level Rise on Florida's Lower East Coast in a report to the South Florida Water Management District at
http://my.sfwmd.gov/...
Titus J.G. and V.K. Narayanan, 1995. The Probability of Sea Level Rise, U.S Environmental Protection Agency, Rockville, Maryland available on the Web at:
http://papers.risingsea.net/... and
http://www.gpo.gov/...
Ice and Sea-level Change in the United Nations Environmental Programme Report at:
http://www.unep.org/...
Note: The body of this article first appeared as a two part discussion of global warming and climate on my blog, The Last New Dealer (rodgzblog.blogspot.com). Only the Part Two was is presented here. It was updated and expanded for this submission.
If you find climate change to be of concern to you then you might want to consider these articles on this topic on my blog:
More Sobering New Numbers On The Sobering New Numbers On Global Warming
Still More Bad News On Climate Change
The US, Ozone Depletion and Melanoma
and, of course, there is a whole world of scientific, peer reviewed material on the web.