Fig 1. A description of this figure is found at the bottom of this posting

Recently I was reading about the Oregon coast and discovered that, since 2002, the region has experienced sudden periods during the summer months in which the shallow ocean water dramatically loses oxygen levels below those required to sustain normal marine life. The first occurrence of this event took place between Newport and Florence along the Oregon coast, and included Yachats, the small town where we stayed. Though I did not personally see any evidence of fish or invertebrate kills, these surges of hypoxic coastal ocean water take place further out in the shallow ocean water beyond the shores and are evident at depths up to about 50 meters or so: because of the intense wave action, tidal pools probably get effective oxygenation through wave aeration; its an excellent mechanism for mixing water and air and the Pacific ocean seems very adept at creating intense wave activity. I have always appreciated how much better the Pacific ocean is at generating large, strong waves when compared to its Atlantic cousin.

When hypoxic events occur, many fish are able to swim out of oxygen depleted regions into more sustainable water, whereas the slower invertebrates are stuck, and in the case of the Oregon coast, thousands of invertebrates have been dying every summer when the ocean becomes intolerably hypoxic. You can view a Quick Time video clip of a fish/invertebrate kill photographed underwater along the Oregon coast here: it amounts to a massive kill.

Marine biologists tell us that normal ocean surface water contains 5 to 8 ml of oxygen per liter of ocean. But during these anoxic spells in Oregon, the measured oxygen level was as low as 1.4 ml/l, too low for most fish and invertebrate survival. Many regions of the world have hypoxic ocean waters, some of which have been created by eutrophication, or fertilizer runoff from intense agriculture, which produces blooms of plankton that reduce the oxygen content of the water. But the scientists who initially investigated the Oregon coast hypoxia knew that it was unlikely to be caused by eutrophication, simply because farming along the Oregon coast didn’t seem sufficient to generate significant fertilizer runoff.  Initially, marine biologists thought that they were viewing a once-in-a-lifetime event, but anoxic waters along the coast of Oregon are now an annual event and have been detected each summer since the first large scale fish and invertebrate kills of 2002. From as early as mid-April to mid-October, hypoxic water has been the rule, though fluctuations in the intensity of oxygen depletion give variance to its magnitude. To this day, the cause of this phasic oxygen deprivation is unknown, though several theories seem to be prominent among oceanographers and marine biologists. Some have even considered this phenomenon to be part of a natural, long-term cycle of ocean behavior.  But, no significant letup has occurred and in 2006, the most extreme case of anoxia took place in which coastal waters lost all detectable oxygen levels for four weeks. In that instance starfish, mussels and rockfish died in large numbers, while other, more mobile fish were able to flee the hypoxic zone, which grew to 3,000 square kilometers. Furthermore the region has been monitored for oxygen content at different depths going back to 1950 and from 1950 to 1999, no anoxic events were recorded (see Fig 1).

The fishing industry along the coast of Oregon has been understandably alarmed about this recurrent hypoxic condition, as fishing brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year into the economy. But Oregon’s hypoxic summer coastal waters are part a global problem, though the causes of ocean hypoxia vary for each region and always have a local component as well. Increasingly the oxygen content of our ocean waters has been receiving more attention and there is broad agreement on the impact that global climate change may have on ocean oxygenation levels, including i)  a failure to properly mix the water column through changes in oceanic currents, that could be seriously impacted by global climate change and its effect on the natural oceanic currents which exchange cool norther waters with warmer waters near the equatorial zones and ii) the warming of the ocean water itself reduces its capacity to dissolve oxygen, a strict reality of chemical reactions.  According to the 2007 IPCC report, from the period 1961 to 2003, global ocean temperature have risen by 0.10°C from the surface to a depth of 700 meters.

Biologists believe that the magic number for oxygen comes in at about 2 ml/l, below which much of the ocean fauna cannot exist; there are now large regions of our ocean, particularly those near tropical areas, where the intermediate depths of the water have reached this level of incompatibility.  While there is plenty of evidence for an increase in the temperature of the ocean over the last fifty years, so far, there is no evidence that the normal ocean currents have been altered by global climate change conditions, at least not for the major currents we concern ourselves with. If there is a compensatory side to global climate change, it is that tropical storms, whose frequency and magnitude can be correlated with ocean water temperature, help to force mixing of the ocean water with the more oxygen rich air, serving to overcome other tendencies to form oxygen-depleted zones, though the significance of this so called “benefit” has been hard to guesstimate. Who wants to be on the sidelines cheering on another Katrina?

The Oregon coast is part of a large West Coast ocean ecosystem, in which shallow, oxygen-rich ocean water, found at depths up to about 50 meters, leads to much deeper, oxygen deficient water found beyond the continental shelf, where depths become hundreds of meters or more. Those deeper regions are poor in oxygen but rich in nutrients. Measurements of oxygen levels as deep as 600 meters have been ongoing in the Oregon region for decades, which, until 2002, did not reveal coastal water hypoxia (Fig 1, left). So, if eutrophication doesn’t explain Oregon’s coastal oxygen deficiency, what does?

The most parsimonious explanation for Oregon’s summer anoxia seems to be that the deeper oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) has been upwelling at higher rates than normal and mixing with the more superficial oxygen-enriched waters in disproportionate ways that did not happen before, but might still be part of a very long periodic cycle that could last for decades or more. Others suggest the more obvious,  that what’s going on in Oregon is a perfect storm created by changes in weather, climate and ocean currents. If so, this should alarm all of us, because it illustrates how quickly the ocean environment can change. We must remember that 71% of the surface of the earth is covered by ocean water.

This new mixing between the two pools of ocean water not only tells us that the oceans can change quickly, but that they can do so with a surprisingly quick lethal outcome. There is clearly a balance force at work here in nature with ocean water mixing that is difficult to comprehend, but mind-numbing to appreciate when it doesn’t work to its historic perfection. It’s hard not to get analytical about this observation without thinking how finely tuned it all is, how interdependent the global system is and then wonder how badly out of tune we have forced mother nature’s engine for sustaining life on the land as well as the ocean. Surely we need to learn better than we ever have that land and ocean are joined at the hip. Excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is acidifying the ocean, but doing so much more and in so many different ways, most of which we cannot yet articulate. Perhaps our very survival is the biological experiment. But for this experiment, mother nature is sitting on the sidelines, as we started the ball rolling on this one.

We use models to predict the impact of global climate change, but with the oceans, we have a laboratory. We should all be jumping into the oceans and making measurements! If we can’t save the country, let’s put everyone to work saving the planet!

RFM

(below is a copy of the figure illustration taken from the Chan et al Science article (note: hydrocasts are water samples obtained from a group bottles that are coupled to one another and sunk to get samples of water at different depths)

Fig. 1. Taken from a Science Brevia paper by Chan et al (Science, 319, 920, 2008). Dissolved oxygen profiles during the upwelling season (mid-April to mid-October) in the upper 800 m of the continental shelf and slope of Oregon (42.00°N to 46.00°N). (A) 1950 to 1999 from the World Ocean Database and Oregon State University archives (n = 3101 hydrocasts, blue). (B) (A) with additional data for 2000 to 2005 (n = 834 hydrocasts, green). (C) (A) and (B) plus data for 2006 (n = 220 hydrocasts,red). The black vertical line denotes the 0.5 ml/l threshold. (Insets) Overlapping locations of hydrographic (blue, green, and red) and remotely operated vehicle (black) stations through time and the 100-m and 1000-m isobaths.

We won’t know the true impact of the oil spill on the animal life in the Gulf of Mexico for many years to come. This is because the entire area has a rich endogenous sea life, but it is also an area where many migratory fish, birds and other aquatic life come through during their migratory movements, so evaluating the full scope of this problem will mean years of study. Should any part of that body of knowledge be funded by BP and kept secret, it would be a travesty against  scientific principles of discovery and dissemination of scientific information. For BP, the only thing sacred is the image of its giant corporation, linked to its profitability. BP’s behavior in securing scientists who will have limited capacity to fully reveal their findings makes a mockery of science itself and paints a very unfortunate image of those scientists who agree to carry out studies under such constrained reporting circumstances and under a cloud where their own work will be tainted with the possibility that it’s been diluted or altered for consumption by corporate interests rather than public health and freedom of scientific exchange. In my opinion, any scientific research supported by BP that is related to this spill should not be admissible in peer-reviewed journals. Indeed, it is up to reviewers of any papers submitted to such journals to evaluate the source of their funding and determine whether there is an ethical violation of a corporate-sponsored study that does not give full disclosure. This is not merely a problem with BP and the oil industry. We see this kind of behavior with the pharmaceutical industry, which tries to manipulate reports so that only the most favorable outcomes are highlighted. I’m afraid it will take a much higher level of awareness by the public to learn how to evaluate starkly conflicting reports, when one is published in a peer-review journal and is funded by an unbiased sources, such as the National Science Foundation vs results published by an oil consortium, with a fancy title, but nevertheless funded by the oil giants. You don’t have to go beyond Congress to see which reports are favored by which major party.
RFM

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   One must keep in mind that if our planet Earth had no means of losing heat from the Sun, but only absorbing it, like a perfect black body, the Earth would eventually, perhaps over millions of years or longer, become as hot as the Sun. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Explorer I

It is a bit tiresome to see the horrible news coming out about the Gulf oil spill, only to be accentuated by the incessant emphasis on whether or not this event will be Obama’s Katrina or the defining moment of his Presidency. We hear this a lot, particularly on stations like CNN (I never go to Fox, but I assume they have already pinned the entire Gulf oil spill on Obama, since he toils daily as the Antichrist, or if not, then certainly he is working as one of his primary agents). Now, I don’t remember CNN ever suggesting that Katrina would be the defining moment of GW’s presidency, do you? It seems to me that, at best, that was an after thought. These charges against Obama are absurd of course unless they’re repeated 10,000 times in the news media, then, by the definitions given to us through modernity, the assertion automatically gets placed in the “truth file.” Let’s put this issue in a very fresh and simple way: we don’t have a government agency that drills for oil as we might if oil was a nationalized industry–which it is in some countries. Because of this, we are at the mercy of the international oil companies themselves–it’s part of our free market economy, and,  just as credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages brought down our economy, so too does the U.S. government give sway to the oil giants to do what they want in exploring for the black gold of our economy.  The government merely hands out permits to drill within U.S. territorial lands and waters and apparently has done a very sloppy if not corrupt job, giving the oil companies what they want, whenever they wanted it. Oil companies are currently allowed to write their own environmental impact studies, usually copied from a prior one, which is how seals and walruses got into the Gulf environmental studies application from BP, despite the fact there are no seals or walruses in the Gulf. This level of incompetence on the part of our government is clearly the result of the hollowing out of Federal functions and regulatory oversight over the years by Republicans from Reagan to GW Bush, with a few Democrat participants, acting like Republicans, thrown in for good measure: it is part of the “kill the beast” program of Republican cowboys.  GW Bush and Cheney (remember Cheney’s his famous meeting with oil and energy executives, where the energy future of the United States was laid out, but never made public. That was the official inauguration of “drill baby drill,” plus launching the idea to replace Middle East despots, such as Saddam Hussein, with regimes favorable to our ever-expanding demand for oil. That’s why it’s very unlikely that we will ever get out of Iraq, unless of course the Chinese manage to get all the oil contracts).

With the competency of the Federal government under daily challenge over the Gulf oil spill, I couldn’t help but think back to a day and a time when government agencies worked very effectively and how we all admired the skill and dedication of its workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists and even a few administrators. Take for example how this oil spill is being handled, with BP having virtually no fall-back technique once the most unlikely methods failed and now compare that to how we formed and executed our space program and successfully brought back the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, when it was announced: “Houston, we have a problem.”   NASA, the government agency that developed our space program (the comparative equivalent of having a nationalized oil system),  and sent men to the moon in 1969, was originally formed as a direct result of “Sputnik.” The year that Sputnik was launched by the Russians in 1957, the Army and Navy had separate missile development programs, each trying to develop their own space-orbiting vehicles (this was the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58). NASA was put together in 1958, through the National Aeronautics and Space Act in order to circumvent what was viewed as a failure by our military to match the ingenious Russian success (Sputnik I was followed a month later by Sputnik II). Never mind that when the Russians launched Sputnik I, which lacked an instrumentation recorder and could not record any scientific information (though it had scientific instrumentation aboard) and never mind too, that a few months after Sputnik, Americans launched Explorer I into space (January 1958, which did have recording instrumentation and discovered the first  Van Allen Radiation belt) and never mind as well that once Explorer I was launched, Americans never lost their lead in the science of space exploration, only in the public relations war that ensnared our space exploration policies and put scientific research on hold, in favor of the PR victory of putting a man on the moon before the Russians did. It was nevertheless  an admirable technological achievement, but in the process it led to the overly costly commitment of using manned space exploration, rather than robotic control which would emphasize science and minimize costs. But we all cheered at seeing an American flag put on the moon and undoubtedly, many Americans got drunk that night.

Apollo 13 was the third lunar mission, launched on April 11, 1970. During the flight to the moon, an electrical fault caused an explosion and loss of electrical power to the service module. The crew was successful in shutting down the command module and using the lunar module as a lifeboat to return safely to earth. This was achieved by acts of serial and parallel competence on the part of the well-trained astronauts and the ingenious group of engineers and scientists centered in Houston. A hit movie was made of this remarkable success story and Americans marveled at how well its new government agency worked and appreciated the competency of those who ran it. I was in the military (Navy) during the early development of the space program and got to see some of the first-hand, relevant issues related to the early days of NASA’s growth. In fact, my own electrophysiological setup in the Navy Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola Florida, that I embellished while doing research in the Navy, benefited indirectly from the space program which set super new standards for making electrical connections and wiring harnesses more reliable. The standards for everything from transistor heat tolerances and resistance to the vibration for wire and panel connections, were dramatically improved and almost everything had a backup. Special tools were designed to apply proper pressure when making electrical connections and unique panels were made to support quick changes in electrical connectivity. Astronauts trained in unique, environmentally constrained surrounds, including underwater space simulations. When one of those implementations failed, as it did on Apollo 13, sufficient ingenuity, and the reliably of the remaining circuits, brought the astronauts back to Earth with a safe landing. We don’t have anything comparable to NASA involved in oversight responsibility for deep sea oil drilling. We have placed our environment on the back burner, while oil exploration  consumes and dictates our policies, irrespective of the risks we are taking with the our fragile ocean ecosystems. No one knows the impact this will have on the ecosystem of the Gulf, but we can see already the economic devastation this is causing the tourism and the fishing industries in the region. Remember that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was going to be a target for oil drilling under GW Bush, until environmentalists successfully defeated the measure, all to the screaming outrage of Republicans like Tom Delay and President GW Bush.

The admiration we all felt about the performance of NASA after the first few Apollo trips to the moon, and the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew, did not last all that long. Major objections about the size of the NASA’s budget in the face of other, pressing national needs led to budgetary reductions and forced NASA to cancel the remaining Apollo missions to the moon. After Apollo, doubts about the future of NASA, the size of their budget and the nature of their mission began to erode and confuse the agency. Nevertheless, the unmanned flights made by Voyager  explored planets and gave us scientifically valuable information about space and our planetary surrounds. In contrast, manned space exploration was carried out with the Space Shuttle program and NASA experienced their own retrospective “Gulf oil disaster” when, in January 1986,  the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated within seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause of this accident reflected the refusal of NASA managers to listen to their field engineers who warned them that critical O-rings were not designed to tolerate the low temperatures encountered on the January launch date. In retrospect, the Challenger disaster represents a reversal of how NASA was put together. During the buildup of NASA, it was the engineers who made the critical decisions, but for the Challenger disaster, engineering input was disregarded by management. Another disaster occurred in February 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia“ disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts on board. In this case, damage to the shuttle had been encountered during the launch, when a small piece of insulation tore loose from the shuttle and damaged the thermal protection system necessary to insure against excessive heat build-up during re-entry. If you want to read further about our space program, a book I recommend is “Vodoo Science: the Road From Foolishness to Fraud” by Robert L. Park

Without doubt, the greatest scientific achievement of NASA was when the Space Shuttle launched the Hubble telescope in 1990. Unfortunately the main mirror used for focusing was improperly ground and was not fixed until another Shuttle repaired the problem in 1993. Once properly running, the Hubble telescope provided many of the most remarkable photographs and scientific data ever achieved in space. Since then, the Hubble has been repaired by astronauts several times, the last one taking place in 2009. The Hubble is expected to function until 2014, at which time it is scheduled for replacement. Stunning images of space, taken by the Hubble telescope, can be viewed at a variety of sites, including that of NASA.

The meteoric rise and slow decline of NASA’s public image was punctuated by many significant achievements, including the recent repair of the Hubble telescope, which is now giving better images of space than we ever had before. But the problems that NASA has experienced began from its inception, when the political choice was made by President Kennedy in  choosing manned flight over unmanned space exploration. Inserting manned space exploration into the Cold War, as we did in response to Sputnik, put science on the back burner (as we do so often), and allowed political decisions to dominate NASA’s early mission objectives. We gained almost nothing of any scientific value by putting a man on the moon, though NASA did generate significant improvements in the technology of heat-tolerance, ceramics and we got Teflon out of the deal.  But in doing so, we distorted and confused the mission future of NASA, whose major scientific achievement was the launching and repair of the Hubble telescope. Nevertheless, if you contrast the successful rescue of the crew of Apollo 13 and compare that achievement with the crude strategies that BP is applying to the Gulf oil spill, one sees that executives are in charge of decision-making in the Gulf and they are already jockeying to reduce company liability and limit the public exposure of seeing oil impregnated birds and turtles. No, our government is not in charge of fixing this leak. We gave that option away from the get-go when we turned loose our free market economy and, in the Gulf oil spill, we are seeing just one example of the rewards for allowing this kind of unchecked freedom to generate huge profits, while doing nothing for improving our renewable energy future. The other night, I heard on the PBS Jim Lehrer report, a venture capitalist forewarn the future of America’s energy strategy. At a time when everyone agrees that we must develop sources and technology of renewable energy, as if we are in an emergency to save our planet and reduce our oil dependency, America has only four members of the top 30 companies in the business of renewable energy! That’s what the Gulf oil spill represents to me–the free market economy of oil exploration done at the expense of letting the rest of the world generate the new jobs that need to be created for renewable energy. Will we pay the Chinese to build solar panels (already they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and have hired American engineers and scientists to assist them in making better panels), or will be build them ourselves and will we continue to be the innovators of science related to energy production and planetary safety? Today, the future does not look bright for American emergence into world leadership for alternative energy.

RFM

Red Knot Shorebird

Perhaps we need another century or two to understand the species of the world and their inter-dependencies before we make judgments about who should go and who should stay: say goodbye to one and you may have to do the same for a seemingly diverse group of animals for reasons that are highly counter-intuitive. It’s foolish of course to even suggest that we are in a position to make decisions about species survival, because we aren’t knowingly making those judgments, even though events, such as species extinction, are very likely occurring on a regular basis as a result of human interventionism. But, species extinctions are taking place without our knowledge of the cause or even, in most cases, an understanding of the species involved. We keep track of big animals, like lions, tigers, elephants and other large mammals and, though  the future for them is not looking particularly bright, we are completely ignorant about animals a step or two below on the evolutionary ladder–like the now extinct, Gastric-Brooding Frog. Who said goodbye to that species? But, here’s one to ponder for the short-term: are you kidding me?–shorebirds and horseshoe crabs? This survival dynamic may play itself out over the next few years.

The interconnectedness of nature almost dictates that you don’t lose single species, that in in losing one, some other species or fauna will also be put into harm’s way:  the loss of one species may precipitate the loss of one or more others, largely because we are unaware of the biological forces that unite them. I don’t know who else we lost or which other species might have been changed when the Gastric-Brooding Frog disappeared, but it didn’t disappear without impacting other species. Of that we can be certain. But, what connection for example does the continued vitality of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, an ancient marine arthropod, have with survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shore bird that makes an annual stopover in the region in which the horseshoe crab breeds? The Limulus is virtually unchanged since it first appeared in the Paleozoic, 570-248 million years ago. Though most people have barely heard of the Limulus, anyone who studies vision is well versed with this species, as its compound eye was first used by H.K. Hartline to reveal fundamental mechanisms of visual physiology, for which he went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1967 for his pioneering work. Horseshoe crabs are abundant on the shoreline of Woods Hole Massachusetts, where Hartline did much of his early work. One of Hartline’s students, Robert Barlow, went on to show that the male Limulus uses its eyes to search aggressively for females and looks for the outlines of the carapace as a visual cue for finding a suitable female, at a time when the animals come into the shoreline for laying and fertilizing their eggs, an activity that usually takes place at night. But, who would ever have thought that the seasonal breeding of this ancient marine species, which takes place big time in Delaware Bay on the East coast, would have a dramatic impact on the survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shorebird that flies 20,000 miles each year, from South America to the Arctic, where it breeds, and then flies back again. Surely the biologists got this one wrong!

The Red Knot arrives in Delaware Bay just at the time the Limulus has come near the shore for breeding and egg laying. Eggs are laid by the female in the sand and then fertilized externally by the male or males that surround her. It is the nourishment derived from feeding on the newly released Limulus eggs that provides a critically needed source of food for the Red Knot to regain its stamina and prepare for resuming its long journey North.  Once the Red Knots arrive at the Delaware shore, they only have about two weeks to get sufficient nourishment, rebuild their wing muscles and store fat for the flight ahead to their Arctic breeding grounds, where they lay their own eggs and raise their young over the short summer of the region. If  insufficient Limulus eggs are available, the Red Knot does not seem to have a plan B and may be ill-equipped to finish the long journey to the Arctic. In some regions where Red Knots used to breed in the Arctic, they have not been seen in recent years and insufficient Limulus egg nourishment has been regarded as the main deficiency in their failed migratory outcome. In preparation for the long flight from South America (Tierra del Fuego, in Chile/Argentina) the bird’s digestive system shuts down, such that the intermediate stop, to feed on Limulus eggs, provides the bird with a very digestible meal, rich in proteins–apparently the ideal food for building up muscle and fat for an animal with a reduced capacity digestive system. Despite the aggressive feeding of the Red Knot on Limulus eggs, the horseshoe crab population in the region was stable into the 1990s, when fishing with Limulus bait became popular.

The shortage of Limulus eggs seems to reflect an overly aggressive harvesting of animals, particularly gravid females used by fisherman as bait for catching eels and conch (marine snails): this has led to a significant decline in the number of Limulus eggs laid on the shoreline, down to perhaps 2/3 of previous estimates and the magnitude of this decline has been implicated in the reduced numbers of Red Knot birds making it to their Arctic breeding grounds. Indeed, it was the alarmingly fast reduction in the Red Knot population, by about 70%, that led to the discovery of their dependence on Limulus eggs in Delaware Bay.  The decline in Limulus breeding and egg-laying seems to be the tipping point that could wipe out the Red Knot and could do so very quickly if a better balance isn’t restored.   There is now a two-year moratorium on using Limulus for fishing bait in the region and researchers are busy trying to find artificial bait substitutes that could be used in place of the real thing. An excellent video about this species interdependency was shown recently on PBS and can be seen here.

How long this interconnectedness between a marine animal that is roughly 350 million years old and a bird, whose evolutionary record goes back 150 million years, is not a matter that can be resolved through the fossil record. At some point, the Red Knot’s migratory flight to Delaware Bay was initiated to be well-timed to the breeding season of the Limulus.  This synchrony could be seriously interrupted further by global climate change which might affect one or the other of these tightly timed mechanisms. Some biologists believe the Red Knot could be extinct within five years. At some point, you reach a bird density wherein birds can’t find one another to mate.

Limulus polyphemus

The fishing industry is not the only survival challenge that Limulus faces. The blood of  Limulus has been used for many years because of its unusual properties. Limulus blood is blue because it uses a copper protein as an oxygen carrier. But, of more importance is the fact that Limulus blood clots whenever it comes into contact with endotoxins. Extracts of Limulus blood have been used for decades to test for bacterial contamination. One quart of Limulus blood is valued at about $15,000. Currently, the FDA insists that all intravenously administered drugs should be exposed to a Limulus blood amebocyte lysate as a test for endotoxins. This is a significant improvement over the prior process of injecting a rabbit with the substance and then waiting to see if the animal gets sick and develops a fever!  The discovery of Limulus amebocyte lysate also took place at Woods Hole, through the observations of scientist Fred Bang. This insight and its technological development has reduced the endotoxin analysis test from days to about 45 minutes. Instead of killing the horseshoe crabs and then bleeding them, the pharmaceutical industry harvests blood from live animals, who are then returned to their native habitat. Thus, some former fisherman, who used them for bait, now collect them for blood letting in a laboratory environment and then release them to the same location. Last year, 300,000 horseshoe crabs were bled and then released; about 13% do not survive this blood-letting procedure, which extracts about 2/3 of their blood.

The counter-intuitive interconnectedness of the Red Knot and the horseshoe crab could only be revealed by extensive field studies that involved capturing, tagging and measuring birds along the pathway of their extensive, almost incomprehensible, migratory flight pattern. These are dedicated scientists who share a passion for this bird and its preservation. Why a bird would exist under the harsh conditions of the Tierra del Fuego, near the Strait of Magellan, then fly to the even harsher climate of the Arctic for breeding and the early rearing of their young, before flying off again on another 10,000 mile trip, is well beyond our capacity to comprehend. Perhaps it got started before tectonic plates rearranged the land masses. The migratory pattern of North America by non-indigenous Homo sapiens was primarily East to West, which is a little easier to understand. In contrast to the rational, the Red Knot flight plan is not one that any of us would recommend to serve as the basis for a committed, routine lifestyle, unless it was one we recommended to our Republican friends. I can imagine Rush Limbaugh feeding on Limulus eggs in search of a new high. Let us hope that the Red Knot survives and the current iteration of the Republican Party goes the way of the Dodo bird as its major flight plan glides it  into extinction. There are many signs that such a glide pattern is already underway. We will undoubtedly hear more about each species in the coming years.

RFM

While the Obama administration does not have the same  “drill baby  drill” attitude of its predecessor, there are no environmentalists within the administration, at least none with the passion of a Teddy Roosevelt or a Stewartl Udall; historically, it seems that spending time in the wondrous U.S. West was essential training experience to acquire a protective attitude about the environment–the physical wonders that your eyes report to you.  The “I want to save this for my children and grand children syndrome,” is a mind state which you could acquire while seeing for the first time places like the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Yellowstone, or any of the other places that are included in our fabulous national park system. Those searing experiences, faced with our inherent tendency to exploit and destroy the natural environment or privatize it,  has historically served as the stimulus for environmentalism and site preservation. But, that was then and this is now. Today, whether it’s an oil spill or the threat of global climate change, we need a far more sophisticated and knowledgeable plan that can begin to sort out the   “species interconnectedness;” this will require more knowledge of biology and environmental preservation, an emphasis which does not resonate well with the short-term problem solving that seemingly exists in the culture of the Obama cabinet meetings and our need for more oil resources. But, the biology we need to be studying can no longer be seen with the naked eye, for it is microscopic in size, yet fundamentally huge in its impact–it’s the ecosystem of our oceans and the threats that exist from oil spills, over fishing and salinity changes that might impair the fundamental biodiversity of the water and impact on the bottom of the food chain where life support is critical and the point at which it all begins.

So, how do you gain knowledge of species interconnectedness by watching birds drenched in oil and being treated with detergents? You don’t! Unless we are watching the event in the company of environmental and marine biologists and toxicologists. Yet, even these experts have limited knowledge of what the long-term impact of an oil spill will do to all the species in the ecosystem. Like global climate change, it’s too incomprehensible to imagine and, unlike global climate change, we don’t have computer models to help us figure out the real dangers of an oil spill of this magnitude. The historical reaction applies here: we can only shrug our shoulders and assume that eventually, all will be back to normal, that the ocean can and will deal with this problem, fixing it in ways that we don’t yet understand. After all, there is an equilibrium to nature, even when faced with increasing global temperatures or a slippery oily interface. We may not like the new steady-state, and it may be far less compatible with our expectations from the oceans of the world, but a new equilibrium point will be established and so far, we have shown ourselves to be completely impotent to facilitate one outcome over another. Ocean ecology is perhaps evolving in something less than a geological time scale. Something short enough that we will be able to gauge some of the impact of the Gulf oil spill, but we will be unable to do anything about it. By the time we recognize what happened, and a validate that a new balance point has been established, we will not be able to return to the old one, no matter how much we miss it, or what we do to restore it. New counter forces will be in place to preserve the new point of equilibrium and oppose any efforts we make to restore an older point of balance.

Krill are tiny crustaceans found in all oceans. They feed on phytoplankton and serve as one of the essential elements at the bottom of the food chain. Somehow we expect that these essential organisms will be unaffected and that no large mammals will start washing up on shore because of starvation. Should that ever begin to happen, the human population would of course already be stressed, yet probably  knowledgeable about the unfavorable imbalances within our oceans and its implications for planetary balance. What do we really know about the influence of oil on the ecology of a region? Did we lose species in the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the one in Santa Barbara? In the case of the Exxon Valdez, the salmon and herring fishing industry in the region collapsed. Slowly the salmon came back, but the herring never returned. One mayor in the region committed suicide, apparently related to his despair over the oil spill and its impact on the local economy. Have we done enough studies to understand the changes in the ecosystem that invariably happen with a major oil spill? Each major spill is probably very unique, given the variance in species and habitat of the surrounding region and relative size of the ocean volume involved.  We know that for each spill, the lives of commercial fishermen will be permanently changed and their chances of getting a fair compensation for their lost livelihood is about zero, as it will take many years to resolve the impending issues and suits within our heavily biased court system, one that rewards and protects big business and allows lower income recipients of the calamity to serve as mere cannon fodder. According to some studies, significant oil residue remains in Prince Williams Sound where the Exxon Valdez spilled oil onto 1200 miles of beach, killing thousands of animals. In some areas, oil was three feet thick. Current estimates are that it will take decades more or even centuries more for the oil to fully dissipate from the region: Litigation against Exxon continues.

If you’re wondering about long-term damage liability, to compensate for lost jobs and continued clean up operations, here is what happened on that issue with Exxon (From Democracy Now): “In 1994, an Alaskan jury found Exxon responsible and ruled the company should pay $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 plaintiffs. Exxon appealed. In 2006, the 9th US Circuit Court cut the award of punitive damages in half to $2.5 billion. Then, in a 5-to-3 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cut the amount of punitive damages again and ordered Exxon Mobil to pay just $500 million in punitive damages, one-tenth of the original jury’s ruling. That equates to about four days of Exxon Mobil’s net profits.” You can see how favorably the courts treat these jury-determined settlement costs. For Exxon, it’s just a few days of profits and they have more lawyers to throw at these issues than almost anyone else on the planet, unless it’s our own government that operates by bringing criminal charges.

This country is badly in need of re-implementing the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) and staffing the organization with field and marine biologists who can participate in efforts to understand oil spills and the devastation they generate on species and their interconnectedness. I have commented on this acute need in a previous posting. We only see the damage at the top, on the shores, in the form of dead and oily birds, turtles and a few mammals. We don’t have the capacity to see the impact on the ecosystem beneath or the effects of the new menace–the large subsurface oil plumes riding at mid-level depths in the ocean; the oil companies would like to keep it that way. For them too much knowledge is a bad thing. They would like us to remember that the oil platforms they put down become havens for fish to collect in the service of sport fisherman. Isn’t that a good enough benefit?

The lack of a strong, passionate environmental presence sitting at the Obama cabinet meetings has made it difficult for our urban president to find his voice on the Gulf oil spill. Someone needs to drive home the environmental disaster to Obama in such a way that an urbanite, who seems to have learned nothing about species interdependency and the potentially disastrous magnitude of the BP spill, can quickly get up to speed talking about phytoplankton, krill and other members of the Zooplankton group. He very badly needs to go out on a boat with a group of marine biologists and toxicologists, who can explain to him the dimensions of the problem and how seeing a bunch of oily birds, while visibly shocking, coupled to the regular summary of the spill on CNN (mostly consumed by showing the undersea footage of the oil leak bulging out if the drill rupture), is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg for the local fishing economy and the long-term health of the Gulf ecosystem. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a lawyer by training, doesn’t quite have the sophistication or experience to recruit the kind of scientific expertise and visibility required to assure the public that some level of scientific accumen is being applied to this disaster. In keeping with the corporate motif of the new world order, science and scientists don’t speak for BP, except through the corporate elites of the company, who know virtually nothing about biology; their objective is solely the public relations message and BP’s liability. Yet, biology is what this spill is all about and it is where the effort must be focused with education, research and a good dose of corporate honesty. School children in the region could be enlisted in the research effort to gather samples, make measurements, much like school children in Minnesota discovered and studied three-legged frogs. How refreshing it would be to see and hear the BP CEO tell us that BP has no idea what the long-term damage of this spill will do to the environment, but that they will begin to fund significant grants for the region to be studied as the long-term laboratory environment they helped to create.  At least that would be a starting point from which we could launch some serious research. Yet, we have to admit that the problem cannot be researched in the sense that no long-term projections can be made because we do not understand, nor do we have models for comprehending the impact we are witnessing from this spill. The new oil plumes beneath the surface represent a form of oil we have not encountered before and we don’t even know the cause. But, they potentially represent vast dead zones due to the lack of oxygen that has been reported near these sites.

Hurricane season is nearly underway and each day we experience continued oil gushing from the well, we run the risk of a single hurricane serving like an ocean Hobart machine, circulating and mixing the oil and water until it reaches the loop current and begins marching up the Atlantic coast. The city of Fort Lauderdale, a major oil import region, has begun discussions on the impact of Gulf oil that might find its way moving into the Atlantic coast, an event that could devastate the tourist economy of the region, to say nothing of the damage already done to the seafood industry that serves Florida and much of the country.

But, back to Alaska. If a spill should occur anything close to what we are seeing in the Gulf, once drilling in the Beaufort and and Chukchi seas begins, it will be impossible to devote anything significant to the cleanup operation, at least not for many months. Even Shell executives have agreed that “there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice.” The government has acknowledged that a major spill in the Arctic waters of the area could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up. How about impossible? However, they concluded that a large oil leak was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis. Well that was then (December, 2009) and this is now. The permit for drilling in the Arctic sea has been suspended, but that suspension could be lifted soon enough to see drilling this summer. Should a spill occur in these cold waters, the nearest Coast Guard facility is a 1,000 miles away, the nearest cleanup vessels and equipment are too few and at least 100 miles away, and the nearest airport where major supplies could be transported is Seattle, a few thousand miles away.

The Alaska waters where drilling permits have been issued, are vastly colder than the Gulf and any oil spill will take far longer to dissipate, no matter what the mechanism, be it biochemical breakdown or micelle formation and dispersal. For another, during the winter, weather patterns often include 65 mile per hour winds at temperatures in the -40 degree range, making rescue operations for any troubled rig virtually impossible. In the summer, the area serves as a huge breeding center for multiple species of birds that migrate from six different continents, including all of the other 49 states. Huge herds of caribou congregate on the Arctic coastal plane and Beluga whales have their calving season in these waters. To become more familiar with the region, check out Subhankar Banerjee‘s interview on TomDispatch.

Several years ago, GW Bush wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development. Fortunately, environmental organizations defeated this idea. But that took place when every environmental organization, everyone interested in sane ecological management, knew they had a hostile President to deal with and opposition to his leadership on almost every front was widespread and passionate. Today, in the current climate, with a Democratic President, the environmental movement has been much more subdued and has become more passive about the ocean drilling plans of Shell Oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, particularly since Obama announced permits for that drilling operation a few weeks before the BP Gulf oil spill. Perhaps the Gulf oil spill will serve to re-invigorate the environmental opposition to drilling and help the country move rapidly to a state of reduced oil dependency. It is not clear to anyone that the drilling demands of the international oil giants is really necessary. You might want to read Michael Klare on this important topic. So far however, Obama has shown himself to be just as much of an oil man as we had with GW Bush. The Minerals Management Service, the government oversight function for the oil companies has for years been deeply corrupted. The recent shake-up in the government oversight structure may improve this relationship, but Obama has a lot of repair work to do if these oil companies are ever going to conform to the needs of our society, rather than their own needs of high profits and reckless drilling practices, with little financial risk to their bottom line. Maybe this will be his wake-up call for the environment and Big Oil.

RFM

With the new financial reform bill close to agreement, it has become clear that Obama intends to un-Reaganize the American economy and reshape how the government spends its money. In place of the GI bill at the end of WW II, which gave us a new vibrant middle class, Obama believes that increasing access to education, improving our public school system and putting more money into research and technology, can achieve the same objectives by reshaping government spending priorities.   David Leonhardt, a New York Times financial writer, has an excellent article in the Times today that briefly covers the major historical trends of the New Deal, the GI Bill, Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson followed by the Reagan years, which really lasted from the time he was elected President in 1980 until 2009 when Obama took over. You could actually include the Jimmy Carter presidency in many ways, as a component of the Reagan era, since he began the march towards deregulation when he began the process with the airline industry, and by not recognizing the strength of the Democratic Party resting with workers and unions, both he and Clinton fractionated the very party that got them elected.
In retrospect, the last 16 months of the Obama Presidency have provided a new vision, one that has been partially obscured by the financial crisis and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, looking around the corner, if Obama can get elected again and continue with his policies of reshaping the way Federal expenditures get distributed, his visionary zeal might just change America to a country we can, once again, feel good about or at least feel better about our future as a livable country, one for which we don’t have to apologize.   This year’s election will surely be the most fascinating in many many years. The Teabaggers have taken some primary elections and unseated standard Republicans, like Bennett in Utah. If Democrats insert truly liberal and progressive candidates to oppose them (a big if), we may see, for the first time in our life time, political contests that will have the most dramatic impact on congressional composition and philosophy, because candidates will be promoting truly opposite views that can impact government in significant ways. Perhaps this will be the election year, when the nation decides whether they want to continue the cultural wars or whether such engagements are beneath a serious country with a set of serious problems.
During Obama’s first year as President, I was disappointed in his centrist, cautionary policies, including his cabinet selections. But, since the Scott Brown election, I see a different Obama, one who is trying to reverse Reaganism, but needs to be elected a second time before he can tackle the really big issues, like reducing the military budget and more wisely investing in education to reduce its cost. Remember, that until Ronald Reagan was governor of California, tuition at the University of California system was free and we didn’t concern ourselves about whether creationism should be taught in science classes (as governor, Reagan first proposed that as a test balloon to see if it resonated with the country). We could return to that long lost previous iteration of ourselves as a functional country, if we return to morphing our prior selves, when we had  a country committed  to education, science and technology as the driving engine for better jobs and a better economy. Then, in my opinion, the cultural wars of today will rapidly disappear and we could have a real culture again.

RFM

In the aftermath of  WW II, Anglo Iranian Oil had assumed the dominant position in Iran’s oil production and had constructed a huge refinery at Abadan.  Ironically, the seeds of nationalism had been sewn by Americans, both by the speeches of FDR and the fact that Americans who were present in Iran at that time, were mostly doctors and aid people, such that America’s image at that moment, in the early 1950s,  was one of a prosperous, do-good country, unlike anything Iranians had come to expect, based on their experience with the British (British colonialism in Iran meant that they did not train Iranians on how to make things work, like their giant refinery in Abadan. So when the British were forced out of Iran when the company was first nationalized by Mossadegh, they were able to shut down the refinery, further alienating Iranians).  Another source of outrage by Iranians against Anglo Iranian Oil came in 1950, when the Arab American Oil company, operating in Saudi Arabia, had agreed, under threat of nationalization, to share the profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis. The British however, were adamantly against such an agreement with the Iranians.

To understand BP and its tortured history with Iran, you might want to read Steven Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, which tells the unfortunate history of Iran’s march to Democracy and how America, by supporting the demands of Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), betrayed democracy and sided with oil and profiteering, with a little anti-communist rhetoric thrown in to confuse the issue.  Kinzer was recently interviewed on Democracy Now where he summarizes this well-known history. Toppling Mossadegh in turn led to the Iranian hostage crisis under Carter, the election of Ronald Reagan (perhaps with the aid of the  “October Surprise”) and the theocratic dictatorship that exists in Iran today. Kinzer extends his analysis to include the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and the American sponsorship of Iraq in their war against Iran (for whom we supplied intelligence and the helicopters that Saddam used to gas the Kurds). That single act of toppling Iran’s Democracy through a CIA coup, seems to pervasively wind its way through much of our history, including the events of 9/11.  New York Times writer James Risen also has a good piece available on this period in history, when the CIA turned to the dark side and permanently transformed what had been a good relationship between the democratically-elected Prime Minister (Mossadegh), the Iranian people and the American presence in Iran. The NYT also has a general website on the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government by the CIA serving British interests, where you can stroll through different sections of the unfortunate American participation. The American model developed in Iran, would serve for countless other, future CIA strategies to overthrow uncooperative or democratically elected governments, especially those in South America.

When Eisenhower was elected, we caste our lot with Anglo Iranian Oil and British interests. At the Times site, you can see the pictures of the players in this drama by scanning over the images to get their names. After the coup that deposed Mossadegh, we installed the Shah, whose torture and suppressive techniques administered through his SAVAK organization eventually led to the revolution in 1979 and the fractionated relationship we have with Iran today–a festering wound we refuse to allow to heal.

If we could go back and reverse one single step in the development of our policies in the Middle East, deposing Mossadegh and stamping out Democracy in Iran would get my vote as the one event we got completely wrong (not that we did very much right, as we continuously sided with oil interests against the rising tides of nationalism). We initiated the CIA coup that overthrew Mossadegh solely because Churchill requested it (by all accounts, Mossadegh was an exceptional leader, perhaps the best and brightest of the good men in the Middle East in those years–he was well-educated and committed to representative government; he was Man of the Year for Time Magazine in 1951 and hugely popular with the people of Iran; if he had a flaw, it was his inflexibility in dealing with BP) . Churchill was unable to get Truman to eliminate Mossadegh and preserve the interests of BP. However, once Eisenhower was elected, he agreed (largely because his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, wanted international companies to have unfettered access to the countries they operated in and he could always find communists even when there weren’t any); Dulles sent in the CIA, under the leadership of Kermit Roosevelt, who pulled the trigger and deposed Mossadegh. Today, we do not have a problem identifying our own nationalism: indeed, if anything, we seem to wallow in it, but we find it almost impossible to adequately recognize the nationalism of people  from other countries, particularly if we need something from that country. Somehow, we manage to convince the world that we are the only ones entitled to nationalism: everyone else’s nationalism has to get out of the way.  With us nationalism is  viral. Nevertheless, with the Shah installed in power after the coup against Mossadegh, Anglo Iranian Oil could not resume its previous position. There was too much national distrust of the oil company, which eventually changed its name to British Petroleum and initially had a 40% hold on the new oil consortium named the National Iranian Oil Company.

A question you’re all dying to ask is surely this: is the current Gulf oil spill somehow related to our meddling in the internal affairs of Iran in 1953? Preposterous? Maybe, but then again maybe not.  Was the toppling of Mossadegh, carried out through the CIA to protect the interests of BP, the non-verbal license for BP to acquire its swashbuckling attitude that allows the company to ignore safety issues and acquire a sense of swagger with confidence that brought them through the twentieth century into the twenty first and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they are now responsible for what could be the most environmentally destructive accident since the industrial revolution began? The most recent estimates suggest that the amount of oil being added to the Gulf is between 25,000 and 70,00 barrels or more a day, or roughly an Exxon-Valdez oil spill every few days. If we had allowed Mossadegh to nationalize Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), would we have a giant catastrophe spewing forth in the Gulf a mile beneath the surface of the water?  BP is the fourth largest corporation in the world and the largest in Britain. My own thinking is that if you can manipulate two powerful governments to do your bidding, as the British and Americans did to save BP from nationalization, then you, as a company are more likely to emerge from that experience with an unparalleled sense of corporate swagger that encourages disregard for the rules and laws passed by either of those governments, especially the two that you just outwitted. This might be one reason why BP is America’s largest oil supplier. If you’re a BP cowboy, after Mossadegh’s topple, you can keep your boots and spurs on as you walk down main street! The long threads of this interconnectedness seem too tempting to avoid sewing them into whole cloth, such that there is at least a tilt towards corporate arrogance. Or is it the fact that we just finished eight years of a presidency that encouraged and indeed insisted on oil company arrogance for now and into the future?  Maybe it’s not such a stretch to the imagination to see these connections and then wonder what kind of oil companies we are going to need if we ever get off of our dependence on black gold? It does not seem like BP is the model for the kind of oil company we need in the future. Indeed, it would have been so much better if we had allowed Mossadegh to stay and BP to go. After all nationalizing oil companies should help remove the two edged sword between cutting costs by reducing emphasis on safety standards and ruining the environment. The BP Gulf oil spill could be the tip of a new iceberg, as plans have been laid out to drill far deeper wells into the Gulf, as the technology for drilling advances, while the technology for protecting the environment doesn’t exist.

RFM

The President’s Cancer panel was setup in 1971, with three panel members who generate reports on the subject. At the release time of the report, only two panel members were in place, including Dr. LaSalle Leffall Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, both of whom were appointed by GW Bush. You can get a copy of the report here. If you load the pdf of the cancer report, use your pdf search engine and put in the words “drinking water” without the quotes. Then click on each found and read the many areas in which our drinking water has been compromised by man-made chemical additives. While that little exercise should shock you, the next question to ask is what are we doing about it? And the answer sadly, is not much, but there is some legislative movement now, where before there wasn’t anything being done about it, as discussion of the issue was among the many of our verbal social taboos.

The work of the panel focused on industrial, occupational and agricultural exposures as well as exposures related to medical practice, military activities, modern lifestyles and natural sources. In the controversial report (conclusions were immediately challenged by the American Cancer Society), one of the major points raised by the study related to the newborn, for whom the risk for cancer genesis is always greater. In our defenseless newborns, 300 chemical contaminants have been detected in cord blood; Some 41% of our population will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives and the question is unavoidable as to whether we have initiated a ticking time bomb in our newborns which sets them up for a date in later life with one type of cancer or another. The panel argues that this is the time to become proactive about the chemicals we are adding to the environment, most of which have not been evaluated for public safety. One ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A (BPA) is still found in many consumer products, despite evidence (still unsettled) that BPA has been linked to several diseases, including cancer. Europe has banned BPA and is far advanced over America in their attitudes and cautions about chemicals in the environment. Yet, while BPA may be getting the lion’s share of public attention at the moment, some naturally occurring substances such as radon have been associated with lung cancer (remember your basement radon detector?) and manufacturing byproducts, including formaldehyde and benzene are also carcinogens.

Perchlorethylene (PCE) is one of the solvents used in dry cleaning. Many incidents have occurred in which drinking water has been contaminated with high levels of PCE, which has been associated with an elevated breast cancer risk. Animals exposed to high levels of PCE develop kidney and liver tumors. Accidental release of tons of PCE into our atmosphere has occurred, with new uncertainties presented to us about safety in this industry. There are presently 28,000 dry cleaning establishments in the country that use these chemical solvents. Trichlorethylene (TCE), once used in dry cleaning, has found use in a variety of chemical industries and is listed as a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (a division of the WHO).  TCE is now the most frequently detected organic solvent in groundwater and is present in as much as 34 percent of the nation’s drinking water. Why aren’t we more alarmed?

The “Safe Chemicals Act” sponsored by Senator Frank Lautenberg, would give the EPA enhanced authority to regulate chemicals in our environment. As Lautenberg remarked, “America’s system for regulating industrial chemicals is broken. Parents are afraid because hundreds of untested chemicals are found in their children’s bodies.” The bill, while far short of a badly needed overhaul and new attitude about chemicals in our environment, would require manufacturers to provide a minimum of information for each chemical they produce, and EPA would have the authority to request any additional data it deems necessary to make a safety determination. At the same time, the bill seeks to avoid unnecessary or duplicative testing requirements.

The panel report argues that it is much better for us as a nation to be proactive in our skepticism about environmental contaminants and basically reverse our thinking. Right now, it seems that if there is no evidence pointing to acute harm by the chemical, it’s OK to use it. This is the time to reverse that thinking and demand rigorous safety testing, followed by an evaluation about whether the gains from adding the substance to our chemical environment are important enough to outweigh public risk if there is any chance that the substance might lead to short or long-term consequences. “Green chemistry” needs to be added to our list of green options. The problem with this strategy is that animal testing has limitations for judging acute effects and is of very limited value for judging long-term consequences, one of which includes a risk for cancer. So, what we truly need is a set of marching orders that begin to decrease the number of chemicals we add to the environment and eliminate as many of them as we can, either searching for better, more proven alternatives, or changing the industry in such a way that only harmless products are part of the business and manufacturing process.

Ever since Reaganism began in the 1980s, we have been sliding backwards in our attitude and vigilance concerning environmental regulation, product testing and the quality of our air and water. Agencies exist to protect our environment, but they have been emasculated by leadership from pro-business, Republican heads and employees. What feature of free market capitalism is it that protects us from environmental risks? I guess it must be the loss of customers as they die off prematurely from carcinogens and other toxic chemicals in the environment. The medical diagnostic industry is also facing a new level of scrutiny. Ionizing radiation exposure from radon and other occupational sources have been constant over the past 30 years, but Americans are now estimated to receive half of their total radiation exposure from medical imaging and other medical sources, compared with 15% in the early 1980s. With the trend towards specialization in medicine, doctors and radiologists are often unaware of the total radiation received in the past for any single patient.

The military is an especially egregious source of environmental contamination. Issues of secrecy and security shield us from knowing the true range and level of contaminants associated with military sites, but the report claims that 900 ongoing Superfund cleanups are found in abandoned military facilities. Cleaning up these sites represents one of the many hidden costs of our militarism. The report also points to drinking water contamination from military sites as an ever present danger. And, deniability is always a military option.

The major focus of this cancer report is not to identify and impugn a large number of environmental contaminants, but rather to emphasize that we are far too lax and far too permissive in allowing unfettered environmental access to the chemical and manufacturing industries. The panel raised five major problems that must be overcome if we are going to gain confidence that we have some control over our chemical environment, including 1) improved funding and staffing of agencies whose responsibility it is to monitor and test our chemical environment; 2) streamline the Federal and State regulatory agencies and improve enforcement of existing laws; 3) reduce excessive regulatory complexity; 4) strengthen laws regulating environmental contamination and, as always; 5) reduce the undue influence from industry that prevents more expansive public safety measures from being created and enforced. You can just about forget the first four of those objectives and by focusing  on the fifth, put your finger on the center piece of the problem–too much corporate influence over issues that are vital to Americans of all political parties. But of course, this issue will not be painted that way in the mainstream media, but will be portrayed as another dividing line within our political spectrum–proponents of more control are facilitating the march towards socialism. But, whether it’s coal mines in West Virginia, oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico or E. Coli infestations in our produce and meat supply, we know what poor enforcement of regulations and disregard for public safety looks like–what we have today defines the problem.

One expects that the report will be (and already is) under attack from several different directions. The two panel members are not toxicologists, though the staff members who wrote this report have obvious expertise in these areas. The cancer scare not only comes from the chemical agents directly, but, particularly in the case of breast-feeding women, through the indirect influence of chemicals that are passed on to the newborn through cord blood, as many of them get through the placental barrier and are also found in  high levels in breast milk. The report cites evidence that women carry more foreign chemicals in their bodies than do men and often show higher levels of hormone-disrupting substances compared to those found in men. Since childhood occupies an important phase of human brain development, does the chemical contamination of our environment alter brain development mechanisms, either in utero or in the critical postnatal period that is so essential for normal brain patterns of connectivity and function? What other aspects of our lives are being altered by the chemicals that surround us? Developmental brain disorders? Are they too part of the chemical environment spectrum of influence? Not only does cancer need to be explored, but the environmental impact on childhood development, particularly brain development, must be better understood. We need to strike while the iron is hot! It is quite conceivable, that if food and drug safety is improved, Obama’s greatest legacy to our culture could be in helping us face and improve the wild cowboy climate that presently occupies the decision-making about introducing more chemicals into the environment. Three hundred different chemicals found in the umbilical cord blood is not reassuring that we have control over our chemicals in our environment. Let’s face it–right now, we have no control and no policies that are reassuring.
RFM