Questions for America

BP oil spill: US scientist retracts assurances over success of cleanup
 
…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…
 
…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…

Looking for the oil? NOAA says it’s mostly gone
 
…the government said…that the mess made by the BP oil spill
…is mostly gone already.
 
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
and the U.S. Geological Survey announced
…that only 52.7 million gallons of oil are left in the Gulf.
 
That is about 31 percent of the 172 million gallons
that spewed into the water from the broken BP well.
 
What’s left in the water
is still almost five times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez…
 
“I think it is fairly safe to say
… that many of the doomsday scenarios that we talked about
and repeated a lot have not and will not come to fruition,”
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said
at a briefing with NOAA’s top scientist.
 
The federal calculations are based on direct measurements
for only 18 million gallons of the oil spilled
the stuff burned and skimmed.
 
The other numbers are “educated scientific guesses,”
said NOAA emergency response senior scientist Bill Lehr…

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.

“This is just way too neat,” said Larry McKinney,
director of the Texas A&M University research center…
 
“How can you even do this at this point?
 
There’s a lot of oil still floating out there.”
 
McKinney said he most worried that this overly optimistic assessment
would cost the government
and save BP
billions of dollars in the damage assessment process.
 
“BP attorneys are placing this in plastic and putting this in frames.”

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.
 
…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.

The scientific report, which has four pages of text
followed by one page of credits,
is small compared to other similar reports.
 
Initially, NOAA said there was a fuller, 200-page report,
but then retracted that.
 
The initial report cites no scientific references…
those, Lehr said, are in his head.

…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… He accused the White House of making “sweeping and largely unsupported” claims that three-quarters of the oil in the Gulf was gone.
 
…MacDonald and other scientists have accused NOAA of discouraging them from making public their findings about lingering oil in the deepwater…

MacDonald said the core of the idea here
that oil in water essentially has about a half-life of a week
makes sense, but what happened from there doesn’t.
 
“There’s some science here, but mostly, it’s spin,” he said.
“And it breaks my heart to see them do it.”
 
MacDonald pointed out that NOAA
spent weeks sticking with its claim the BP well
was spewing only 210,000 gallons a day.
 
Now, after several revisions,
the federal government said it really was 2.2 million gallons a day.
 
So he has a hard time believing NOAA this time, he said.

…Yesterday’s testimony and the Science article put the White House and government scientific agencies increasingly out of step with independent scientists.
 
…The NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco, herself an ocean scientist, had played down the first reports of oil in the ocean depths…

When Lubchenco was asked about that
…Gibbs stepped in to defend the agency’s credibility.
 
Gibbs and Lubchenco said NOAA
provided the best information at the time
and updated estimates when it had better data and tools.
 
“Is there uncertainty to this?
Of course there is,” said NOAA’s Lehr.
 
But he said there was no political interference.
 
That question got raised
because of the coordination of the media rollout of the report.
 
[White House energy adviser Carol] Browner
was on all four morning TV shows saying
“the vast majority of oil is gone,”
and the report was leaked to The New York Times.

…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.
 
…It noted that the plume was not made up of pure oil but included toxic oil compounds including benzene and xylene.
 
Suzanne Goldenberg
US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, August 19, 2010

 

 Seth Borenstein
Associated Press, Aug 6, 2010

NOAA Claims Scientists Reviewed Controversial Report; The Scientists Say Otherwise

…at the report’s unveiling on August 4, Lubchenco spoke of a “peer review of the calculations that went into this by both other federal and non-federal scientists.” On Thursday afternoon, she told reporters on a conference call: “The report and the calculations that went into it were reviewed by independent scientists.” The scientists, she said, were listed at the end of the report.

…Told how much certainty administration officials expressed in the estimates — “we have high degree of confidence in them,” is how Lubchenco put it…

…Lubchenco had previously been a key figure in the patently low-ball estimates for the oil flow, and fervently resisted acknowledging the existence of underwater oil plumes…

But all the scientists on that list contacted by the Huffington Post for comment this week said the exact same thing: That although they provided some input to NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), they in no way reviewed the report, and could not vouch for it.

…they refuted the notion, as put forth by Lubchenco and other Obama administration officials, that the report was either scientifically precise or an authoritative account of where the oil went…

…independent scientists are…expressing outrage that the administration released no actual data or algorithms to support its claims.

Why did administration officials mislead the public about those findings — and then claim that independent scientists had reviewed them, when the evidence suggests that they did not?

Dan Froomkin
Huffington Post, August 20, 2010