Crude, Degrading
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides this chart of where all the spilled Deepwater Horizon oil has gone:
Bradford Plumer summarizes:
About one-quarter of the oil is still bobbing on the sea surface or washed ashore. Another quarter has been dispersed into microscopic droplets, either by artificial chemicals or natural processes. And another quarter has been “dissolved.” All told, just 25 percent has been physically removed from the Gulf ecosystem. The rest is still lurking… somewhere.
It’s good to know that much of the oil has evaporated or been dispersed. The trouble is, as Kate Sheppard notes, that there are still “about nine and a half Exxon Valdez spills” out there.
Oil Spills? Don’t Worry, They Happen All the Time
Kate Sheppard shares the map below from a National Wildlife Federation report on the many oil-production incidents which occurred in recent years, before BP captured our full attention. Sheppard writes:
From 2000 to 2009, onshore pipeline accidents caused 2,554 major incidents, including 161 deaths and 576 injuries. Offshore, 1,443 incidents caused 41 fatalities, 302 injuries, 476 fires, and 356 releases of pollution into the waters.
Warmer Than It Used To Be
David Leonhardt posts this graph from NASA climate data:
Energy Consumption by Sector
I ginned up this modest little pie chart from U.S. Energy Information Administration data after reading this post from Ezra Klein.
Interestingly, even though transportation uses account for about 28% of our energy consumption, very little of the projected emissions reductions to be achieved under climate legislation would have come from the transportation sector. As David Roberts notes, “The reason for this is simple: It takes an extremely high price on carbon to substantially raise the price of gasoline.” Roberts:
Under the American Power Act, the ceiling on the price of a ton of carbon in 2013 is $25. Even in the unlikely event that the price hits the ceiling, that will boost the price of a gas by just under a quarter per gallon. Given that gas has swung around over a $2-3 range just in the last few years, a quarter isn’t much more than noise. A recent study at Harvard found that in order to reduce carbon emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, gas will need to rise to $7 a gallon by then. Getting there from today’s $4 gas would require a carbon price of well over $300 a ton, and that, in turn, would completely upend the utility sector. So it won’t happen.
Which is all a propos of the new “utilities-only cap-and-trade bill” trial balloon floating around Washington. Even if it’s not ideal, it sounds like a productive development in what has been looking like a politically moribund debate. Read David Roberts’ piece for more.
Weekend Spillery: Pelican Brief
Is the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico going to wipe out the brown pelican? Not globally, at least, writes Phil McKenna at the New Scientist:
The species as a whole isn’t about to go extinct as a result of the oil spill: as 400,000 out of a total global population of 650,000 live in Peru. Roughly 60 per cent of the subspecies Pelecanus occidentalis carolinensis breed along the Gulf coast, where many nest on the barrier islands off Louisiana that have already been exposed to oil.
The slicks threaten the birds and their fragile wetland habitat only a few months after brown pelicans were removed from the US federal endangered and threatened species list in November last year. The birds had been on the list since 1970 after the pesticide DDT poisoned and nearly wiped out pelicans across the country. At the time Louisiana, where the pelican is the official state bird, lost its entire population. After years of resettling individual birds from Atlantic coast populations, Louisiana was able to boast the largest brown pelican population of any Gulf state, with 16,000 nesting pairs in 2004.
Just a small clarification: it’s true that Louisiana’s brown pelicans were just removed from the endangered list in November 2009. But the Alabama, Florida, and the Atlanta coast populations were taken off the list in 1985.
Gulf Spill Infographic
Sorry for all the lame infographic posts lately. I’ll do some real blogging again soon. But in the meantime, check out this cool infographic about the BP oil spill:
Elections Matter: Oil Gusher Edition
In times of war and disaster, abstract concerns about the size of government are appropriately ignored. One would hope that people would always bear in mind the risks of such catastrophes when evaluating the governing philosophies of candidates for office. That is, if anybody ever actually makes an honest and open-minded evaluation of candidates’ governing philosophies, I’d hope that such risks would be taken into consideration.
Ezra Klein writes:
So though Obama deserves to take his lumps on this one, Americans should take the lesson of recent disasters, from the financial crisis to the BP spill to Katrina, and realize that they actually like having good regulators and they get upset when their regulators fail them. Which might mean it’s a good idea to elect people who are interested in making sure regulators don’t stop doing their jobs every couple of years, as opposed to people who think that the best regulation is no regulation, and the second-best regulation is whatever the relevant industry tells them it is.
Effective government is about ends and means. It requires taking both seriously. To ensure public safety and prosperity, we need regulation adequate to those ends. Elections matter.
Pensacola Beach Reporting
This post is mostly for you far-flung Pensacolians out there. The good news is that, as of Wednesday morning, Pensacola Beach is not slathered in crude. The bad news is that there’s a “sheen” of oil moving closer by the hour. The sheen was 7.5 miles from shore when the News Journal went to press last night. “Tar balls” hit Dauphin Island, AL on Tuesday, followed by pancake-sized patties on Wednesday.
Here are two pictures I took with my phone this morning. Take a good look. It may be the last you’ll see of that unspoiled quartz sand.
Big Oil
Here’s a great Google earth utility (via James Fallows) that will help give you a sense of how big the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is. The site allows you to superimpose the image of the spill (as of May 6) onto other parts of the map for comparison.
And here’s a NASA satellite image (at a different scale and, admittedly, hard to make out):
Pale Blue Dot Day
Weekend Birdery: State of the Birds
This is the inaugural edition of a new, occasional feature about birds.
This week, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its 2010 State of the Birds report. Woohoo! The theme of the report is how climate change is affecting populations and habitats of the roughly 800 species of bird in America. The report finds that birds in every category of habitat are threatened by climate change, as the graph below illustrates, but particularly vulnerable are the 67 ocean-going species (like albatrosses and petrels) and others that breed on low-lying islands imperiled by rising sea levels.
Relative Vulnerability of U.S. Bird Species by Habitat
Red = high vulnerability; Yellow = medium vulnerability; Green = low vulnerability
Warming trends are amplifying and adding to existing ecosystem stressors. Coastal and island birds face erosion of habitat and disruption of food supply from the increased frequency and severity of storms caused by increasing sea temperatures. Warming can tip the ecological balance towards birds’ predators, invasive species, or disease. (E.g., mosquito-borne avian malaria and pox spread easily through bird populations on islands like Hawaii, where the native species have little natural resistance. And as average temperatures rise and creep up to higher elevations, mosquitos and malaria creep with them.)
One notable and measurable effect of warming has been a northward shift in the wintering ranges of many if the most widespread species in the northern states.
Although many factors are known to drive range changes, results from the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) show that the warmer winters in recent decades have played an important role in shifting winter bird ranges to the north. CBC data from the mid-1960s through 2006 show that 170 (56%) of the 305 most widespread, regularly occurring species have shifted their ranges to the north, whereas only 71 species (23%) have shifted to the south and 64 species (21%) have not shifted significantly north or south.
State of the State of the Birds Report Report
Overall I think the report is nicely presented, and I think the idea of integrating disparate surveys, studies, and data sources is great. I presume the effort provides a helpful backdrop for setting and funding research agendas and for articulating the basis for conservation efforts.
But I must say I’m a little disappointed in this year’s State of the Birds report. For one thing, it lacks a comprehensive overview of, you know, what’s going on with birds in America. I’d like to see some population estimates, lists of endangered and threatened species1, data trends, and such. And while the layout and pretty pictures (bird porn) are nice, the report has an unforgivable paucity of informative charts. (Sorta just kidding about the unforgivable part. But the charts are paltry. Besides the two above, there are some basically pointless pie charts and not a table in sight.)
Altogether it comes off like a promotional brochure, lacking a certain analytical heft—though I have no doubt that it represents serious scientific work product. (See the report in pdf here.)
So: geek that thing up next year, guys! A statistical appendix, maybe. Or at least post some tables and lists on the website.
- There was a table of endangered species in the 2009 report. [↩]
Save the California Fog
A new study shows declining levels of fog on the California coast, a development which means trouble for the giant redwoods. Brad Plumer explains:
[R]edwoods rely very heavily on moist air hitting their needles and dripping down onto the ground; this fog drip provides anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent of the trees’ water. Indeed, that’s a big reason why redwood roots are relatively shallow but often extend out over one hundred feet from the base—so they can collect the dripping fog.
Now, the reason for the fog decline seems to be that the temperature difference between the coast and the California interior has been narrowing. The researchers stressed that they’re not certain whether the vanishing fog is part of a natural cycle or due to broader climate-change trends—to do that, they’ll have to look more closely at redwood tree-ring data to reconstruct the region’s climate over the past century, as well as analyze fog patterns elsewhere in the world. This study’s mainly notable because the redwoods have enough problems as is (only about 5 percent of the original forests survive today), and they certainly don’t need a dry spell on top of it all.
“Only 5 percent of primary growth redwood forests survive today; the rest has been logged or developed,” reports Jeremy Hance. “According to Save the Redwoods League, eighteen percent of the remaining coastal redwood forests are protected, the rest lies either on private land or in natural forests, which could be logged in the future. Save the Redwoods League, along with Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences, funded the study.”
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Via Brad Plumer.
Cap-and-Trade Health Reform
From The Vine, a recent study estimates that the public health benefits of a climate bill would outstrip its costs:
The researchers surveyed 48 studies on the subject and found that, while estimates of the health benefits can vary quite a bit, they average $44 per ton of CO2 in wealthy countries and $81/ton in developing countries. That’s bigger than the expected carbon price under a U.S. cap-and-trade system (around $20-$30 per ton). In other words, the air-quality improvements alone could offset the cost of cutting carbon. A cap could be “worth it” for public health reasons, regardless of how one feels about global warming.
What’s in a Name
Forget “excise tax” and “surtax,” we need infirmity offsets!
Interesting study, from Brad Plumer (again):
Test subjects were broken up into two groups, and each group was allowed to pick between pricier and cheaper versions of various items like airline tickets. Group A was told that the more expensive items included the price of a “carbon tax,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Group B was told that the costlier items included the price of a “carbon offset,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Exact same policy, just different names for each.
You can guess what happened next. In the “offset” group, Democrats, Republicans, and independents all flocked toward the pricier item. They were perfectly happy to pay an extra surcharge to fund CO2 reduction—even Republicans gushed about the benefits of doing so. Not only that, but most of the group supported making the surcharge mandatory. In the “tax” group, however, Democrats were the only ones willing to pay for the costlier item. Republicans in this group were much more inclined to grumble about how much more expensive the tax made things. Labels really do matter.
Things I’ve Always Wondered About: Global Warming Edition
If the hole in the ozone layer lets in harmful rays from outer space, doesn’t it also let them out? And if the hole is repaired, won’t that trap even more heat in the atmosphere? Yes, it seems. Bradford Plumer:
The bad news, alas, is that a big reason Antarctic summers are still relatively chilly appears to be the hole in the ozone layer, which strengthens circumpolar winds and shields the continent from global warming. But since we’ve banned CFCs (with good reason), the ozone layer’s slowly on the mend, and as it heals, the greenhouse effect will take over and Antarctic summers will heat up even more in the coming decades, according to Marco Tedesco, an atmospheric scientist at the City College of New York. It’s like we just can’t win.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we should just sit back, crack open a can of CFCs, and let the planet bake. It sounds like the Senate Majority Leader agrees and is planning to charge ahead with a climate bill this spring.
From September 21-30, 2006 the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles. This image, from Sept. 24, the Antarctic ozone hole was equal to the record single-day largest area of 11.4 million square miles, reached on Sept. 9, 2000. ... The blue and purple colors are where there is the least ozone, and the greens, yellows, and reds are where there is more ozone. Click image to enlarge.
Credit: NASA.
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