What? Even Time Magazine nows says greenies and the media exaggerated the Gulf oil spill?

Astounding stuff. But no more than what I and other people have been saying for weeks now. Oil gushing into the ocean is not a good thing. I don't like to see birds and animals covered in oil and doomed to die a horrible death. But the fact remains that very few have actually been killed by the oil spill. Certainly only a tiny percent compared to those killed after the wreck of the Exxon Valdez all those years ago. In terms of the Earth itself the Gulf spill is a minor and temporary irritant that will disappear, in Earth time, very quickly. But the actions of most environmental groups, as well as large sections of the media, need to be examined and they need to be held to account for the lies, misinformation and exaggeration they have engaged in. Andrew Bolt: Within a month of the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I warned that the damage done by spills tended to be wildly exaggerated, and that this one seemed to be no exception.  Two months later, Time now agrees: President Obama has called the BP oil spill “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the “catastrophe along the Gulf Coast,” while CBS, Fox and MSNBC are all slapping “Disaster in the Gulf” chyrons on their spill-related news… The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it “the leak” — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype. Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it’s no leak; it’s the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It’s also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it’s important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana. Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we’ve heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region’s fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. Ditto Yahoo News: Where is all the oil? Nearly two weeks after BP finally capped the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, the oil slicks that once spread across thousands of miles of the Gulf of Mexico have largely disappeared. Nor has much oil washed up on the sandy beaches and marshes along the Louisiana coast. And the small cleanup army in the Gulf has only managed to skim up a tiny fraction of the millions of gallons of oil spilled in the 100 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig went up in flames. So where did the oil go? “Some of the oil evaporates,” explains Edward Bouwer, professor of environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins University. That’s especially true for the more toxic components of oil, which tend to be very volatile, he says. Jeffrey W. Short, a scientist with the environmental group Oceana, told the New York Times that as much as 40 percent of the oil might have evaporated when it reached the surface… Perhaps the most important cause of the oil’s disappearance, some researchers suspect, is that the oil has been devoured by microbes. Ditto the Telegraph: One hundred days on from the original blow-out, the question is beginning to be asked: might the scale of the potential environmental damage have been exaggerated?… For many marine scientists, the answer seems to be yes – and now that some of the initial fury has died down, they are putting their heads above the parapet to say so. Dr Simon Boxall, an expert in marine pollution and dispersion at the National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton, explains that there was panic at the estimated size of the spill, between 140 and 200 million gallons – the equivalent of about four supertankers of oil… The combination of the fact that it was light, or “sweet”, crude oil and that the disaster happened in warm waters so far out to sea always meant, he says, that it would be dispersed very quickly. The Gulf, which has a lot of natural seepage into its waters, has, he explains, developed microbes that break down the oil. “...When (BP’s) Tony Hayward said it was a drop in the ocean, it might have been the wrong thing to say at the time, but it was the truth. This spill is the equivalent of less than a drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. For all but a tiny bit of the Gulf, it will be back to normal within a year...” A quick look at the statistics produced by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other bodies seems to bear out his thesis. Of the more than 2,100 miles of threatened coastline, one quarter has been touched by oil and much less has been heavily soiled. As for wildlife, the total number of animals found dead and covered in oil for the whole period is 1,296 birds, 17 sea turtles and three dolphins – that is less than one per cent of the birds killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989… Professor Geoffrey Maitland, an energy engineer at Imperial College, agrees that the Gulf is well adapted to oil spills because tens of millions of gallons naturally seep into it every year. “Many people do not realise that oil is a naturally occurring substance and nature has a way of dealing with it,” he says. It doesn’t need to be scooped off, burnt or dispersed with chemicals. “In fact, it is often best to let it just evaporate and biodegrade naturally. “With all the clean-up work, natural evaporation and biodegradation, I reckon 50 per cent of the oil has already gone and the rest will follow shortly. There is talk of a lot of oil below the surface, but I am a bit sceptical, as oil is less dense than water and so it floats.” Ditto, to a lesser extent, Vanity Fair and The Washington Post: Scientists and government officials are currently on the hunt for much of the oil that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, reports The Washington Post. While experts remain positive that the oil is still in the Gulf—"That stuff’s somewhere,” a researcher hypothesized to the paper—most of it is AWOL. According to the Post, “up to 4 million barrels (167 million gallons), the vast majority of the spill, remains unaccounted for in government statistics. Some of it has, most likely, been cleaned up by nature. Other amounts may be gone from the water, but they could have taken on a second life as contaminants in the air, or in landfills around the Gulf Coast.” Some believe that a portion of the oil was consumed by ocean-dwelling microbes. The tiny organisms, like humans, enjoy oil on their seafood. But the microbes can only do so much: scientists are also reporting that masses of oil have migrated miles away from the spill… Still, of the 5.2 million barrels that likely leaked, we’ve only destroyed 1.2 million barrels worth of the stuff. The country will continue to restlessly search the land and seas for oil, which, really, is exactly what we’ve always done anyway.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous