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excepting the existential threat posed by political Islam and Barack Obama, of course
Unlike the left, I don't think everything is a crisis.
excepting the existential threat posed by political Islam and Barack Obama, of course
seems like another grab for money, since its reporting season...didnt bp made like 22b this quarter?
boom
Personally I would have gone with LEDs and dishwasher soap.
Actually, the more I think about it the more its really ing funny that Darrin of all people is trying to claim the mantle of level headedness.
How many Libraries of Congress that would be?
I think superdomes should be the new SI unit for volume.
Superdome is a massive volume -- except when compared to the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever the effects of the spill, BP's financials have recovered nicely:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/bu...2011.html?_r=1
The article notes that trial on the claims of those who allege themselves to have been harmed by the spill is scheduled to begin on February 27 in New Orleans. Should be an interesting trial.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_581779.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/201...ear_later.html
That happened, BP hasn't paid for it, the Gulf Coast is still ed,and Guld Seabed is full to toxic dispersants. aka, UCA business as usual. Private gain, public pain.
Judge: BP liable for civil penalties for oil spill
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that BP PLC and one of its minority partners in the blown-out Macondo well are liable for civil penalties under the Clean Water Act for their roles in the nation's worst offshore oil spill.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier also ruled that Deepwater Horizon rig owner Transocean Ltd. may be liable under the same law as an "operator" of the well. The judge, however, said he couldn't decide before a trial scheduled to start Feb. 27 whether Transocean meets the definition of that term.
The Justice Department argued that BP, minority partner Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Transocean are each liable for per-barrel civil penalties for oil discharged from the well.
Barbier rejected Anadarko's argument that oil discharged from Transocean's rig, not the well.
"Pressure within the earth drove hydrocarbons up the Macondo Well, through the (blowout preventer), and finally out the riser," the judge wrote. "Thus, the uncontrolled movement of oil began in the well. The riser and (blowout preventer), by contrast, were merely passive conduits through which oil flowed."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...f96f76776696f2
Well, there is something I disagree with on this (surprise surprise.)
The Blowout Preventer used was not "passive." It was an active hydraulic ram to shear and block the pipes. Wasn't this incident uncontrollable to be stopped because the blowout preventer failed?
Anadarko also won a ruling:
Anadarko Wins Court Ruling Excluding Evidence in BP Spill Trial Next Week
You're misapplying the way in which Judge Barbier used the word "passive." He's not using the word to describe the blowout preventer itself; instead, I think he's explaining that, in terms of how the oil escaped, the blowout preventer was a passive element -- that the oil simply flowed through it and the blowout preventer was not the cause of the flow.
No, that is my point. Passive elements of an object wouldn't have a hydraulic ram. A pipe is passive. The blowout preventer is an active component.
WC displays his mastery of language skills and comprehension. Bravo, WC. We should all strive to be at your level.
Great!
Your point has exactly nothing to do with the legal question the court was answering, but I'm sure it's wonderfully useful in some context.
The oil flowed passively through the blowout preventer even though the blowout prevented is potentially mechanically active when operated.
..NEW ORLEANS (AP) — After months of laboratory work, scientists say they can definitively finger oil from BP's blown-out well as the culprit for the slow death of a once brightly colored deep-sea coral community in the Gulf of Mexico that is now brown and dull.
In a study published Monday, scientists say meticulous chemical analysis of samples taken in late 2010 proves that oil from BP PLC's out-of-control Macondo well devastated corals living about 7 miles southwest of the well. The coral community is located over an area roughly the size of half a football field nearly a mile below the Gulf's surface.
The damaged corals were discovered in October 2010 by academic and government scientists, but it's taken until now for them to declare a definite link to the oil spill.
Most of the Gulf's bottom is muddy, but coral colonies that pop up every once in a while are vital oases for marine life in the chilly ocean depths. The injured and dying coral today has bare skeleton, loose tissue and is covered in heavy mucous and brown fluffy material, the paper said.
"It was like a graveyard of corals," said Erik Cordes, a biologist at Temple University who went down to the site in the Alvin research submarine.
So far, this has been the only deep-sea coral site found to be seriously damaged by the spill.
On April 20, 2010, the well blew out about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, leading to the death of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the nation's largest offshore spill. More than 200 million gallons of oil were released.
"They figured (the coral damage) was the result of the spill, now we can say definitely it was connected to the spill," said Helen White, a chemical oceanographer with Haverford College and the lead researcher.
She said pinpointing the BP well as the source of the contamination required sampling sediment on the sea floor and figuring out what was oil from natural seeps in the Gulf and what was from the Macondo well. Finally, the researchers matched the oil found on the corals with oil that came out of the BP well.
Also, the researchers concluded that the damage was caused by the spill because an underwater plume of oil was tracked passing by the site in June 2010. The paper also noted that a decade of deep-sea coral research in the Gulf had not found coral dying in this manner. The coral was do ented for the first time when researchers went looking for oil damage in 2010.
The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists said that they have gone back to the dying corals by submarine since 2010, but that they are not ready to talk about what they've seen at the site.
However, Charles Fisher, a biologist with Penn State University who's led the coral expeditions, said recovery of the damaged site would be slow.
"Things happen very slowly in the deep sea; the temperatures are low, currents are low, those animals live hundreds of years and they die slowly," he said. "It will take a while to know the final outcome of this exposure."
BP did not immediately comment on the study.
The researchers said the troubled spot consists of 54 coral colonies. The researchers were able to fully photograph and assess 43 of those colonies, and of those, 86 percent were damaged. They said 10 coral colonies showed signs of severe stress on 90 percent of the coral.
White, the lead researcher, said that this coral site was the only one found southwest of the Macondo well so far, but that others may exist. The researchers also wrote in the paper that it was too early to rule out serious damage at other coral sites that may have seemed healthy during previous examinations after the April 2010 spill.
Jerald Ault, a fish and coral reef specialist at the University of Miami who was not part of the study, said the findings were cause for concern because deep-sea corals are important habitat. He said there are many links between animals that live at the surface, such as tarpon and menhaden, and life at the bottom of the Gulf. Ecosystem problems can play out over many years, he said.
"It's kind of a tangled web of impact," he said.
..----------------------------------------------
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea...318260912.htmlTracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
"At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these," Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP's oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: "Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets."
"Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico]," she added, "They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their s s soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with s s that don't have their usual es … they look like they've been burned off by chemicals."
On April 20, 2010, BP's Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Han County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
"I've seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out," Ladner told Al Jazeera. "The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday."
While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and "their s s missing around their gills and head".
"We've fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this," he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs "with holes in their s s, s s with all the points burned off so all the es on their s s and claws are gone, misshapen s s, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they've been dead for a week".
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
"We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills."
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was "ten per cent what it normally is".
"I've never seen this," he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.
2 years later, fish sick near BP oil spill site
http://news.yahoo.com/2-years-later-...144143260.htmlBARATARIA BAY, La. (AP) — When fishermen returned to the deep reefs of the Gulf of Mexico weeks after BP's gushing oil well was capped, they started catching grouper and red snapper with large open sores and strange black streaks, lesions they said they'd never seen and promptly blamed on the spill.
Now, two years after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, killing 11 men and touching off the worst offshore spill in U.S. history, the latest research into its effects is starting to back up those early reports from the docks: The ailing fish bear hallmarks of diseases tied to petroleum and other pollutants.
Those illnesses don't pose an increased health threat to humans, scientists say, but they could be devastating to prized species and the people who make their living catching them.
There's no saying for sure what's causing the diseases in what's still a relatively small percentage of the fish, because the scientists have no baseline data on sick fish in the Gulf before the spill to form a frame of reference. The first comprehensive research may be years from publication. And the Gulf is assaulted with all kinds of contaminants every day.
Still, it's clear to fishermen and researchers alike that something's amiss.
— A recent batch of test results revealed the presence of oil in the bile extracted from fish caught in August 2011, a year after BP's broken well was capped and nearly 15 months after it first blew out on April 20, 2010.
"Bile tells you what a fish's last meal was," said Steve Murawski, a marine biologist with the University of South Florida who was chief science adviser for the National Marine Fisheries Service until November 2010 when he began working on oil spill studies for USF. "There was as late as August of last year an oil source out there that some of those animals were consuming."
Bile in red snapper, yellow-edge grouper and a few other species contained on average 125 parts per million of naphthalene, a compound found in crude oil, Murawski said. Scientists expect to find almost none of the toxin in fish captured in the open ocean.
"Those levels are indicative of polluted urban estuaries," he said.
— Last summer, a team of scientists led by USF has done what experts say is the most extensive study yet of sick fish in shallow and deep Gulf waters. Over seven cruises in July and August, the scientists caught about 4,000 fish — from Florida's Dry Tortugas to central Louisiana — using miles-long fishing lines dragged from close to shore out to depths of 600 feet. The work was funded with a federal government grant and help from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Ins ute.
I'll bet that was a of a fish fry...
Rather than take the time to keep pointing out to you why the things you say are wrong, and then you not really paying attention and saying them again, I propose the following shorthand:
Anytime you see this, you will know it is something stupid you have already said, or similar enough to something else stupid you have said that has already been concretely shown as illogical.
...mmmm naphthalene...
Rather than take the time to keep pointing out to you why the things you say are wrong, and then you not really paying attention and saying them again, I propose the following shorthand:
Anytime you see this, you will know it is something stupid you have already said, or similar enough to something else stupid you have said that has already been concretely shown as illogical.
You are morally and intellectually superior. Congrats!
Legacy Of BP Oil Spill: Eyeless Shrimp And Fish With Lesions
Shrimp with no eyes, fish with lesions, and clawless crabs.
Scientists believe that shrimp, fish, and crabs in the gulf have been deformed by the chemical released to disperse oil during the spill. Fishers in the area say that they’ve been noticing deformities on their catches since. Al Jazeera reports:
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” [Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy] Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their s s soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with s s that don’t have their usual es … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.” [...]
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...-with-lesions/
In other UCA poison-for-profit and -the-planet news, Monsanto wants to use an Agent Orange poison on US crop land, now that round-up for Monsanto's GM crops has spawned a generation of round-up resistant super weeds.
ah, that's a gently warmed over rewrite of the recent al jazeera link
Last edited by Winehole23; 04-19-2012 at 12:05 PM.
but do go ahead. were you saying something?
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