Mike Anderson of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium measures the first loggerhead turtle nest of the year, at Sunset Beach in Treasure Island, on Sunday. A beachgoer saw a turtle digging and alerted authorities. The nest will be monitored until the hatchlings emerge.
 
[JIM DAMASKE | Times

May 25, 2010
By Sara Gregory, Times Staff Writer

With the oil spill casting a shadow of danger, turtles begin making nests. Wildlife officials are cautiously waiting to see what impact the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will have on sea turtles as their nesting season gets under way. Biologists worry about oil spill’s effects on nesting sea turtles.

The number of loggerhead turtle nests along Pinellas beaches has grown moderately the past two years, recovering from an all-time low in 2007. Officials were hoping the growth would have continued or stayed the same, though what will happen now is anyone’s guess.
“Probably strange things,” said David Godfrey, executive director of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, an organization dedicated to advocating on behalf of sea turtles. “It’s really impossible to guess what this spill may do to the nesting season.”
The oil spill could affect turtles in a number of ways.
Oil in the gulf could leave adult turtles too ill to mate or make it to the beach to lay their eggs. If the oil reaches the shore, it could contaminate nests, cutting off oxygen to the eggs buried in the sand.
Hatchlings that make it back to the water could face even more challenges. They spend the first years of their life swimming in the loop current, which could become contaminated with oil. If that happens, oil could burn their skin and they could mistake tar balls for food.
“You can imagine this little mouth with this marble-sized tar ball in its mouth,” Godfrey said. “It’s not coming out.”
Pinellas County’s first loggerhead turtle nest of the season was discovered Sunday morning on Sunset Beach Treasure Island. That’s on track with when the first nests are usually found, said Mike Anderson, Clearwater Marine Aquarium’s supervisor of sea turtle nesting.
Nesting season began May 1 and continues until Oct. 31, though most of the golf ball-sized eggs will have been laid by the end of September, Anderson said.
Throughout that time, Anderson and his staff will patrol the beaches, looking for the telltale signs of turtle nesting: drag marks in the sand from flippers, a mound of sand near where the eggs are buried and more drag marks as the female turtles make their way back to the water.
Both Godfrey and Anderson stress that the spill’s full effects might not be known for decades, when the hatchlings born this season reach maturity.
“This spill keeps me up at night,” Godfrey said.
There were signs before the spill that the loggerhead population was struggling.
“We’ve really had an unusual last 10 years,” said Anne Meylan, a research administrator with the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute. About 55,000 nests were laid statewide each year in the late 1990s, a number that dropped about 43 percent by 2006.
Unprecedented cold weather in January left thousands of turtles in “cold stuns,” unable to move.
And in March, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fishery Service declared its intent to change the status of loggerhead turtles from “threatened” to “endangered.”
Florida’s other two turtle species, the leatherback and green turtles, already are listed as endangered. If the loggerhead turtle joins their ranks, it could mean extra efforts to identify and preserve crucial loggerhead turtle habitats.
For now, there’s only wait-and-see, Meylan said.
“Everybody’s just heartsick about it,” she said. “Turtles are dead center in this particular mess.”
Sara Gregory can be reached at (727) 893-8785 or sgregory@sptimes.com.
By the numbers
Loggerhead nests found in Pinellas by Clearwater Marine Aquarium
2005 105
2006 115
2007 38
2008 108
2009 138

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/opinion/28brooks.html

May 27, 2010

By DAVID BROOKS

In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the political debate has fallen into predictably partisan and often puerile categories. Conservatives say this is Obama’s Katrina. Liberals say the spill is proof the government should have more control over industry.

But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.

In the first place, people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters. At the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, a series of small systems happened to fail at the same time. It was the interplay between these seemingly minor events that led to an unanticipated systemic crash.

Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.

Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.

Third, people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices. More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking. That’s because they have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.

On the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a Transocean official apparently tried to close off a safety debate by reminding everybody the blowout preventer would save them if something went wrong. The illusion of the safety system encouraged the crew to behave in more reckless ways. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in a 1996 New Yorker essay, “Human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”

Fourth, people have a tendency to match complicated technical systems with complicated governing structures. The command structure on the Deepwater Horizon seems to have been completely muddled, with officials from BP, Transocean and Halliburton hopelessly tangled in confusing lines of authority and blurred definitions of who was ultimately responsible for what.

Fifth, people tend to spread good news and hide bad news. Everybody wants to be part of a project that comes in under budget and nobody wants to be responsible for the reverse. For decades, a steady stream of oil leaked out of a drill off the Guadalupe Dunes in California. A culture of silence settled upon all concerned, from front-line workers who didn’t want to lose their jobs to executives who didn’t want to hurt profits.

Finally, people in the same field begin to think alike, whether they are in oversight roles or not. The oil industry’s capture of the Minerals Management Service is actually misleading because the agency was so appalling and corrupt. Cognitive capture is more common and harder to detect.
In the weeks and hours leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, engineers were compelled to make a series of decisions: what sort of well-casing to use; how long to circulate and when to remove the heavy drilling fluid or “mud” from the hole; how to interpret various tests. They were forced to make these decisions without any clear sense of the risks and in an environment that seems to have encouraged overconfidence.

Over the past years, we have seen smart people at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, NASA and the C.I.A. make similarly catastrophic risk assessments. As Gladwell wrote in that 1996 essay, “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.”

So it seems important, in the months ahead, to not only focus on mechanical ways to make drilling safer, but also more broadly on helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity. There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.

This isn’t just about oil. It’s a challenge for people living in an imponderably complex technical society.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703957604575272880066140578.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories

May 29, 2010

By CARL BIALIK

The Gulf oil spill may be a good deal bigger even than the numbers issued Thursday suggest, some of the scientists who worked on the estimate said.

BP PLC’s oil well is leaking between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil a day, according to initial estimates announced by the U.S. Geological Survey on Thursday. Even using the more conservative figure, of 12,000 barrels a day, the spill already has become the largest in U.S. history, surpassing that of the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska in 1989. The USGS statement Thursday called the numbers “the overall best initial estimate for the lower and upper boundaries.”

But some of the researchers who came up with the range of 12,000 to 19,000 say that is merely the minimum amount gushing out, not the lower and upper limits.

“It would be irresponsible and unscientific to claim an upper bound,” Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an interview. Dr. Leifer is a part of the National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group, which produced the estimate.

UC-Santa Barbara issued a statement Thursday in which Dr. Leifer said that “it’s safe to say that the total amount is significantly larger” than 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. He urged that the statement be issued because “I wanted to stand up for academic integrity,” he said in the interview.

The university is providing, upon request, a document that explains how scientists who reported to the USGS arrived at their estimate by observing the plume of oil from the leak site on videos provided by BP. In the document, the research team, led by William J. Lehr, senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response and Restoration, states that it is providing “a range of values that represent an estimated minimum.”

“There are and will continue to be differing estimates and conclusions within the group,” USGS spokeswoman Julie Rodriguez said in a written statement. These disagreements “represent a healthy and important part of the process that will continue to help us get closer to more and more accurate estimates,” Ms. Rodriguez said.

Dr. Leifer, in an interview, and the report also said BP provided low-quality video of the leak site that hindered efforts to make an estimate. The footage had a resolution of 720 x 480 pixels, not much higher than that of a YouTube clip, and “appeared to be video of videos, rather than original high definition images,” the scientists wrote. BP later provided more videos, but too late for this round of estimates.

“After some initial hiccups around video resolution and file sizes, we have been supplying [researchers] with large quantities of data,” BP spokesman John Curry said.

The confusion over the initial estimate of flow rate highlights for Dr. Leifer the need, in the aftermath of such incidents, “for some kind of scientific SWAT team to go and collect data, independent of the cause of an incident,” he said. “That would be in everyone’s interest, because that would give everyone confidence in the numbers.”

Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com

 http://www.sws.org/ 

 Society of Wetland Scientists Mission 

The mission of the Society of Wetland Scientists is to promote understanding, scientifically based management, and sustainable use of wetlands. The current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has the potential to impact coastal wetlands and cause enormous short- and long-term damage to ecosystem services they provide. The potential short- and long-term economic costs are therefore massive and unprecedented.

Statement from the Environmental Concerns Committee

Society of Wetland Scientists

Dennis F. Whigham, Chair

Stephen W. Broome

Curtis J. Richardson

Robert L. Simpson

Loren M. Smith

May 18, 2010

Coastal wetlands are essential components of healthy and productive coastal fisheries, and nowhere within the lower 48 states has the critical linkage between wetlands and fisheries resources been more clearly demonstrated than in the Gulf Mexico (e.g., Chesney et al. 2000, Crain et al. 1979). Louisiana alone, for example, generates 30% of the nation’s seafood production (Day et. al., 2005) and accounts for 40% of the total wetlands in the conterminous United States (Richardson and Pahl 2006). The ongoing loss of wetland resources in the Gulf of Mexico and the potential economic and environmental costs, especially in Louisiana and Florida, is an issue of international concern. The impacts of the current oil spill are unknown but the potential for direct and indirect environmental damage to coastal ecosystem services are extraordinary. Both the oil and the activities used in the cleanup have the potential to adversely affect wetland flora and fauna.

Thus far, most of the oil has remained offshore but reports of oil reaching the coast have been geographically extensive ranging from Florida to Louisiana. The potential geographic extent of the spill could result in the exposure of many types of coastal wetlands to oil, ranging from mangroves in Florida, Texas, Mexico and islands in the Caribbean basin to tidal freshwater wetlands along the Gulf Coast. Most wetlands that will potentially be exposed to oil are saline and brackish tidal wetlands, which are nursery grounds for economically important coastal fish and shellfish. Seagrass beds are also at risk.

Experimental and monitoring studies around the world have found that oil commonly has a negative impact on emergent wetlands and the biota that reside in them (e.g., Lin et al. 2002). However, the degrees of impacts are variable and complex (Pezeshki et al. 2000), depending on the species composition of the wetland vegetation (e.g., Lin and Mendelssohn 1996), the amount and characteristics of the oil, the extent of weathering, and the geographic location of the wetland. Tropical and subtropical mangroves seem especially vulnerable to oil spills (e.g., Garrity and Levings 1993, Proffittt et al. 1995), as was demonstrated along the Persian Gulf following the Gulf War and in Panama following a major spill in 1986. Coastal wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico are also sensitive to oil as are species-rich tidal freshwater wetlands, although long term impacts span the gamut from rapid recovery within a growing season to delayed recovery for several years (Hester and Mendelssohn 2000). In

addition to direct impacts on emergent plants, oil that reaches wetlands also impacts animals that utilize the wetlands, especially benthic organisms that reside in the substrate.

Studies of impacted wetlands have demonstrated that wetlands can recover from the impacts of oil spills but the recovery process varies from extremely slow in mangroves swamps (e.g., Burns et al. 1993, 1994) to relatively rapid in grass-dominated marshes (Pahl et al. 2003). The recovery of coastal wetlands from the current oil spill will be further complicated due to current stress on wetland plant productivity from the ongoing 1 cm yr

The current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has also focused discussion on where offshore drilling should be allowed. The disaster at the Deepwater Horizon platform demonstrates that the placement of oil wells in deep offshore waters has the potential to have far-reaching geographic impact. The disaster has also demonstrated that current technologies are not adequate to assure that an accident of this magnitude in deep ocean areas can be effectively managed without enormous economic and environmental costs. While the short- and long-term impacts of the current oil spill on ecosystem services unfold, the Society of Wetlands Scientists supports (1) the immediate inspection of all offshore oil facilities and remediation, if required, to ensure that an accident of this type does not happen again and (2) a moratorium on all new deep-water oil exploration and extraction until further technological advances are available and tested to assure that the impacts of accidents of this sort can be managed efficiently to assure minimal negative impacts to coastal resources.

References

Burns, K.A., S.D. Garrity, and S.C. Levings. 1993. How many years until mangrove ecosystems recover from catastrophic oil spills? Marine Pollution Bulletin 26: 239-248.

Burns, K.A., S.D. Garrity, D. Jorissen, J. MacPherson, M. Stoelting, J. Tierney, and L. Yelle-Simmons. 1994. The Galeta Oil Spill. II. Unexpected persistence of oil trapped in mangrove sediments. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 38: 349-364.

Chesney, E.J., D.M. Baltz, and R. G. Thomas. 2000. Louisiana estuarine and coastal fisheries and habitats: perspectives from a fishse eye view. Ecological Applications 10: 350-366.

Craig, N.J. R.E. Turner, and J.W. Day Jr. 1979. Land loss in coastal Louisiana (U.S.A.) Environmental Management 3: 133-144.

Day, J.W., Jr., J. Barras, E. Clairain, J. Johnston, D. Justic, G.P. Kemp, J. Ko, R. Lane, W.J. Mitsch, G. Steyer, P. Templet, and A. Yañez-Arancibia. 2005. Implications of global climatic change and energy cost and availability for the restoration of the Mississippi delta.

Garrity, S.D. and S.C. Levings. 1993. Effecs of an oil spill on some organisms living on mangrove (

Hester, M. W. and I. A. Mendelssohn. 2000. Long-term recovery of a Louisiana brackish marsh plant community from oil-spill impact: vegetation response and mitigating effects of marsh surface elevation. Marine Environmental Research 49:233-254.

Lin, Q. and I.A. Mendelssohn, 1996. A comparative investigation of the effects of South Louisiana crude oil on the vegetation of fresh, brackish, and salt marshes. Marine Pollution Bulletin 32: 202-209.

Lin, Q., I.A. Mendelssohn, M.T. Suidan, K. Lee, and A.D. Venosa. 2002. The dose-response relationship between No. 2 fuel oil and the growth of the salt marsh grass,

Pahl, J. W., I. A. Mendelssohn, C. B. Henry, and T. J. Hess. 2003. Recovery trajectories after in-situ burning of an oiled wetland in coastal Louisiana, USA. Environmental Management 31:236-251.

Pezeshki, S.R., M.W. Hester, Q. Lin, and J.A. Nyman. 2000. The effects of oil spill and clean-up on dominant US Gulf coast marsh macrophytes: a review. Environmental Pollution 108: 129-139.

Proffitt, C.E., D.J. Devlin, and M. Lindsey. 1995. Effects of oil on mangrove seedlings grown under different environmental conditions. Marine Pollution Bulletin 30: 788-793.

Richardson, C. J. and J. W. Pahl. 2006. Katrina consequences assessment and projection Report. Chapter 23, in FEMA Report on Impacts of Hurricane Katrina. February 2006. Washington, D. C.

Stumpf, R. P. and J. W. Haines. 1998. Variations in tidal level in the Gulf of Mexico and implications for tidal wetlands. Estuarine, Coastal, and Shelf Science 46:165–173.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster and wetlands -1 relative sea level rise (Stumpf and Haines 1998) and land subsidence due to natural and human-related factors within the Louisiana coastal zone (Richardson and Pahl 2006). Ecological Engineering 24: 253-265. Rhizophora mangle L.) roots in Caribbean Panama. Marine Environmental Research 35: 251-271. Spartina alterniflora. Marine Pollution Bulletin 44. 897-902.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.truthout.org/obamas-missing-moral-narrative59968
SUNDAY 30 MAY 2010
Saturday 29 May 2010
by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: jurvetson; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

Barack Obama may be one of the best communicators of this generation, but he is not living up to his own talents. In a year of disasters, communication failure doubles the disasters.

If, as he says, the monster spill was his highest priority from Day 1, he needed to communicate that from Day 1 – or at least Day 3 or 4. It took five weeks for him to tell the nation what he and his administration were doing. The result was visible in the press conference yesterday. He was on the defensive. He needed to be on the offensive – from early on. The choice is not doing or communicating. It is doing **and** communicating.

His narrative: This is a tough, unprecedented situation, but I’m in charge, and I’ve been very busy, in the Situation Room where I belong, not on TV. I’m fully competent. I’m a good policy wonk – ask me any question about details. I’m honest. I admit my few policy mistakes. I think about the details day and night. Don’t think I’m oblivious.

It’s defensive, trying to overcome criticism that should never have been allowed to accumulate. But worse, it’s weak when it needs to be strong.

The president did do the required minimum. He placed a moratorium on offshore drilling and cancelled oil leases in the Gulf and off Virginia. He appointed a commission to make safety recommendations. And he is reorganizing the Mining Management Service. All to the good, but…

Crises are opportunities. He has consistently missed them. Today was a grand opportunity to pull together the threads – BP and the spill, Massey and the mine disaster, Wall Street and the economic disaster, Anthem BlueCross and health care, the Arizona Immigration Law, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even Afghanistan. The press threw him fastballs straight down the middle, and he hit dribblers every time.

It’s not that he said nothing to tie them together.  But there was no home run, no unifying narrative, no patriotic call to the nation on the full gamut of issues. Instead, there were only hints, suggestions, possible implications, notes of concern – as if he had been intimidated by the right-wing message machine.

And yet Obama, of all political leaders, could have done it, because he did before in his campaign.

The central idea is Empathy. Democracy is based on empathy, on people caring about one another and acting to the very best of their ability on that care, for their families, their communities, their nation, and the world. Government must also care and act on that care. Government’s job is to protect and empower its citizens.

That idea is what draws together all the threads. The bottom line for corporations (whether BP, Massey, Anthem or Goldman Sachs) is money, not empathy. The bottom line for those who hate (whether homophobes, the Arizona Legislature, or al Qaeda) is domination and oppression, not empathy.

Empathy, and acting on it effectively, is the main business of government. And Obama knows it in his heart.

Yet the right wing has intimidated Obama into dropping not just the word “empathy,” but the idea. Empathy is a positive deep connection with other people in general and with all living things, the ability to see and feel as they do.  The right wing, which shows little empathy, has confused empathy with a bleeding-heart sympathy for individuals, which they see as a weakness. And though Obama has repeatedly made the distinction clear, he has allowed the right wing to intimidate him into abandoning “the most important thing my mother taught me.”

At the very end of the press’ questions, there was a hint of the campaign Obama.
 
…I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications not just for this generation, but for future generations.
I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have.

And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that they’re comments are fair; on the other hand, I probably think to myself, these are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are – and to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.

So the thing that the American people need to understand is that not a day goes by where the federal government is not constantly thinking about how do we make sure that we minimize the damage on this, we close this thing down, we review what happened to make sure that it does not happen again. And in that sense, there are analogies to what’s been happening in terms of in the financial markets and some of these other areas where big crises happen – it forces us to do some soul searching. And I think that’s important for all of us to do.
 
Here, at the very end, he allows the empathy and the moral vision to come out. Future generations, the sacredness of nature over the immediate economic consequences, caring for this incredible bounty that we have, identifying with folks who see fishing as part of who they are, analogies to what’s been happening in the financial markets, soul searching.

That should have – and could have – been the central narrative drawing all the threads together. The narrative about the daily competence and effort should have been in service of the central narrative of his administration. It should be, and can be, the central narrative of American democracy.

But to make it central and powerful would be confrontational. It would bring him head-to-head with right-wing ideology – empathy-free, self-interest maximizing, with disdain or even hatred for those seen as lesser beings. It is self-reinforcing:  a value-system that above all promotes that value-system itself. That is why right-wing Republicans always vote no to his proposals. Because to vote yes would strengthen an empathy-based moral system and weaken their own.

Because right-wing ideology takes precedence over empathy, there will be little or any real bipartisanship with those on the hard-core right.  The right is provoking confrontation. It cannot be avoided. The president should be confronting the right wing on all issues – not issue-by-issue as a policy wonk, but with the master moral narrative that makes sense of our country’s values.

Here’s what that would mean. The following “shoulds” are not mine. They follow naturally from President Obama’s own values as he articulated them is his 2008 campaign, and as they leaked out, largely unnoticed, during his press conference.

The president recognizes that financial reform requires dealing with systemic risk, which means not mere regulation, but restructuring the financial system to minimize, and if possible eliminate, systemic risk. Applying the analogy to oil spills, it would mean no more deep-water drilling because major systemic risks (“worst case scenarios”) cannot be eliminated when you drill starting a mile down where no human being can go and drill three miles deeper.

Like other large corporations, BP uses cost-benefit analysis to maximize profits. It is no surprise that, to save money, BP chose inferior materials in Deepwater Horizon, materials whose defects may well have caused the explosion. The use of cost-benefit analysis for a corporation’s benefit (and not the public’s) is a dangerous practice in many industries.  Cost-benefit analysis itself, used this way, should be considered as an important component of systemic risk by the President’s commission on safety.

The president should support the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR ACT, which will actually cut gasoline consumption radically by 2050 and carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, while stimulating the economy by providing significant financial dividends to all adult citizens, eliminating government imposition on business, and making those who profit from selling polluting fuel pay to clean it up and develop alternative energy. CLEAR is far superior to cap-and-trade alternatives.

The president should generalize from oil spills to coal mining, banning the blowing up of mountaintops and the fouling of streams, and imposing serious safety restrictions on all mining.
The president should review the covert operations imposed by the military and cancel those that are inconsistent with American values.

The president should order military leaders under his command to support the elimination of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

The president should ask the First Lady to sponsor a major government program to do research on and support empathetic parenting, along the lines of his 2008 Father’s Day speech.
And much more.  A great deal follows from a unified moral stance.

Empathy and the discipline to act effectively on it, when seen as the basis of democracy and American values, can be powerful. It can unify the major policies of the administration, and unify people of good will – and that is a majority of our citizens.  But only if the president communicates empathy effectively, and acts on it consistently.

Empathy Now!

Special thanks to Richard Charter