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[guardian.co.uk > Environment > BP oil spill]
BP oil spill: US scientist retracts assurances over success of cleanup
NOAA's Bill Lehr says three-quarters of the oil that gushed from the Deepwater Horizon rig is still in the Gulf environment while scientists identify 22-mile plume in ocean depths
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 August 2010 21.34 BST
Article history
{Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the NOAA, appeared before Congress to repudiate an earlier report he wrote, which suggested the majority of the oil had been captured. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images}
White House claims that the worst of the BP oil spill was over were undermined yesterday when a senior government scientist said three-quarters of the oil was still in the Gulf environment and a research study detected a 22-mile plume of oil in the ocean depths.
Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) departed from an official report from two weeks ago which suggested the majority of the oil had been captured or broken down.
"I would say most of that is still in the environment," Lehr, the lead author of the report, told the house energy and commerce committee.
The growing evidence that the White House painted an overly optimistic picture when officials claimed two weeks ago the remaining oil in the Gulf was rapidly breaking down fuelled a sense of outrage in the scientific community that government agencies are hiding data and spinning the science of the oil spill. No new oil has entered the Gulf since 15 July, but officials said yesterday the well is unlikely to be sealed for good until mid-September.
Under questioning from the committee chair, Ed Markey, Lehr revised down the amount of oil that went into the Gulf to 4.1m barrels, from an earlier estimate of 4.9m, noting that 800,000 barrels were siphoned off directly from the well.
By some estimates, as much as 90% of the oil was unaccounted for. Lehr said 6% was burned and 4% was skimmed but he could not be confident of numbers for the amount collected from beaches.
The NOAA has been under fire from independent scientists and Congress for its conclusions and for failing to explain how it arrived at its calculations. The agency has failed to respond to repeated requests from Congress to reveal its raw data and methodology.
Markey told Lehr the agency report had given the public a false sense of confidence. "You shouldn't have released it until you knew it was right," he said.
"People want to believe that everything is OK and I think this report and the way it is being discussed is giving many people a false sense of confidence regarding the state of the Gulf," Markey said.
Lehr said the agency would release all supporting data in two months.
But the impression of stonewalling has damaged the credibility of the Obama administration in the scientific community.
"That report was not science," said Ian MacDonald, an ocean scientist at Florida State University who has studied the Gulf for 30 years. He accused the White House of making "sweeping and largely unsupported" claims that three-quarters of the oil in the Gulf was gone.
"I believe this report is misleading," he said. "The imprint will be there in the Gulf of Mexico for the rest of my life. It is not gone and it will not go away quickly."
MacDonald went on to warn of a tipping point from which the wildlife and ecosystem in the Gulf could not recover.
Meanwhile, in the Science article, experts from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute mapped a 22-mile plume of oil droplets from BP's well, providing the strongest evidence so far over the fate of the crude.
"These results indicate that efforts to book-keep where the oil went must now include this plume," said Christopher Reddy, one of the Woods Hole team. The report also said the plume was very slow to break down by natural forces.
"Many people speculated that subsurface oil droplets were being easily degraded," said Richard Camilli, the lead author of the paper. "Well, we didn't find that. We found it was still there."
The scientists zig-zagged for hundreds of miles across the ocean to track the plume, taking 57,000 readings of its chemical signature during a 10-day research voyage at the end of June.
The Woods Hole effort reinforces earlier reports from research voyages by scientists from the University of Georgia and Texas A&M University who detected the presence of deepwater plumes of oil.
This week, University of South Florida scientists reported oil in amounts that were toxic to critical plankton on the ocean floor far east of the spill. Those findings have not been reviewed by other scientists.
According to the Woods Hole findings, the deepwater plume is 22 miles long – or about the length of Manhattan – 1.2 miles wide and 650ft high. It noted that the plume was not made up of pure oil but included toxic oil compounds including benzene and xylene.
Yesterday's testimony and the Science article put the White House and government scientific agencies increasingly out of step with independent scientists.
It also raises new questions about the administration's decision to use nearly 2m gallons of a chemical dispersant Corexit to break up the oil.
The NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco, herself an ocean scientist, had played down the first reports of oil in the ocean depths. MacDonald and other scientists have accused NOAA of discouraging them from making public their findings about lingering oil in the deepwater.
A NOAA spokeswoman said last night that the Woods Hole voyage was in late June, while the broken BP well was still spewing oil. "It's not necessarily an indication of where we are today" she said.
A NOAA team reported two weeks ago that just over a quarter of oil remained in the Gulf as a light sheen on the surface or degraded tar balls washing ashore.
[guardian.co.uk > Environment > Climate change]
Rising temperatures reducing ability of plants to absorb carbon, study warns
Research shows warming over past decade caused droughts that reduced number of plants available to soak up carbon dioxide
Alok Jha
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 August 2010 19.19 BST
Article history
{Droughts have wiped out plants that would have absorbed the carbon equivalent of all the man-made greenhouse gas emissions from the UK every year. Photograph: Patrick Pleul/EPA}
Rising temperatures in the past decade have reduced the ability of the world's plants to soak up carbon from the atmosphere, scientists said today.
Large-scale droughts have wiped out plants that would have otherwise absorbed an amount of carbon equivalent to Britain's annual man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists measure the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by plants and turned into biomass as a quantity known as the net primary production. NPP increased from 1982 to 1999 as temperatures rose and there was more solar radiation.
But the period from 2000 to 2009 reverses that trend – surprising some scientists. Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana estimate that there has been a global reduction in NPP of 0.55 gigatonnes (Gt). In comparison, the UK's contribution to annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions was 0.56Gt in 2007, while global aviation industry made up around 0.88Gt (3%) of the world total of 29.3Gt that year, according to UN data.
The researchers used data from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (Modis) on board Nasa's Terra satellite, combined with global climate data to measure the change in global NPP over the past decade.
"The past decade has been the warmest since instrumental measurements began, which could imply continued increases in NPP," wrote Zhao and Running in the journal Science.
But instead of helping plants grow, these rising temperatures instead caused droughts and water stresses, particularly in the southern hemisphere and in rainforests, which contain most of the world's plant biomass. The growth there has been curtailed by lack of water and increased respiration, which returns carbon to the atmosphere. These problems counteracted any increases in NPP seen at the high latitudes and elevations in the northern hemisphere.
Reduced plant matter not only reduces the world's natural ability to manage carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but could also lead to problems with growing more crops to feed rising populations or make sustainable biofuels.
"Under a changing climate, severe regional droughts have become more frequent, a trend expected to continue for the foreseeable future," said the researchers. "The warming-associated heat and drought not only decrease NPP, but also may trigger many more ecosystem disturbances, releasing carbon to the atmosphere. Reduced NPP potentially threatens global food security and future biofuel production and weakens the terrestrial carbon sink."
The researchers conclude that further monitoring will be needed to confirm whether the decrease in NPP they have observed in the past decade is an anomaly or whether it signals a turning point to a future decline in the world's ability to sequester carbon dioxide.
• This article was amended on 20 August 2010. The original referred to carbon dioxide as CO2 and CO². This has been corrected.
[guardian.co.uk > Environment > BP oil spill]
BP oil spill: US scientist retracts assurances over success of cleanup
NOAA's Bill Lehr says three-quarters of the oil that gushed from the Deepwater Horizon rig is still in the Gulf environment while scientists identify 22-mile plume in ocean depths
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 August 2010 21.34 BST
Article history
{Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the NOAA, appeared before Congress to repudiate an earlier report he wrote, which suggested the majority of the oil had been captured. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images}
White House claims that the worst of the BP oil spill was over were undermined yesterday when a senior government scientist said three-quarters of the oil was still in the Gulf environment and a research study detected a 22-mile plume of oil in the ocean depths.
Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) departed from an official report from two weeks ago which suggested the majority of the oil had been captured or broken down.
"I would say most of that is still in the environment," Lehr, the lead author of the report, told the house energy and commerce committee.
The growing evidence that the White House painted an overly optimistic picture when officials claimed two weeks ago the remaining oil in the Gulf was rapidly breaking down fuelled a sense of outrage in the scientific community that government agencies are hiding data and spinning the science of the oil spill. No new oil has entered the Gulf since 15 July, but officials said yesterday the well is unlikely to be sealed for good until mid-September.
Under questioning from the committee chair, Ed Markey, Lehr revised down the amount of oil that went into the Gulf to 4.1m barrels, from an earlier estimate of 4.9m, noting that 800,000 barrels were siphoned off directly from the well.
By some estimates, as much as 90% of the oil was unaccounted for. Lehr said 6% was burned and 4% was skimmed but he could not be confident of numbers for the amount collected from beaches.
The NOAA has been under fire from independent scientists and Congress for its conclusions and for failing to explain how it arrived at its calculations. The agency has failed to respond to repeated requests from Congress to reveal its raw data and methodology.
Markey told Lehr the agency report had given the public a false sense of confidence. "You shouldn't have released it until you knew it was right," he said.
"People want to believe that everything is OK and I think this report and the way it is being discussed is giving many people a false sense of confidence regarding the state of the Gulf," Markey said.
Lehr said the agency would release all supporting data in two months.
But the impression of stonewalling has damaged the credibility of the Obama administration in the scientific community.
"That report was not science," said Ian MacDonald, an ocean scientist at Florida State University who has studied the Gulf for 30 years. He accused the White House of making "sweeping and largely unsupported" claims that three-quarters of the oil in the Gulf was gone.
"I believe this report is misleading," he said. "The imprint will be there in the Gulf of Mexico for the rest of my life. It is not gone and it will not go away quickly."
MacDonald went on to warn of a tipping point from which the wildlife and ecosystem in the Gulf could not recover.
Meanwhile, in the Science article, experts from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute mapped a 22-mile plume of oil droplets from BP's well, providing the strongest evidence so far over the fate of the crude.
"These results indicate that efforts to book-keep where the oil went must now include this plume," said Christopher Reddy, one of the Woods Hole team. The report also said the plume was very slow to break down by natural forces.
"Many people speculated that subsurface oil droplets were being easily degraded," said Richard Camilli, the lead author of the paper. "Well, we didn't find that. We found it was still there."
The scientists zig-zagged for hundreds of miles across the ocean to track the plume, taking 57,000 readings of its chemical signature during a 10-day research voyage at the end of June.
The Woods Hole effort reinforces earlier reports from research voyages by scientists from the University of Georgia and Texas A&M University who detected the presence of deepwater plumes of oil.
This week, University of South Florida scientists reported oil in amounts that were toxic to critical plankton on the ocean floor far east of the spill. Those findings have not been reviewed by other scientists.
According to the Woods Hole findings, the deepwater plume is 22 miles long – or about the length of Manhattan – 1.2 miles wide and 650ft high. It noted that the plume was not made up of pure oil but included toxic oil compounds including benzene and xylene.
Yesterday's testimony and the Science article put the White House and government scientific agencies increasingly out of step with independent scientists.
It also raises new questions about the administration's decision to use nearly 2m gallons of a chemical dispersant Corexit to break up the oil.
The NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco, herself an ocean scientist, had played down the first reports of oil in the ocean depths. MacDonald and other scientists have accused NOAA of discouraging them from making public their findings about lingering oil in the deepwater.
A NOAA spokeswoman said last night that the Woods Hole voyage was in late June, while the broken BP well was still spewing oil. "It's not necessarily an indication of where we are today" she said.
A NOAA team reported two weeks ago that just over a quarter of oil remained in the Gulf as a light sheen on the surface or degraded tar balls washing ashore.
[guardian.co.uk > Environment > Climate change]
Rising temperatures reducing ability of plants to absorb carbon, study warns
Research shows warming over past decade caused droughts that reduced number of plants available to soak up carbon dioxide
Alok Jha
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 August 2010 19.19 BST
Article history
{Droughts have wiped out plants that would have absorbed the carbon equivalent of all the man-made greenhouse gas emissions from the UK every year. Photograph: Patrick Pleul/EPA}
Rising temperatures in the past decade have reduced the ability of the world's plants to soak up carbon from the atmosphere, scientists said today.
Large-scale droughts have wiped out plants that would have otherwise absorbed an amount of carbon equivalent to Britain's annual man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists measure the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by plants and turned into biomass as a quantity known as the net primary production. NPP increased from 1982 to 1999 as temperatures rose and there was more solar radiation.
But the period from 2000 to 2009 reverses that trend – surprising some scientists. Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana estimate that there has been a global reduction in NPP of 0.55 gigatonnes (Gt). In comparison, the UK's contribution to annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions was 0.56Gt in 2007, while global aviation industry made up around 0.88Gt (3%) of the world total of 29.3Gt that year, according to UN data.
The researchers used data from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (Modis) on board Nasa's Terra satellite, combined with global climate data to measure the change in global NPP over the past decade.
"The past decade has been the warmest since instrumental measurements began, which could imply continued increases in NPP," wrote Zhao and Running in the journal Science.
But instead of helping plants grow, these rising temperatures instead caused droughts and water stresses, particularly in the southern hemisphere and in rainforests, which contain most of the world's plant biomass. The growth there has been curtailed by lack of water and increased respiration, which returns carbon to the atmosphere. These problems counteracted any increases in NPP seen at the high latitudes and elevations in the northern hemisphere.
Reduced plant matter not only reduces the world's natural ability to manage carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but could also lead to problems with growing more crops to feed rising populations or make sustainable biofuels.
"Under a changing climate, severe regional droughts have become more frequent, a trend expected to continue for the foreseeable future," said the researchers. "The warming-associated heat and drought not only decrease NPP, but also may trigger many more ecosystem disturbances, releasing carbon to the atmosphere. Reduced NPP potentially threatens global food security and future biofuel production and weakens the terrestrial carbon sink."
The researchers conclude that further monitoring will be needed to confirm whether the decrease in NPP they have observed in the past decade is an anomaly or whether it signals a turning point to a future decline in the world's ability to sequester carbon dioxide.
• This article was amended on 20 August 2010. The original referred to carbon dioxide as CO2 and CO². This has been corrected.