The ecological effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill are still largely unknown. Josh Fischman, senior writer, is on the research vessel Endeavor in the Gulf of Mexico, with a team of university scientists seeking answers. He is filing reports from the ship. 

—100 miles off Pascagoula, Miss. 

Debby did Gulfport this past weekend. Or threatened to, enough to toss the Endeavor’s cruise plan up in the air. Tropical Storm Debby was barreling north across the gulf with 50-knot winds and 15-foot waves, but the forecasts were vague about whether she would turn east across Florida or west, right across Gulfport, Miss., and the area we want to study. The harbor in Gulfport is fairly exposed, and the captain didn’t relish the idea of staying in port and getting banged against the pier. So on Sunday we jogged four hours east, to a Coast Guard station and shipyard protected by an island at Pascagoula. It was fly-infested—the biting buggers were still on the ship days later—but it was quiet and it was safe.

And it gave Andrew Juhl a chance to talk about why he was on the ship. He was hunting for predators. Small single-celled predators, but still bigger than the oil-eating bacteria which they engulf with tiny whiplike appendages called flagella.

Juhl is a biological oceanographer who “didn’t even see the ocean until I was a teenager, because I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin,” he says. “But I was always interested in it, probably because I watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau as a kid.” He sees a lot of it now, as a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, where he holds an adjunct appointment and teaches. A slender, quiet man, Juhl spends a lot of his time near the water in Alaska, where he studies algae that grow inside sea ice, and on the water here in the South, where he has been part of the Ecogig, a group studying gulf ecology since 2010.

Here his interest is bacteria, in particular the kind that live off hydrocarbons like oil, or pieces of hydrocarbons, and a puzzle about them spewed by Deepwater Horizon. Every milliliter of seawater has about a million bacteria. What researchers found in the aftermath of the 2010 accident was that particular bacteria had started to degrade the oil.  But although their metabolic rates went up—the bacteria were more active—the population wasn’t growing by much.

“That’s sort of a paradox,” Juhl says. “You’d think if there’s a food source they’d start dividing more, and the population would increase a lot.” (Scarcity of nutrients like nitrogen, which are not a part of the oil, can limit population size, as one of Juhl’s colleagues, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, has pointed out. But not in this case, Juhl says. If lack of nitrogen was holding bacteria back then the metabolism would have stayed low along with population size.) The composition of the community changed—there were more bacteria that degraded alkanes, an oil component—but the overall population size didn’t go up much.

The explanation, Juhl thinks, lies in the next step up the ocean food chain: Micropredators, single cells just a few microns across that look like spheres with hairs sticking out of them, are grazing on the bacteria, thinning their ranks.

Read the rest at Chronicle.com. 

Image: Deepwater Horizon oil spill as seen from NASA's Terra Satellites, May 24, 2010. Photo by NASA's Earth Observatory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This image is in the public domain. 

This article originally appeared at Chronicle.com. 

In the front hall of the American Gothic cottage that Justin Morrill built in Strafford, Vt., hangs his meticulous, hand-drawn plan for its gardens and orchards. It dates to the late 1840s. Morrill, a blacksmith's son who never attended college, had enjoyed a successful career as a merchant, and he retired to his hometown at 38 to marry and indulge his passion for horticulture on a 50-acre hillside farm. He planned to try growing a wide variety of plants and trees, in addition to raising sheep and cattle, and his neighbors were welcome to visit to see the progress of his various experiments.

You could say that the map Marissa Keys is holding as she leads the way across a field here this afternoon is a descendant of Morrill's tidy garden outline. Ms. Keys, an agroecology major at Pennsylvania State University, is part of a joint Penn State-U.S. Department of Agriculture team studying ways to make the crops that feed dairy herds more sustainable. The map of the team's 13-acre project shows a patchwork of plots testing rotations of crops, herbicide levels, methods of distributing manure, and kinds of farm equipment—all with the aim of controlling weeds and pests effectively, cheaply, and safely while producing plenty of healthful food for the cows.

One of the team's many experiments will test canola as a winter cover crop. "It breaks pest and weed cycles," Ms. Keys says, adding that you can then press the canola to make biodiesel fuel for your tractor, as well as feed your cows canola meal.

Almost everything on this 2,000-acre spread of university land plays some role in research. Pieces of slate in the field can be lifted to count bugs and worms that have taken refuge beneath. On a slope nearby are plots set up so that the amount of moisture lost to the soil can be precisely calculated. Even the tractors here are research tools, says Bruce McPheron, dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State. The university worked with New Holland, the equipment maker, to prove that biodiesel fuel would not harm the company's engines.

All of this is, in a sense, Morrill's doing. He did not live out his days in Strafford as planned. Elected to Congress in 1854, he soon took the lead in pressing legislators to grant land to the states for the creation of agricultural colleges. President James Buchanan vetoed the first bill Morrill got passed, in 1859, but on July 2, 1862—150 years ago next month—Abraham Lincoln signed Morrill's second agriculture-school bill into law. Along with another measure he championed, in 1890, it created a system of land-grant colleges that rooted agriculture firmly in university research and helped democratize American higher education, creating institutions not for the sons and daughters of the upper classes but for the children of farmers.

Morrill's vision was that land-grant colleges could teach students to "feed, clothe, and enlighten the great brotherhood of man." As land-grant-university officials prepare to visit Washington this month to celebrate their institutions on the National Mall during the Smithsonian Institution's annual folklife festival, they say that the agriculture colleges that are at the core of Morrill's mission are more popular with students than they've been in decades, and that the institutions' pathbreaking research and teaching are more critical than ever in a world facing huge population increases, climate change, and shortages of energy, water, and food.

Read the rest at Chronicle.com. 

Image of a farm outside State College, PA, by Nicholas_T, licensed under Creative Commons.   

 
The Chukchi Sea serves as the western border to the National
Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. (Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/) 

In the July/August issue of Utne Reader, wildlife biologist Jeff Fair introduced us to the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an unlikely name for such a beautiful and crucial wildlife habitat on Alaska’s North Slope. Writing for Audubon Magazine, Fair offered some background on the 23-million-acre arctic reserve, the rich variety of migratory birds and caribou that live there, and the miniscule amount of oil being used as an excuse to introduce habitat-damaging oil infrastructure.

While Congress mandated “maximum protection” for the reserve’s wildlife from energy exploration and development back in 1976, the reality is that every president since – from Carter to Obama – has done little to ensure that protection. One could argue that they’ve actually made it easier for petroleum interests to gain a foothold in the refuge.

In May 2011, responding to high gasoline prices and the political call for greater domestic oil production, President Obama authorized the Interior Department to begin conducting annual lease sales in the reserve with that stipulation that “sensitive areas” be respected, specifically around Teshekpuk Lake. As Fair notes, the reserve has been “open” for oil leasing to private companies since 1981, but previous administrations haven’t extended the habitat protections that Obama’s has. Whether that approach is maintained, though, is the big question.

Hoping to “facilitate the responsible development of the abundant resources” in the reserve, the Bureau of Land Management released a Draft Integrated Activity Plan and Environment Impact Statement on March 29 that is open to public comment until June 15. The plan outlines four alternatives to the current management strategy ranging from no changes (Alternative A), to more significant habitat protection and oil and gas leasing on nearly 1/2 of the reserve (Alternative B), to less significant habitat protection and oil and gas leasing on 3/4 of the reserve (Alternative C), to widespread oil and gas leasing while still “protecting surface resources with a collection of protection measures” (Alternative D).

Wildlife supporters are most interested in seeing Alternative B selected by the BLM, as it offers the greatest protections for critical habitat around Teshekpuk Lake, coastal bays and lagoons, and 12 rivers throughout the reserve, while still offering oil and gas leasing on nearly half of the reserve. And, as Eric Meyers, policy director of Audubon Alaska notes, the amount of oil at stake is truly miniscule.

“Based on the government’s analysis in the Draft EIS, the difference between the alternative that would provide a true balance of oil development and protection of surface/wildlife values (Alternative B), and the next and far more aggressive oil development alternative (Alternative C) amounts to only about two weeks of oil consumption some ten years into the future,” said Meyers. “(It is) an entirely insignificant and inconsequential volume of oil that would make no difference to oil prices or national security.”

Meyers also emphasized that while the formal public comment period ends June 15, the BLM will be deliberating on the final plan throughout the summer, and concerned individuals should continue to express their views to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “The Final EIS is not due until the fall and that will be followed by a final Record of Decision, so opportunities to be heard will continue,” said Meyers.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich -- after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards -- but also a little pathetic. A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them—and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That—have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with. Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp. That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot. Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children—still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people... may even be more efficient while killing—and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you—because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.

Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age—he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry—plays rough: he regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance. Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore. In it he explained that he agreed with the California Congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that the time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant again and again. His dalliance with the truth about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than any other single “failing.” Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in 50 years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican Party on the issue. This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming. Put another way, the various right wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.

It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years. He did show a little leg to his liberal base in Rolling Stoneearlier this spring by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue. Last week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the president clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent, which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated. In fact, a spirited counter-movement has arisen in recent years. The very same weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block—at least temporarily—the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast. In the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything—if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers, delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able to claim one of the epic victories in political history—one that will last for geological epochs.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 

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Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben

Image by Ansgar Walk, licensed under Creative Commons.