The Case of the Vanishing Oil Spill: A Parable

ABC News reported July 26 that the oil cleanup brigades are having trouble finding oil to clean up (emphasis added):

For 86 days, oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP's damaged well, dumping some 200 million gallons of crude into sensitive ecosystems. BP and the federal government have amassed an army to clean the oil up, but there's one problem -- they're having trouble finding it.

At its peak last month, the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.

[…] The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels.

Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.

"[It's] mother nature doing her job," said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.

The well has been capped for only two weeks, and already nature has done an “astonishing” amount of the work that the cleanup folks had expected to do.

This says a lot about our planet’s ability to accommodate shocks to the ecosystem.

Think about it.  Experts have been taken completely by surprise by the way the Gulf of Mexico is cleaning itself up. 

And yet, we’re told by many that the science is settled concerning climate change, and that there remains no credible opposition to the notion that we’re nearing a tipping point of irreversible damage to our planet.  What’s really astonishing is the hubris of “experts” who think their knowledge of climate is anywhere near the level needed to make predictions like that.

Pause and reflect.

 

(Image found here)