Gulf Oil Slick

[MsDemeanor]

Originally Posted by Sabine Gallais

I just read about how Al Gore now blames Obama for the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Link, please?

[Kast]

Dear Americans, it so saddens me to see all of this evil happening to our lands and to the lands of the world. May you find your peace in the midst of it.

[Glenn]

Folks; I've been awake all night trying to understand why our government would not accept help and take away our constitutional rights during this catastrophy. Now I'm thinking it could be because of the methane bulge on the ocean floor which can explode. Did anyone hear about this new info? I've been searching for hours. Here at http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease...thegreat-dying is what they said methane can do in the ocean.

[Sabine Gallais]

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/...shore?page=0,0


Sorry, but you have to subscribe to read the entire piece.

[Soon]

[Kast]

Yeah! Rachel Maddow for President! She'll get something done! Isn't she awesome?

I have to speak up, I can't watch my home country going down the crapper without speaking up to help the people understand what the hail is going on?... you realize that this 'spill' is in a media black out to the world? Well... I've witnessed many black outs, you see... there is no real 'free' press anymore - the 'main stream' media is owned by corporate America. They choose what news you've been hearing for years, yeah - it's a propaganda machine.

The more you censor the words of people the more fascist this country is going to remain. The people need to speak up now, more than ever in the history of our country, it's going to take the chains of the Constitution to unbind America or she will fall further into fascism.

There's a few pulses to what's really happening in America, on some sites with threads, if it's not too heavily monitored to shut the people up and where the people are allowed to speak, you can get better idea of what's happening - sites like Twitter and Facebook, possibly?

[MsDemeanor]

Let me get this straight.

- BP spill destroys gulf environment, wildlife, businesses, jobs, health.

- President negotiates with BP for a $20B escrow account to pay damages.

- Republicans are outraged that BP has to put up money, apologize to BP.
linkyloo

- People still actually vote for these yahoos.

Proving once again that I live in the land of the truly stupid.

[MsDemeanor]

Originally Posted by Sabine Gallais

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/...shore?page=0,0


Sorry, but you have to subscribe to read the entire piece.

Oh well, I guess I'll never get to read about how Gore blames Obama for the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Too bad, I was really curious what that actually means. Maybe some non-pay service will pick up the news and report it. After all, if Obama personally caused the explosion, that's kinda a front-page headline.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by popcorninthesofa

Folks; I've been awake all night trying to understand why our government would not accept help and take away our constitutional rights during this catastrophy. Now I'm thinking it could be because of the methane bulge on the ocean floor which can explode. Did anyone hear about this new info? I've been searching for hours. Here at http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease...thegreat-dying is what they said methane can do in the ocean.

Popcorn:

I'm aware of this hypothesis and, as far as it goes to explain the P/T boundary extinction event it is certainly interesting. However, I don't think that it actually relates to *this* situation. There are concerns about a rapid release of methane (which is ALSO a greenhouse gas) but not because of the oil spill. Rather, there is a lot---I mean a HUGE amount--of methane locked up in the tundra and at the bottom of the ocean. If a large enough rise in temperature were to occur then that methane would be released into the atmosphere but not explosively. It would still be a BAD DAY but it wouldn't be a P/T extinction kind of bad day. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO_2 but that is mitigated by having a very short (10 years) half-life in atmosphere.

I'm not aware of a large amount of methanehydrate at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico (full disclosure, I am NOT an oceanographer) and could not find anything to suggest that there is one. Whatever incompetencies and/or willful blindness on the part of our government regarding this disaster, I am fairly confident that fears of a P/T style extinction isn't one of them. I say this for two reasons--firstly, that kind of mass extinction is vanishingly improbable (while still having a probability that is not identical to zero) and is not likely to be triggered by THIS disaster. Secondly, there is a far more serious threat that we know, for a fact, has caused at least one mass extinction in the last 100 million years and our government is putting scant resources into either detecting the threat or planning what to do if (when?) that threat appears. I'm talking, of course, about large asteroids that are on orbits that might bring them perilously close to the Earth. (That said, a new large telescope has just gone online in Hawaii and it will be dedicated--at least part of the time--to detecting 'killer' asteroids.)

Thirdly, there are some things that if they happen we just can't do anything about. An asteroid we *might* be able to handle but if a very large pocket of methane is going to explode, it will happen without warning and if it's serious enough to cause a P/T scale extinction there's nothing we can do about it. The other one is a gamma-ray burst from an inconveniently near supernova. One of those would make for a VERY BAD DAY hear on Earth and we wouldn't know about it until it happened since the signal that it had happened would be the light from the supernova itself which would, of course, have gamma-rays as part of it.

I would't stay up worrying about the methane.

Cheers
Aj