Gulf Oil Slick

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Sabine Gallais

Look, it's pretty simple. The Gulf of Mexico as we knew it is now dead. And, we did it. The frustrating thing about almost any government response to an emergency is that it’s hard to tell if their incompetence is deliberate or intentional since they’re so good at both.

I don't need science to tell me that.

Okay no, you don't. But you DO need science to understand what impacts there will be and how serious they will be. You DO need science to understand the air hazard. You DO need science to predict the flow of oil. You DO need science to clean up the mess.

No, you don't need science to know that an oil spill happened and you don't need science to know that the government has bungled the response. But everything AFTER that requires science. People can pray for the oil to disappear from now until the Universe undergoes heat death in another 30 billion years or so and it won't do a damn bit of good. When this mess is cleaned up (and it will be eventually) it will be science that played a crucial part in that happening. When the Gulf of Mexico rebounds (and it WILL rebound, life has seen far, far, far worse than this in the last 4 billion years) it will be science that helps us understand what was preserved and what was lost. So in order to truly assess this event as it unfolds and all of its downstream implications requires science.

Oh and lest anyone say that science got us into this mess, not even wrong. The failure of the Deepwater Horizon was a failure of engineering, capitalism and governance but it wasn't a failure of science.