Fox News has a knack for reporting on non-problems by making problems out of them. Such is the case of an article on their website today titled “Wind Farms Blow U.S. Off the Radar,”  which at first made me fall to the ground in laughter because it resembled an Onion News Network satire piece from this summer titled “Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit:”

Fearing the dire effects that wind turbines have on radar, I clicked into the article to find this lead:

This one’s really off the radar.

Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy sources, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: “blank spots” that distort radar readings.

Is the first sentence referring to the second? Because “solar power and other alternative energy sources” have no connection to the way a wind turbine functions or affects the environment.

The article continues on by framing the problem that these “blank spots” pose:

Spinning wind turbines make it hard to detect incoming planes. To avoid that problem, military officials have blocked wind farm construction near their radars — and in some cases later allowed them after politicians protested.

Shepherd’s Flat, a wind farm under construction in Oregon, was initially held up by a government notice that the farm would “seriously impair the ability of the (DoD) to detect, monitor and safely conduct air operations.”

Then Oregon’s senators got involved.

“The Department of Defense’s earlier decision threatened to drop a bomb on job creation in Central Oregon,” democratic Senator Ron Wyden noted in a press release.

Clearly, Democratic politicians, with their mischievous plots of job creation and misguided hopes in “alternative energy sources” are causing radar vulnerabilities for Department of Defense.

Or is this really not a problem at all:

Beloite told FoxNews.com that the project was given the green light by the military only after scientists at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory assured the Department of Defense “that there were algorithms and processors they could design for not too much money that would mitigate the problem.”

Beloite said that the MIT technology has proven successful in the last few months.

“[The problem] has been addressed. And I have a letter from the deputy director of operations from U.S. NORAD that says ‘step one of the two-step fix worked so well that we recommend we don’t spend any more money on step two.’”

So wind farms aren’t really a problem for the Department of Defense, and the fix has been so effective that there’s no need to move on to a Plan B. Shouldn’t this article be about the triumph of technology to solve problems?

In a 2010 Pew survey, only about one in six Republicans said they believed human activity was changing the climate. In a Gallup survey this March that phrased the question differently, 36 percent of Republicans said they believed pollution from human activities had contributed to “increases in the Earth’s temperature over the last century,” while 62 percent of Republicans attributed those changes to natural changes in the environment. Rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change has become an article of faith for virtually all elements of the GOP coalition. Even in a secular, well-educated state such as New Hampshire, for instance, University of New Hampshire surveys since April 2010 have found that only about one-fourth of Republicans believe human activity is changing the climate. National figures provided to National Journal by Gallup combining surveys from 2011 and 2010 show that college-educated Republicans are even more likely than their non-college counterparts to reject the notion that human activity is changing the climate.

Yes, being a college-educated Republican makes you less likely to believe that humans have contributed to climate change than if you were non-college educated.

[hits self over the head with a book]

Furthermore, this latest Gallup poll shows that Jon Huntsman has fallen to 1% while anti-science Rick Perry has surged to the lead of the primary race with 29%. I think this should put the subject of a ‘moderate’ Republican’s viability to rest for a while. Goodbye Jon Huntsman.

…almost three-fourths of the crude that leaked has disappeared or soon will be eaten by bacteria. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has said at least half of the oil released is now “completely gone.”

Chemist Dana Wetzel said the administration’s conclusion felt like the “closing credits of a movie.”

“It’s like they were saying ‘the end,’” Wetzel, program manager at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, said in an interview last week. “I’d say we have just gotten through setting up the plot.”

Carol Browner, Obama’s top environmental adviser, added her own celebratory rhetoric to that:

Mother Nature did some nice work for us in terms of evaporation and dissolution of the oil in the water…

The NOAA report was greeted with widespread skepticism. This week has brought two pieces of news that seem to amply justify the skepticism.

On Tuesday, we learned that scientists from the University of Georgia had strongly questioned the NOAA’s conclusions:

A group of scientists says as much as 79 percent of BP Plc’s leaked oil remains in the Gulf of Mexico, challenging an Obama administration assessment that the crude is largely gone or rapidly disappearing.

Most of the oil that leaked from BP’s Macondo well from April 20 to July 15 is still beneath the water’s surface, five scientists including Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia in Athens, concluded in a memo made public yesterday. The researchers say they drew upon the U.S. government’s study while reaching different conclusions.
[...]
Charles Hopkinson, a University of Georgia marine scientist and one of the five researchers, said plumes of oil dispersed underwater remain a danger.

“One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless,” he said in a statement released yesterday. “The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are.”

The University of Georgia scientists said in so many words that the NOAA’s analysis didn’t really support the conclusions they drew (and trumpeted to the public).

The same day University of South Florida scientists also reported disturbing news:

Separately, a study released by University of South Florida scientists said experiments in the northeastern Gulf where so-called plumes or barely visible clouds of oil had been found earlier had turned up oil in sediments of an underwater canyon. The oil was at levels toxic to critical marine organisms.

Oil droplets were found in the sediments of the DeSoto Canyon, where nutrient-rich waters support spawning grounds of important fish species on the West Florida Shelf, this report said.

In response to both developments, the NOAA defended its analysis and pretended that its director had never put a rosy, optimistic spin on the findings:

In a response to the University of Georgia report, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spokesman said the August 2 government calculation was based “on direct measurements whenever possible and the best available scientific estimates where direct measurements were not possible.”

“Additionally, the government and independent scientists involved in the Oil Budget have been clear that oil and its remnants left in the water represent a potential threat, which is why we continue to rigorously monitor, test and assess short- and long-term ramifications,” NOAA Communications Director Justin Kenney said in a statement.

Thn, yesterday, the respected Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts published the results of a major study in the journal Science:

A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill.

The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said.

Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly “gone,” and it is gone in the sense you can’t see it. But the chemical ingredients of the oil persist more than a half-mile beneath the surface, researchers found.

And the oil is degrading at one-tenth the pace at which it breaks down at the surface. That means “the plumes could stick around for quite a while,” said study co-author Ben Van Mooy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, which led the research published online in the journal Science.

Monty Graham, a scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not involved in the study, said: “We absolutely should be concerned that this material is drifting around for who knows how long. They say months in the (research) paper, but more likely we’ll be able to track this stuff for years.”

At this point, there seems little doubt that the NOAA’s August 4 report was seriously misleading. The kindest statement that can be made about Jane Lubchenco’s upbeat pronouncements is that she made statements that are not substantiated by the facts.

The irony is that when University of South Florida researchers first announced the existence of underwater plumes in May, this is the reaction they got from the NOAA:

When University of South Florida researchers stood before television cameras and the world in May to announce they had found evidence of vast plumes of invisible undersea oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the dean of the College of Marine Science didn’t get kudos from federal officials.

Instead, Hogarth said, he got grief from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“They were concerned about the data and wanted to know if we were sure of what we were saying,” Hogarth said this morning. “They felt we were making statements that were not substantiated.”

With BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone’s lips is: where is all the oil?

For three long months a massive slick threatened the shorelines of Louisiana and other southern US Gulf Coast states as BP tried everything from top hats to junk shots and giant domes to stanch the toxic sludge.

A cap stopped the flow on July 15 after between three and 5.2 million barrels (117.6 million and 189 million gallons) had gushed out. Roughly one quarter of that was picked up by BP’s various collection and containment systems.

After frantic efforts to skim and burn the crude on the surface — some 34.7 million gallons of oil-water mix have been recovered and 411 burns have been conducted — the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up.

Dozens of reconnaissance planes fly constant sorties from Florida to Texas noting any oil sightings, while flat-bottomed boats trawl the marshes for lumps of tar too large to biodegrade.

“What we’re trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it,” said US spill response chief Thad Allen. …

The figures speak for themselves. Before the cap went on, some 25,000 barrels of oil a day were being skimmed from the thickest part of the slick near the well site.

By the time Tropical Storm Bonnie arrived last week, the take was down to a pitiful 56 barrels, begging the question of what to do with the fleet of 800 skimmers, many of them run by disgruntled fishermen.

Jane Lubchenco, the head of the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said Tuesday that a lot of the oil had been broken down naturally.

“We know that a significant amount of the oil has dispersed and been biodegraded by naturally occurring bacteria,” she said.

“Bacteria that break down oil are naturally abundant in the Gulf of Mexico, in large part because of the warm water there and the conditions afforded by nutrients and oxygen availability.”

“We are currently doing a very careful analysis to better understand where the oil has gone,” she added.

With no more oil to be skimmed, BP’s CEO designate Bob Dudley talked about scaling back the clean-up effort:

BP’s incoming CEO said Friday that it’s time for a “scaleback” of the massive effort to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but he added that the commitment to make things right is the same as ever.

Tens of thousands of people – many of them idled fishermen – have been involved in the cleanup, but more than two weeks after the leak was stopped there is relatively little oil on the surface, leaving less work for oil skimmers to do.

That “very careful analysis” that Jane Lubchenco was speaking about? The NOAA was pleased to release the results yesterday:

With a startling report that some researchers call more spin than science, the government said Wednesday that the mess made by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is mostly gone already.
[...]
U.S. officials announced that nearly 70 percent of the spilled oil dissolved naturally, or was burned, skimmed, dispersed or captured, with almost nothing left to see — at least on top of the water. That declaration came on the same day they trumpeted success in plugging up the leaking well with drilling mud,

The report, incidentally, “was based on findings from government and non-government scientists”. In case you’re wondering where you’ve heard that phrase before in the context of the BP oil spill, it was the phrase used to describe the Flow Rate Technical Group, the U.S. government expert panel that decided, after very careful estimation, no doubt, that the rate at which oil was spewing from the well was 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day (which, if you remember, turned out be exactly the gross underestimate BP executives had been praying for every night).

The funny thing about the NOAA’s very careful analysis of what happened to all the oil is the masterful way they club things together.

…government scientists reported that most of the crude that gushed from it for three months has dissipated or been removed from the water.

The NOAA would have you believe that there’s no meaningful distinction between removing the oil from the water and “dissipating” it into the water. (Isn’t that like saying there’s no meaningful distinction between pissing in the pot and flushing to remove it from the bathroom system, or just pissing all over the floor and letting it dissipate into the bathroom system?)

Continuing with the official NOAA rhetoric:

In a summary of the report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the White House said a third of the oil released in the spill was “captured or mitigated” by recovery operations, “including burning, skimming, chemical dispersion and direct recovery from the wellhead.” It said 25 percent “naturally evaporated or dissolved, and 16 percent was dispersed naturally into microscopic droplets.”
[...]
The summary said the “residual amount” of 26 percent “is either on or just below the surface as residue and weathered tarballs, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments.” It said dispersed and residual oil eventually breaks down through natural processes and that “early indications are that the oil is degrading quickly.”

Evaporated or dissolved, equally good? (Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it in just a moment.)

Clearly, we are being invited not to lose sleep over the residual amount of 26%. And why should we? It’s only five times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. And, hey, it’ll eventually break down.

According to NOAA Director Jane Lubchenco, the report actually indicates that “At least 50 percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the system”. That comes from “adding up the amounts that were recovered, burned, skimmed, evaporated or dissolved.” Lubchenco, clearly regards dissolved oil as “completely gone from the system”. Perhaps, she can be persuaded to drink a glass of dissolved oil on live TV, just to reassure the country that dissolved oil is in fact perfectly safe, and quite harmless to man, woman or child?

Even if you let Lubchenco off the hook for the dissolved oil being lumped with recovered, burned, skimmed and evaporated, the oil that’s hiding out as residual oil (26%), naturally dispersed (16%) or chemically dispersed (8%) adds up to 50%. (Apparently, when Lubchenco said that “At least 50 percent of the oil that was released is now completely gone from the system”, she didn’t mean 50% or more, she meant exactly 50%. This lady has a way with words, doesn’t she? A way that might be described by an innocent bystander as “fast and loose”.)

This 50%, the report assures us, “is currently being degraded naturally”. And at this point we’re only talking about roughly 10 times the oil that was spilled by the Exxon Valdez.

In any case, here are some of the early reviews of the NOAA report:

Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post:

The underlying measurements and methodology were not made public, however, leaving much of it looking like so much guesswork.

NYT:

Some researchers attacked the findings and methodology, calling the report premature at best and sloppy at worst. They noted that considerable research was still under way to shed light on some of the main scientific issues raised in the report.

“A lot of this is based on modeling and extrapolation and very generous assumptions,” said Samantha Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia who has led some of the most important research on the Deepwater Horizon spill. “If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces.”

The AP:

“This is a shaky report. The more I read it, the less satisfied I am with the thoroughness of the presentation,” Florida State University oceanography professor Ian MacDonald told The Associated Press. “There are sweeping assumptions here.”
[...]
“There’s some science here, but mostly, it’s spin,” he said. “And it breaks my heart to see them do it.”

MacDonald pointed out that NOAA spent weeks sticking with its claim the BP well was spewing only 210,000 gallons a day. Now, after several revisions, the federal government said it really was 2.2 million gallons a day. So he has a hard time believing NOAA this time, he said.

There is also the reassuring fact that the NOAA can’t even make up it’s mind whether or not a long-form report actually exists. Plus, the report doesn’t cite any scientific references.

The scientific report, which has four pages of text followed by one page of credits, is small compared to other similar reports. Initially, NOAA said there was a fuller, 200-page report, but then retracted that. There is a second report that is 10 pages. The initial report cites no scientific references — those, (NOAA emergency response senior scientist Bill Lehr, an author of the report) said, are in his head.

Meanwhile, here’s one answer to the question of where the oil is hiding:

According to WVUE correspondent John Snell, local officials dispatched a dive team to a barrier island off of southeastern Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish to scan the sea floor for oil. The team, however, could barely see the sea floor, due to the current murky state of the area waters. But when the divers returned to shore, they made a rather remarkable discovery: Tiny holes that burrowing Hermit crabs had dug into the ground effectively became oil-drilling holes. When the divers placed pressure on the ground near the holes, oil came oozing up.

“It’s [like] Jed Clampett‘s oil,” P.J. Hahn, the Plaquemines Parish Coastal Zone Director, told Fox8. “All we need is the theme song to ‘The Beverly Hillbillies.’ “

Relax, guys! It’s only residual oil. And it’s all properly accounted for. And it’s currently being degraded naturally. So, before you know it, it’ll all be gone.

Even the people who make their living off the seafood-rich waters of Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish have a hard time swallowing the government’s assurances that fish harvested in the shallow, muddy waters just offshore must be safe to eat because they don’t smell too bad.

Fresh splotches of chocolate-colored crude, probably globules broken apart by toxic chemical dispersants sprayed by BP with government approval, still wash up almost daily on protective boom and in marshes in reopened fishing grounds east of the Mississippi River.

When shrimp season opens in a couple of weeks and fisherman Rusty Graybill drags his nets across the mucky bottom, he worries that he’ll also collect traces of oil and dispersants — and that even if his catch doesn’t smell, buyers and consumers will turn up their noses.

“If I put fish in a barrel of water and poured oil and Dove detergent over that, and mixed it up, would you eat that fish?” asked Graybill, a 28-year-old commercial oyster, blue crab and shrimp angler who grew up fishing the marshes of St. Bernard. “I wouldn’t feed it to you or my family. I’m afraid someone’s going to get sick.”

Louisiana wildlife regulators on Friday reopened state-controlled waters east of the Mississippi to harvesting of shrimp and “fin fish” such as redfish, mullet and trout. Smell tests on dozens of specimens from the area revealed barely traceable amounts of toxins, the federal Food and Drug Administration said.

The tests were done not by chemical analysis, but by scientists trained to detect the smell of oil and dispersant.

I cannot imagine that anything else I read this month can possibly top this.

And here’s the reason why the FDA has decided to go with smell tests:

Chemical tests on fish for oil-related compounds are routine, but no such test exists for detecting levels of dispersant, said Meghan Scott, FDA spokeswoman. Federal scientists are developing one, she said. It wasn’t clear when one would be ready, though.

You follow the logic, right? If we don’t have a reliable chemical test for dispersants now, why wait till we do have one before declaring that fishing should resume? And once we’re cutting corners in such cavalier fashion, why bother with the chemical tests for oil-related compounds that we do actually have? If you can’t see it, and even trained scientists can’t smell it, how can it possibly do you any harm?

(If someone eats any of the seafood, and thinks they’re sick, perhaps the FDA can, as a public service, lay on scientists who can smell whatever is necessary to determine that it wasn’t the seafood?)

And, you know, there’s really no reason to worry. FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg (we’re working hard to confirm what kind of doctor she is, and whether she possibly has a doctorate in smelling) is on the job, and knows “we have to remain vigilant.”

On June 10, a group of technology-focused business leaders — including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, and the current or former chief executives of General Electric, DuPont, Lockheed Martin, and Xerox — issued a mayday manifesto urging a massive public-private effort to accelerate research into clean-energy innovations. Without such a commitment, they warned, the United States will remain vulnerable to energy price shocks; continue to “enrich hostile regimes” that supply much of the United States’ oil; and cede to other nations dominance of “vast new markets for clean-energy technologies.” At precisely the moment these executives were scheduled to unveil their American Energy Innovation Council report, the Senate was to begin debating a resolution from Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global climate change.

Murkowski’s proposal would have blocked the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions to fight global warming. It lost by four votes (47 to 53). But every single Republican (and six Democrats, namely Bayh, Rockefeller, Pryor, Landrieu, Lincoln and Ben Nelson) voted for the proposal. (How could anyone in the party of obstructionism fail to support a proposal to obstruct something? Especially something that’s urgently necessary.)

Yes, the Murkowski proposal lost, but as Ron Brownstein points out:

… the substantial support that Murkowski’s proposal attracted highlights the political obstacles looming in front of any policy that aims to seriously advance alternatives to the carbon-intensive fossil fuels that now dominate the United States’ energy mix. Her resolution collided with the Innovation Council report like a Hummer rear-ending a hybrid.

The Innovation Council has made a passionate plea for action on a new energy policy, pointing out that the stakes are no less than the future of the American economy, of American competitiveness in the global economy:

The council frames the need for a new energy direction as being as much of an economic imperative as an environmental one. It calls for a national energy strategy centered on a $16 billion annual federal investment in energy research — as much, the group pointedly notes, as the United States spends on imported oil every 16 days.

Equally important, the group urges that government catalyze the development of energy alternatives by sending “a strong market signal” through such mechanisms as mandates on utilities to produce more renewable energy or “a price or a cap” on carbon emissions. Such a cap is precisely what the Senate resolution sought to block. But the business leaders said that it is one of the policies that could “create a large, sustained market for new energy technology.”

One of the council’s key insights was to recognize that expanded energy research and limits on carbon (or other mandates to promote renewable power) are not alternative but complementary policies: One increases the supply of new energy sources; the other increases demand for them. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation echoed this conclusion in a report warning that the United States is already faltering in the race for new markets. With the world readying to spend $600 billion annually on clean-energy technology by 2020, the group noted, the United States is now running a trade deficit in these products and facing “declining export market shares” virtually everywhere.

Other nations are seizing these opportunities faster. In China, stiff mandates to deploy renewable sources domestically are nurturing local companies capable of capturing international markets. It’s revealing that even as venerable an American firm as California-based Applied Materials, which produces the sophisticated machinery used to manufacture solar panels, opened a research center last fall in Xian, China. “If the U.S. becomes a bigger market for us, definitely we’d have to readjust our strategy,” general manager Gang Zou recently told visiting journalists. “But today, our customer market is in Asia.”

Yes, there are six Democrats who are aligned with Republicans in obstructing any progress on a new energy policy. But, ultimately, a new energy policy is currently outside the realm of political possibility because of the united opposition of Senate Republicans. Every single Republican stands staunchly opposed to any action. Including such alleged moderates as Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Scott Brown.

The Republican Party’s position is crystal clear. Here’s what they are singing to one clear harp in divers tones:

Fuck the US economy! Fuck US competitiveness in global markets! All we care about is obstructing every single thing that Democrats propose. It doesn’t matter if a proposal makes perfect sense. It doesn’t matter if it proposes action that’s urgently necessary. It doesn’t matter if opposing the proposal will screw us for generations. We’re simply going to obstruct it. Because we see that as the only way that we can possibly get back in power. Doesn’t matter how slim the prospect of getting back in power actually is. It’s the only way we see, so that’s that. And nothing is more important than getting back in power. Because then we can go back to totally buggering up the economy all over again. The economy, and everything else in sight.

That estimate quickly attained “the most reliable estimate” status, and has since been trotted out by everyone, both media and bloggers. Except that, for some reason, almost everyone prefers to go with the 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day range that the Flow Rate Technical Group itself pushed, even though its own upper-end estimate is 25,000 barrels a day.

The Flow Rate Technical Group estimate displaced other estimates produced by scientists.

On April 30, the WSJ reported (subscription required) that “Ian MacDonald, professor of oceanography at Florida State University who specializes in tracking ocean oil seeps from satellite imagery” had concluded the “oil spill could be leaking at a rate of 25,000 barrels a day, five times the government’s current estimate”. Ian MacDonald is also certified by the NYT as “an expert in the analysis of oil slicks”.
[...]
Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

But here’s the funny thing about the estimate that walks on water. Over to Ira Leifer of the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara, a member of the Flow Rate Technical Group; he’s speaking just after the panel’s official estimate was released:

The Flow Rate Technical Group, to date, has only about seven minutes of video showing a lot of variability from very low to very high flows, and is being asked to extrapolate seven minutes of BP low-quality video to three weeks. I am very uncomfortable taking a BP-selected time segment and concluding that it is representative of the emission rate over the entire time period.

Somehow those salient facts never made it into U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt‘s official announcement of the estimates. Nor have they received any real attention in the media.

That’s funny, right? Maybe even funnier. But certainly not funniest.

Because the funniest thing is that live streaming video feeds of the spill became publicly available several days before the Flow Rate Technical Group released its estimates.

Live video of the spill is hosted by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida and BP.

If the Flow Rate Technical Group had any self-respect, or commitment to scientific accuracy, it would have gone back and done a more careful analysis based on the live streaming video. The fact that it didn’t tells us all we need to know about the independence and reliability of its analysis.

This is obviously a very, very significant environmental disaster and I think with the numbers I’ve given you, you can do the math.

That’s what she thinks. What I think is that she couldn’t do the math, and wants someone to help her.

For example, here are her numbers, refracted through the prism of Reuters:

On May 17, there were at least 130,000 barrels of oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, and a similar amount had been skimmed off the surface or evaporated, according to a panel of government scientists known as the Flow Rate Technical Group.

The findings, made public by U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt, confirm that more oil has been spilled from BP’s leaking well than the estimated 257,000 barrels that fouled Alaska’s Prince William Sound by the grounding of the Exxon Valdez tanker.

If the panel’s calculations are accurate, a total of at least 260,000 barrels of oil had spilled into the ocean by May 17.

The high-end estimate of oil on the water that day was 270,000 barrels, with a similar amount contained or evaporated, the panel found.
[...]
The team’s best estimate for the amount of oil pouring from the well is 12,000-19,000 barrels per day, though one of three measurement methods the team used returned a high-end rate of 25,000 barrels per day, McNutt said.

Assuming the well has flowed 12,000 barrels (504,000 gallons/1.9 million liters) a day since April 20 — the day the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded — the total amount of oil released by the well is 444,000 barrels (18.65 million gallons/70.59 million liters), nearly twice the amount from Exxon Valdez.

So let’s accept her invitation, and do some math.

The expert panel’s estimates of the amount of oil gushing from the well range from 12,000 barrels per day to 25,000 barrels per day.

The estimate of 260,000 barrels having spilled into the ocean by May 17 corresponds to the low-end estimate of 12,000 barrels a day. The estimate of 540,000 barrels having spilled into the ocean by May 17 corresponds to the high-end estimate of 25,000 barrels a day.

Deepwater Horizon went kaboom on April 20. Even if you exclude that day, and also leave out May 17, oil gushed from the spill for 26 days. According to both me and Bill Gates (who I summoned up in Turkish Excel), 12,000 barrels a day for 26 days makes 312,000 barrels, not 260,000. (Or if you’re a high-end kind of person, 25,000 barrels a day for 26 days makes 650,000 barrels, not 540,000.)

Here’s my hypothesis. Just the other day I wished for the oil to magically disappear. Now some of it has.

It’s only the Flow Rate Technical Group’s math that is inscrutable, by the way. Nothing wrong with Reuter‘s 444,000 barrels computation. That’s 12,000 barrels a day for the 37 days from April 20 through May 26 (or possibly April 21 through May 27). (Of course, then they had to spoil it all by telling us that 444,000 is almost double of 257,000.)

*** Update, 10:34 a.m. ***

In my hurry to publish the post, I forgot to mention that the expert panel seems to have totally ignored the huge underwater plumes. They are only talking about what’s on the surface now, and what’s been skimmed off the surface or evaporated. (I guess that makes it an admittedly superficial estimate?)

On Sunday, BP managed to insert a narrow tube into the broken pipe that is spewing oil into the Gulf. So now part of that oil is being captured:

After more than three weeks of efforts to stop a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers achieved some success on Sunday when they used a milelong pipe to capture some of the oil and divert it to a drill ship on the surface some 5,000 feet above the wellhead, company officials said.

After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.

“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.”

Mr. Wells said he could not yet say how much oil had been captured or what percentage of the oil leaking from a 21-inch riser pipe was now flowing into the 4-inch-wide insertion tube.

What is delightfully absent from this NYT account is any mention of the quantities of oil involved. Is the amount now being captured anywhere near a significant percentage of the total quantity that has been gushing into the Gulf? This success we are being invited to celebrate with BP, is it a huge success or so small as to hardly make any difference to the spill rate?

BP would very much prefer that nobody is in a position to make any kind of informed assessment.

The NYT‘s silence on the subject of quantities and percentages can actually be viewed as a form of journalistic integrity.

BP is shamelessly putting out a 20% number that is apparently based on the thoroughly discredited official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day as the spill rate. Evidently, it doesn’t matter a bit how thoroughly it has been discredited. As long as it hasn’t been replaced by an updated official estimate, BP feels ethically justified in continuing to use it. (Which, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of the real world, tells you when you may expect to see BP conceding that the spill rate is significantly higher than 5,000 barrels a day.)

And it’s not just BP. Some news outlets are perfectly happy to repeat that number without any ifs or buts.

Here’s AOL News:

BP America President Lamar McKay told the committee that his company’s engineers are collecting roughly 20 percent of the oil and gas leaking from a pipe at the bottom of the gulf, using a mile-long pipe connected to a tube that is siphoning the oil to a tanker on the surface.

(I don’t know about you, but I’m very impressed by how many official spokesmen BP has, and how many top-brass executives. It’s almost like every story I read quotes a different spokesman and/or a different member of the top brass from any that has come before.)

And here’s the U.K. Times:

BP said that it was now capturing about a fifth of the oil gushing from the ruptured well after a suction tube had been inserted into the well riser pipe on the ocean floor.

It has, though, occurred to a few news outlets that they are allowed to report BP’s numbers, and then put a question mark around it.

The Wall Street Journal offers us:

BP said Monday it hopes to double to 2,000 barrels a day the amount of oil it is siphoning through a pipe inserted into the leaking well during the weekend. BP’s estimate is that the well is leaking at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day, but a number of scientists have questioned that figure, saying that the flow could be as much as five times that rate.

That only rates a B-, though. In view of the fact that scientists have said the flow could be almost seventeen times that rate. (That’s based on NPR/Steven Wereley‘s 70,000 barrels a day plus or minus 20%.)

The Christian Science Monitor does a lot better:

The siphon is collecting 1,000 barrels of oil a day – roughly one-fifth of the oil leaking from the wellhead, by BP’s estimates, though some scientists suggest the amount of oil leaking in the Gulf oil spill could be much greater.

(That embedded link takes you to a story which says: “National Public Radio cited estimates from three independent scientists who say at least 50,000 barrels of oil a day are flowing into the Gulf waters.”)

But for every The Christian Science Monitor, there’s a The Wall Street Journal. And a Times (UK) or AOL News. Which makes it well worth BP’s while to keep everyone in the dark for as long as possible.

Trickle-not-a-torrent seems to have been BP’s strategy from the very outset. To see how low a number they could get away with, they didn’t really put out an estimate of their own to begin with. On April 24, the Coast Guard — which is internationally renowned for their expertise in estimating the size of deep sea oil spills — rushed in where BP feared to tread, estimating that the spill rate was a mere 1,000 barrels a day: “Guard officials on Saturday estimated that as much as 1,000 barrels of oil is escaping each day from the well head on the ocean floor“.

To the collective leadership of BP, that must have come as manna from heaven. 1115′s deep undercover fly-on-the-wall army reports that the collective leadership spontaneously went down on bended knee, and sent up a fervent “Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-am!”

BP officials eagerly embraced the Coast Guard estimate. Especially since it was phrased as “as much as 1,000 barrels of oil is escaping each day”. To have 1,000 barrels a day presented as the worst case scenario must have exceeded their wildest dreams. The AP updated its story to read: “Coast guard and company officials estimate that as much as 1,000 barrels of oil is leaking each day after studying information from remotely operated vehicles and the size of the oil slick surrounding the blast site.”

Clearly, BP wasn’t going to revise the estimate upwards unless they were forced to do so, say by a credible source producing a much higher estimate. No doubt to BP’s chagrin, the 1,000 barrels per day estimate didn’t hold up for very long. The NOAA upped the ante on April 28:

In a hastily called news conference, Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard said a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had concluded that oil is leaking at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, not 1,000 as had been estimated.

At this point, the media pretty much stopped reporting the continuing evolution of the spill rate estimate (till NPR came along last Friday, and reignited the debate — giving BP serious corporate conniptions in the process — by presenting 70,000 barrels a day as a scientific estimate to be taken seriously; but we’ll come to that by-and-by). However, the estimate did indeed continue to evolve.

The 5,000 barrels a day estimate may have come from the NOAA, but it was evidently just a back-of-the-envelope calculation (and an amateur one, at that):

The figure of 5,000 barrels a day was hastily produced by government scientists in Seattle. It appears to have been calculated using a method that is specifically not recommended for major oil spills.

On April 30, the WSJ reported (subscription required) that “Ian MacDonald, professor of oceanography at Florida State University who specializes in tracking ocean oil seeps from satellite imagery” had concluded the “oil spill could be leaking at a rate of 25,000 barrels a day, five times the government’s current estimate”. Ian MacDonald is also certified by the NYT as “an expert in the analysis of oil slicks”.

A BP statement on May 4 (made initially in a briefing to members of Congress) about the worst case scenario, which should have raised all kinds of alarm bells about the true flow rate, somehow went hugely underreported:

An executive with BP Plc on Wednesday said a ruptured well in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico could gush at 60,000 barrels per day if all the equipment on the sea floor restricting the current flow were removed.

“If the existing BOP (blow-out preventer) and all the equipment were removed, it could get up to that rate,” Doug Suttles, a BP executive said when asked at a media briefing about the company’s worst-case scenario analysis.

At this point, the official estimate embraced jointly by the government and BP was still 5,000 barrels a day. Apparently, almost no one in the press stopped to consider how much of an impact “the equipment on the sea floor restricting the current flow” (by accidentally getting in the way) could realistically have on the flow rate. The question was pretty simple: “Could the blown blow-out-preventer and other unspecified sea-floor equipment really cut the rate of flow by more than 90%?” One suspects that if the question had been asked to experts at the time, the answers would have been pretty straightforward.

Enter NPR with its game-changing report on May 14:

The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR.

At NPR‘s request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.

BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

BP, of course, strenuously disputes these numbers.

“We’ve said all along that there’s no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately,” said Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman.

Yes, indeed. Said all along. And hoped. And prayed.

A more formal statement came from Bob Dudley, BP managing director for the Americas and Asia:

“Well that’s not what our experts, multiple experts, not only from BP, and the industry say,” said Bob Dudley, BP managing director for the Americas and Asia. “This crude is what’s called a light-sweet crude. It has lots of gas and when it comes out, it expands very rapidly, a little bit like bubbles in a soda pop. So it’s very difficult to look at it and say that the volume will be much higher. We certainly don’t see that at the surface.”

(At the time of going to press, we are still trying to confirm rumors that, in his college days, Dudley was known far and wide as Bullshit Bob.)

The key to BP’s current obfuscation strategy seems to be that last sentence. They want to focus only on what can be seen at the surface. Here’s an official spokesperson pronouncement on the subject:

BP spokeswoman Rebecca Bernhard said the company is standing by the 5,000-barrel figure. “We look at the fact that it’s coming out of the riser (pipe) in several ways. We look at it from satellite imagery, overflight observations and on-the-water observations.”

She said none of the methods were exact. “We said that from the beginning.”

They look at it in several ways. All of which involve looking at the surface, preferably from a long way off.

This may be part of the reason why BP thinks attention should be focused just on the surface:

Rising through 5000 feet of water, the oil is going through a process…call[ed] Fractioning. Literally the tremendous pressure and temperature [cause]…the oil and Natural Gas [to] change on their way up. The very light, easy-to-evaporate parts are all that is rising to the surface. The heavy oil isn’t even getting to the top…the chemicals added at the well head to disburse the oil, speed this process up. Because of this fractioning, what you see from the air on the surface of the water represents maybe just 20% of the volume of the various types of oil in that area.

The NYT report about huge underwater oil plumes seems to confirm this hypothesis:

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.
[...]
The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Let’s give the last word to BP. This is probably a fitting testimonial to their entire approach to obfuscating and misrepresenting the spill rate:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point.”

No, not as long as we can Minimize, Obfuscate, Misrepresent. Yes, it’s the “Hi Mom!” strategy.