You can’t tell where anyone stands even with a program and team roster. There is obviously something going on that people aren’t being told, and that isn’t a safe thing to do right now. People are angry and many are afraid. Sooner or later someone is going to snap if the people in charge don’t start paying attention.
The time for trying to minimize the problem is over, so the people in charge had better start telling the truth. Hell, local officials are already being openly rude to BP people, and that is not the way things have ever been done down here. If you are a local politician you are expected to say “excuse me” before you murder an opponent.
]]>She attended a Catholic girls’ high school, St. Mary’s Academy, where, like so many Obama appointees, she played basketball. Lubchenco attended Colorado College, where she fell in love with the ocean during a summer course in invertebrate zoology at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. After earning her BA in biology in 1969, she received her MS in zoology from the University of Washington in 1971, and her PhD in ecology from Harvard University in 1975.
She had a great start at Woods Hole… then went off the rails if you ask me. UW & Harvard… Seems like she was more interested in Political aspirations. *shrug*
I really don’t understand how someone with all her qualifications (even discounting her academic ones) can be allowing this to continue, and even helping the disaster continue.
She has served as president of the International Council for Science (the first woman to do so), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Ecological Society of America. She was a presidential appointee to two terms on the National Science Board (1996-2006), which advises the President and Congress and oversees the National Science Foundation. She co-chaired an Oregon gubernatorial advisory group on global warming that recommended actions the state should take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Lubchenco founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program that teaches environmental scientists to be leaders and communicators of scientific information to the public, policy makers, the media and the private sector. She currently serves as chair of the program’s advisory board. She also participated in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a five-year, international scientific assessment of the consequences of environmental changes to human well-being, and co-chaired the MA’s Synthesis for Business and Industry (PDF). She is also a Founding Principal of COMPASS (the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea), a collaboration among academic scientists, communication and media specialists that communicates academic marine conservation science to policy makers, the media, managers and the public.
Lubchenco served on the Pew Oceans Commission and now the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative (a merger of the Pew Oceans Commission and the US Commission on Ocean Policy). She is a director, co-chair or trustee of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, SeaWeb and the Environmental Defense Fund; Trustee Emerita of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and a former trustee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and the World Resources Institute.
Damned if I know! 😐
Anyway…
I found a cool techno-blog (with some blogs about the Horizon disaster, but also some other interesting blogs.)
]]>As a companion blog following the research, planning and production of a series of documentary films, The X-Journals seek out and explore revolutionary new technologies from both conventional and unorthodox sources, especially those technologies that could help to remedy significant threats to our planet and societies.
someone uses a straw to collect an oil blob on the beach in Pensacola
Slide 7 has this:
BP CEO Tony Hayward (pictured at a press conference in Louisiana on May 24) disputes that the oil plumes even exist. “The oil is on the surface,” he said. “There aren’t any plumes.” He argues that, because oil is lighter than water, it will always float to the surface. BP scientists, at any rate, have found “no evidence” of underwater oil clouds.
I’d call him a moron, but that would assume that he really is a moron, rather than the lieing criminal he actually is. Maybe he wants people to think he’s a moron and that will be his defense? 🙄 
This is from Der Spiegel (in English). 🙂
Oil Spill’s Real Threat Lies Beneath the Surface
The Gulf of Mexico spill is vastly larger than the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989, but where is all the oil? While efforts to protect coastlines have been making the headlines, the real ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is unfolding deep beneath the water’s surface.
Samantha Joye was sure she was right. Somewhere down there, the toxic clouds were sure to exist. And now she was holding the evidence in her hands. A thin film of oil glistened in one of the small sample bottles Joye had filled with water taken from more than 1 kilometer (3,300 feet) beneath the surface.
“You could see it. Everybody saw it,” Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, wrote on her blog. Besides, the sample taken from the Gulf of Mexico smelled as if it had come directly from a gas station.
Joye made this important discovery a few days ago on board the research ship Walton Smith, near the location where the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig went up in flames on April 20.
The scientists are now referring to the site as “Ground Zero.” They have spotted oddly shaped “pancakes of oil” floating on the surface there, Joye reports, as well as “bizarre orange and black stringers, as deep in the water column as you could see.”
And they have a Flash map with time-line for the best estimates of the spill that’s just scary! Click on the red dot’s on the time-line to see the progression:
Estimated Reach of the Deepwater Horizon Spill
It’s definitely going to get worse. 🙁
]]>This smells like lawyers doing the filtering by everyone involved. No one is allowed to say what they think unless they can prove it in court. The fact that the number two guy at the Energy Department was BP’s chief scientist before taking the job, and helped the Secretary [Minister in the rest of the world] of Energy get a huge grant from BP, does not make me a happy camper.
It seems like everyone in this administration is tied to Goldman Sachs and/or BP. This wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t thousands of qualified, experienced people in the US who aren’t tied to corporations and could use a job right now.
]]>In the news today (yesterday now), I found these two items. One from the Environment News Service (USA) where she is quoted as saying:
Hydrocarbons found in the samples 42 nautical miles northeast from the wellhead at the surface at 162 feet and 4,500 feet were in concentrations too low to do the actual fingerprinting, she said.
BP Fingerprints Found on Subsurface Oil in the Gulf
And this from News Australia:
“NOAA is confirming the presence of very low concentrations of subsurface oil at sampling depths ranging from the surface to 3300 feet (1006 metres) at locations 40 (74 kms) to 42 (78kms) nautical miles northeast of the well site,” she said.
Ms Lubchenco said officials have completed a process of “fingerprinting” the oil to confirm that it did in fact, come from the BP spill.
“The test results confirm that there is oil subsurface. We’ve always suspected that, but it’s good to have confirmation,” the NOAA chief said.
Oil from BP spill found 74km away
So, apparently, when speaking about the spill and links to BP in the USA, she “doesn’t know for sure”, but in International media, she is certain!
Maybe she’s certain that American’s are pig ignorant and don’t look at International news? *shrug*
Anyway, this is simply one of several I’ve seen. It will suffice for now.
“Curiouser and Curiouser”, Said Alice 😉
]]>OK, Back to Jane… She has received the Heinz Award for the Environment:
Jane Lubchenco receives the Heinz Award for the Environment for her role in broadening awareness of the importance of biological sustainability to the future of humanity, her efforts to raise the visibility of ocean issues, her commitment to opening the lines of communication between scientists and citizens, and her pioneering concept of the social contract that exists between science and society.
Based on a brilliant scientific career, and after years of dedicated service, Jane Lubchenco is one of our most respected and recognized ecologists. She has shown that, while science should be excellent, pure and dispassionate, scientists should not sacrifice their right – and must not ignore their responsibility – to communicate their knowledge about how the earth is changing or to say what they believe will be the likely consequences of different policy options.
So… given the impressive credentials, I don’t understand the discrepancies.
Continued…
]]>OK. Let’s have a look at who Dr. Jane Lubchenco is (or is purported to be):
First, her biography:
According to her Bio, she certainly has the academic qualifications and her husband, Dr. Bruce Menge, is a Marine Biologist also.
Dr. Menge has been working with Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon as a Community Ecology Instructor (from their blog):
Dr. Menge has also been involved in the USGS Mendenhall Research Fellowship Program:
Predicting Effects of Climate Change on Pacific Coast Intertidal Foragers
Both Jane and Bruch have been contributors and their publications used in several books, such as:
“Defending illusions: federal protection of ecosystems” By Allan K. Fitzsimmons
(also called: Science, Ecosystems and the Emperor’s New Clothes). Available via Google Books, see reference 16.
Continued…
]]>If you work for the Obama administration you probably got your graduate degree from an Ivy League school, Harvard in her case. Why anyone who was interested in marine biology would go to Harvard is beyond me, because most of the best research is done at schools that are tied to research institutes or on the the ocean. MIT has ties to Woods Hole. but the real work is done in the public universities of coastal states.
]]>I mean, all up it took me about an hour to find and check those doc’s, and there were dozens more. I figured they were the most relevant and debunks Dr. Liar. She is either lieing or got her PhD from one of those bogus online *Universities* (like Uni of Sucker-R-U). And the rest of the Gov from the Prez down also. And I really don’t get it. They can’t really believe they can hide the truth for long? Even Bushmoron wasn’t that stupid… OK, yes he was. Oh well… *shrug*
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