Chile Forum

We can be sure that there are ideologically oriented story-tellers on all sides of this issue

Dr. David Valentine - one of the world's leading experts on oil-eating bacteria:
We have found no Alcanivorax borkumensis in the deepwater plumes.
Dr. Valentine is a biogeochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara - received funding from the National Science Foundation to characterize the microbial response to the Gulf oil spill. The National Science Foundation has funded Dr. Valentine's research into how the oil-eating microbes are dealing with the spill, and whether or not Corexit is interfering with the microbes' ability to break down the oil.

I want to talk about the uses of skepticism in everyday life. I want to talk about how skepticism -- prioritizing good evidence and critical thinking over ideology and preconception, which includes declining to accept propositions without good evidence, and letting go of conclusions when the evidence doesn't support them -- can make our lives happier, healthier and more richly satisfying. I want to talk about the real challenges that a skeptical approach to everyday life can present... and why the rewards make those challenges so worthwhile.

I took a look at the record of Dr Hazen's work in this area. It is impressive.

Looks as though there is enough of that cognitive dissonance for everyone on the forum.
Time will tell, I reckon.

Hazen’s interpretation has its skeptics. “Most of the science associated with this spill has been oversimplified,” says John Kessler, a chemical oceanographer at Texas A&M University in College Station. In a good-faith effort to make sense of what’s going on, many researchers look to offer interpretations based on too few data, he charges.
For instance, he says, “what Hazen was measuring was a component of the entire hydrocarbon matrix,” which is a complex mix of literally thousands of different molecules. Although the few molecules described in the new paper in Science may well have degraded within weeks... “there are others that have much longer half-lives — on the order of years, sometimes even decades.”
Moreover, he points out, many of the tools traditionally used to gauge biodegradation don’t work well in the field. A few teams have lately begun transitioning to use of more sensitive probes, he says.
And data from those more sensitive tools are fueling his skepticism of Hazen’s report that microbes have been erasing deep-sea plumes. As recently as August 22, ... “I spoke to some of those researchers out there [in the Gulf], and they told me they were still seeing plumes.”

... as Reuters notes:
According to WHOI oceanographer Richard Camilli, the plume could already be hundreds of miles from its previous location, and Hazen’s team could simply have missed it. “The plume is not a stationary object,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
University of South Florida microbial ecologist John Paul, part of a recent study that found oil in Florida fish spawning beds and contradicted federal claims of the oil’s disappearance, wasn’t convinced by the new results.
The differences in bacterial abundance, diversity and hydrocarbon degrading potential are “slight” between plume samples and regular Gulf seawater, said Paul. He also said that the gene-tagging technologies used by Hazen’s team are used by few researchers “because they are often problematic in execution and interpretation of results.”
According to University of Maryland aquatic toxicologist Carys Mitchelmore, Hazen’s team only measured the breakdown of select compounds in the oil. “There’s lots of other chemicals in the oil,” she said.
She also stressed that it’s essential to identify what happens when oil is degraded. That catch-all term implies that it just vanishes, but “sometimes things can be degraded into more toxic components,” said Mitchelmore. The latest study did not make those measurements, nor did it test how microbes interacted with chemical oil dispersants used during the disaster.
“The big take-home is that we don’t know much about many things related to this spill, the oil fate and its effects” said Mitchelmore. “There are huge data gaps and uncertainties, conflicting data from many aspects, and this will continue to happen based on the huge complexity of studying this.”

And BTW... g~j wonder who pays his salary...
Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

As Lawrence Berkeley Labs notes, the research was funded by BP:
Hazen ... conducted this research under an existing grant he holds with the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) to study microbial enhanced hydrocarbon recovery. EBI is a partnership led by the University of California (UC) Berkeley and including Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP.
Reuters also picks up on the potential conflict of interest:
Funding for the study was provided by the Energy Biosciences Insitute, a joint project of the University of California, Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Chicago at Illinois-Champaign and BP, who gave the EBI a $500 million, 10-year grant. Terry Hazen sits on the EBI’s Executive Committee, as does BP executive Tom Campbell. Conflicts of interest are rarely as black-and-white or simple as they seem, but this ought to be mentioned.

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:Fresh crab, oysters, shrimp, fish from the gulf on your plate? ... you go first.

patagoniax wrote:

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:Fresh crab, oysters, shrimp, fish from the gulf on your plate? ... you go first.

If you knew how much raw sewage the Cubans alone dump into the Gulf, you'd never eat anything from the Gulf again.

Chefs Digging In to Gulf Seafood - Restaurants confident their catch is safe.

When President Obama took his August microvacation along the Gulf of Mexico, he swam in the water, munched on fish tacos, and said, “Let me be clear. Seafood from the gulf is safe to eat.” He’d already dined on some during a trip in June and lived to tell, but post-BP seafood has been a tough sell. “People see the images and think, automatically, it’s over,” says Ralph Brennan, whose family owns 12 restaurants in New Orleans and who battled the same misconception five years ago, after Katrina. “It’s a perception challenge.”

The thought of 200 million gallons of oil spewing into the gulf is enough to give anyone pause, but at this point, you’d think folks would be clamoring for almost any alternative to the half billion suspect eggs the feds began recalling the same week as the president’s outing. Gulf fishers—shrimpers, in particular—have had a tough time of late. Many had only just rebounded from Katrina when the well blew less than two weeks before the opening of the season. Worse, over the last 15 years they’ve lost the bulk of their market share to foreign imports. More than 90 percent of the shrimp consumed in this country comes from Thailand, China, India, and Ecuador, where the shrimp is raised in ponds so overcrowded, they also serve as breeding grounds for salmonella, bacteria, and parasites, which are combated by adding massive doses of antibiotics and fungicides to the water. Then there’s the taste and texture, which Dave Pasternack, chef at Manhattan’s Italian seafood mecca Esca, calls “disgusting.”

Given the imports’ lovely provenance, it’s ironic that Americans are now squeamish about the catch in the gulf. We spot-test less than 2 percent of the shrimp that comes in, compared with the 20 to 30 percent required by the European Union. Contrast that to what’s going on in the gulf, where waters must be free of oil for a month before fishing is allowed. Samples of all fish and shellfish (directly from the water, as well as from docks and markets) are then aggressively tested for contaminants by both the FDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which subjects them to microscopic analysis and the “sniff test” (by people trained to detect the presence of oil). To Pasternack, such measures mean that “gulf seafood is the safest seafood in the world right now.”

Pasternack was in New Orleans last week to show the flag and to go fishing with Donald Link, the James Beard award-winning chef-owner of Herbsaint, Cochon, and others. After a rigorous session of eating and drinking at Galatoire’s, the two headed south, where they bow-fished for redfish and hooked everything else that came their way—including gar, which they turned into “meatballs” with pancetta when they returned to one of Link’s restaurant kitchens. “Man, the life in the water is unbelievable,” Pasternack told me after a night and a day on the water. “The quantity and variety is amazing. We were in a place where I kept hearing there was lots of oil, but I didn’t see any.” There were, however, lots of docked boats, whose captains were afraid that the high cost of gasoline and ice would not be offset by sales to a panicky public.

Anyone with doubts about the seafood would have been convinced by the feast Link and Pasternack cooked up at an event sponsored by the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Among the dishes were pan-roasted shrimp, redfish “on the half shell,” and Pasternack’s spaghetti with his grandmother’s crab sauce. Throughout the spill, Esca served red snapper from Alabama and from and Pensacola, Fla. (“The only really good snapper comes from the gulf”), along with Louisiana shrimp. He’ll do the same, he says, at Eataly, Mario Batali’s new complex opening this week in Manhattan. Pasternack will man the fish market, restaurant, and raw bar, and says, “I’ll be having Louisiana shrimp and gulf fish, I can promise you that.”

patagoniax wrote:

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:Fresh crab, oysters, shrimp, fish from the gulf on your plate? ... you go first.

I always enjoy hearing from people who believe that the Gulf would be clean were it not for leaking oil. Eating anything that comes from the Gulf of Mexico should first take into account the qualities and quantities of non-oil crap that has been and continues to be dumped into it. If you knew how much raw sewage the Cubans alone dump into the Gulf, you'd never eat anything from the Gulf again.

The Mississippi River dumps much worse crud, more persistently toxic and in enormous amounts - worse than any oil problems. That includes thousands of tonnes of pesticides and herbicides including atrazine, alachlor, and metolachlor, along with earlier and now prohibited DDT, chlordane, and dieldrin which are insoluble but still comprise a significant part of the river pollution spectrum - and these all have much more persistent toxic effects than oil particularly since the toxins accumulate in the food chain in ways that oil does not.

Then there is fertilizer runoff and industrial pollution in the Mississppi River discharge that includes tonnes of chromium compounds and other heavy-metal residues. The non-oil crud from the Mississippi creates huge dead zones. One dead zone created by non-petroleum toxins from the Mississippi drainage is supposed to be the same size as Alabama. Together these have a worse impact on shrimp and other fisheries than the oil. But as they say, we pick our poisons. Or maybe just selectively ignore some.