Too hot to handle

I have a question for all the global warming deniers: Where are the billions of humans that populate the planet going to live when vast areas become uninhabitable?

Climate change could make much of the world too hot for human habitation within just three centuries, research released Tuesday showed.
Scientists from Australia's University of New South Wales and Purdue University in the United States found that rising temperatures in some places could mean humans would be unable to adapt or survive.
"It would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about seven degrees Celsius (13 Fahrenheit), calling the habitability of some regions into question," the researchers said in a paper.
"With 11-12 degrees Celsius warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed."
Researcher Professor Steven Sherwood said there was no chance of the earth heating up to seven degrees this century, but there was a serious risk that the continued burning of fossil fuels could create the problem by 2300.
"And under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees (Celsius) or even more," Professor Tony McMichael said.
"If this happens, our current worries about sea level rise, occasional heatwaves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties will pale into insignificance beside a major threat -- as much as half the currently inhabited globe may simply become too hot for people to live there."

And since there is simply no way that we are going to stop burning fossil fuels for at least several decades, if not a few centuries, this study clearly becomes very important and troublesome.
So, deniers out there, I’m listening.

Make sure you sleep enough!

Looks like evidence has been found that too little sleep can shorten one’s life span, as well as too much sleep, although for very different reasons:

Sleeping consistently for less than six hours a night may cause an early death, but too much sleep could also mean problems, according to a study that claims to have found unequivocal evidence of the potential harm from abnormal sleep patterns.

It found that those who generally slept for less than six hours a night were 12% more likely to experience a premature death over a period of 25 years than those who consistently got six to eight hours' sleep. Evidence for the link was unequivocal, the researchers concluded.

It also concluded that those who consistently sleep more than nine hours a night can be more likely to die early. Oversleeping itself is not seen as a risk but as a potential indicator of underlying ailments.

"Whilst short sleep may represent a cause of ill health, long sleep is believed to represent more an indicator of ill health," said Professor Francesco Cappuccio, who led the study and is head of the Sleep, Health and Society programme at the University of Warwick.

The study noted that previous research into lack of sleep had shown it was associated with ailments including heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes.

I wish I could take a nap right about now…

Why shouldn’t I call you a bigot?

I love this article because it invalidates gay haters’ and homophobes’ argument that gays are mean spirited for calling them bigots, when in reality, according to the word’s definition, that’s exactly what they are:

On Saturday Weigel caused a stir when he tweeted "I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years, no one will admit they were a part of that."

Absolutely! Opposing gay marriage is the moral equivalent of supporting anti-miscegenation laws.

By definition, bigots are people with unshakable baseless prejudices. There is absolutely no reason, besides blind prejudice, to deny same sex couples the right to civil marriage.

You can use religious language to express your belief that gays and lesbians are disgusting second class citizens unworthy of rights that heterosexuals take for granted, but it doesn't make your position any less bigoted. Logically, there is no reason to put same-sex relationships on a lesser legal footing than opposite sex unions, unless you think there's something wrong with them.

You can insist you don't wish gay people any harm. Perhaps not. But there were lots of pro-segregationists who didn't wish ill upon black people, but still didn't want to drink out of the same fountains. They too were bigots.

You can point out that discrimination against gays and lesbians is a longstanding tradition, but that doesn't excuse your bigotry. If anything, it makes it worse. It was one thing to fear what the expansion of gay rights might do when gays and lesbians had no rights. Today we're decades into gay liberation and none of the dire predictions have come true. For example, children raised by same-sex parents are at least as healthy and well-adjusted as those raised by opposite sex parents—and no more likely to self-identify as gay.

So, if you're still clinging to those irrational fears in the face of evidence, guess what? That's bigoted. If, like the voters of California, you voted to break up families in the name of preserving family values, that makes you a hypocrite and a bigot.

There’s more in the full post.

A Quote By

New Zealand speed skater Blake Skjellerup who recently came out of the closet:

“Gays are too often given a stereotype. Back when I was 18, and becoming serious about my sport and my Olympic goals, if I could have seen an athlete like myself out there – with whom I could relate to – my journey would have been a lot easier.  [American figure skater] Johnny Weir meets a specific stereotype, I meet a specific stereotype and [Welsh rugby player] Gareth Thomas meets another. Being gay is just like any other personality trait: it’s multifaceted. I can’t personally relate to Weir or Thomas, and nor will many other young gay athletes out there. But maybe some of them will see something in me to relate to. The more types we provide, the more we’ll appeal to people [who are struggling with their sexuality.]”

Donate your organs

I believe that organ donation upon one’s death is the best last decision one can make.  Why should you hold on to a bunch of organs that will slowly die, decay, and turn into dust when someone else might benefit from them instead?

If you can save someone else’s life after you are dead, why not do it?

A lawmaker is trying to make it easier to harvest organs, and I fully agree with his efforts:

A New York assemblyman whose daughter is alive because of two kidney transplants wants his state to become the first in the nation to pass laws that would presume people want to donate their organs unless they specifically say otherwise.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky believes the "presumed consent" measures would help combat a rising demand for healthy organs by patients forced to wait a year or more for transplants. Twenty-four European countries already have such laws in place, he said.

If he succeeds, distraught families would no longer be able to override their loved ones' decisions to donate upon their death. And eventually, hospitals would be able to assume the deceased consented to have his or her organs harvested, unless the person refused in writing.

Advocates say the availability of healthy donor organs is low just about everywhere nationwide, where 106,000 people are on a waiting list that averages three to four years for each type of organ.

But serious emotional, medical and ethical concerns worry families, who currently can stop organ harvests even if their loved ones agree to donate.

Presumed consent, opponents say, could force someone to become a donor against their will. It also might lead patients viewed as prospective donors to worry about how hard a medical team will work to save them if there is a greater benefit to harvesting the organs.

As I said, this makes sense to me and I hope they switch the consent to presumed, especially when it’s so easy for family members to override one’s wishes to donate his or her organs.

I can see how someone might feel like doctors won’t do all they can to save them if they know they can take the patient’s organs instead, but I doubt that that would really occur, since doctors swear an oath to do all they can to save a patient’s life unless it goes against that person’s wishes.

BP’s oily mess

Watch this video and weep.

The 2010 spill - Update

The lowering of the big containment dome, alas, was not successful.  Some crystals formed inside it making it unusable.  A second, smaller device seems to have been successfully put in place on one of the smaller leaks:

Efforts to staunch the gusher continued Wednesday. The "top-hat" oil containment device has reached the sea floor and should be in position over the wellhead and operational by the end of the week, BP said.
A larger containment vessel was unsuccessful in stopping the flow of oil from the gusher about 5,000 feet underwater.
BP built the smaller dome after a much larger, four-story containment vessel, designed to cap the larger of two leaks in the well, developed glitches Saturday. Ice-like hydrate crystals formed when gas combined with water and blocked the top of the dome, making it buoyant.
If attempts to cap the well fail, BP may try to plug the leak by shooting debris -- shredded tires, golf balls and similar objects -- under extremely high pressure into the well's blowout preventer in an attempt to clog it and stop the leak. The blowout preventer has been partially successful in sealing the well, but did not fully close when the rig exploded and sank.
Suttles said BP also is drilling a relief well to try to divert the flow to another pipe.
"That started about a week ago," Suttles said. "That work continues. The well is at about 9,000 feet."
It may take up to three months to reach the target area, and progress will slow the deeper the drill bit goes, said David Nagel, executive vice president of BP America.

So now the big dome structure has joined the sunken rig at the bottom of the ocean, which is slowly turning into a dead pool/trash dump:

We might be powerless.
The oil flowing out from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico may be under such great pressure that we do not possess technology to stop the tragedy. Chances are quite good we have no true sense of the dire nature of the situation. The facts that have been ascertained, however, lead to a dark scenario.
Although BP and Washington are trying very hard to convince the public that everything possible is being done to stem the flow of crude, there is seemingly little that might be accomplished. 5000 feet below the surface of the water with oil blasting out at tens of thousands of PSI, and wreckage from the giant rig scattered about, fixes are not easy to find. The latest plan is for a special funnel to be placed over the spout, which will then force the flow into a pumping channel. But how does a funnel get placed over the top of anything pushing at that kind of pressure? Consider that story to be an unrealistic solution.
A well blowout in 1979 offers a bit of context; except the Deepwater Horizon horror show is already about to transcend what happened in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico. The Ixtoc 1 rig blew and began to spew crude that flowed uninterrupted for nine months.
The Ixtoc disaster, however, is spit in the ocean compared to the British Petroleum apocalypse. Estimates are the current blowout is putting 200,000 gallons or 5000 barrels of crude per day into the waters of the Gulf. Ixtoc's blowout was not capped until two relief wells were drilled and completed at the end of those nine months, and regardless of optimistic scenarios from the federal government or BP, relieving the pressure on the current flow is probably the only way to stop the polluting release of oil. The only way to relieve that pressure is with additional wells. No one is going to honestly say how much time is needed to drill such wells but consider the scope of environmental damage we are confronting if it requires at least as long as Ixtoc. Nine months of 5000 barrels of crude per day ought to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a lifeless spill pond and set toxins on currents that will carry them to deadly business around the globe.
NOAA apparently believes the situation is on the verge of getting worse. A leaked memo suggests that the tangle of pipes on the ocean floor are covering and constraining two other release points. Pressure is likely to blow those loose and, according to NOAA, the gusher will increase by "orders of magnitude." In most interpretations, that phrase means a ten-fold rise in the flow, which will replicate the Ixtoc disaster in three days.
And there are no guarantees relief wells are the fix. That is a complicated project. They are drilled to intersect the main well and then concrete is forced down the holes to seal the leaking well. What do we do, if that doesn't work? Humans cannot function at 5000 feet of ocean depth and the mitigation efforts currently are being handled by robotic remotes. What is left to us as a solution other than an explosive device, which is often what is deployed during above ground blowouts? Given the pressures reported and the amount of flow, we may need a bunker-buster nuke to be placed over the wellhead. We can then begin to talk about the water pressures caused by burst at detonation and residual radiation. Is that a better or worse situation? Certainly, aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico is doomed unless there is a reclusive genius to step forward and save us from our great failure.
Anyone who thinks this tragedy is not going to result in massive kills of marine life is either blind, ignorant, or in denial. The one scenario that we all refuse to confront is the possibility that it is beyond our capabilities to stop this undersea blast of oil. If that is the case, the flow continues until the pressure eases, which might be years. How much ecological injury will that cause our planet?
Nobody knows.

Meanwhile, the investigation into this colossal failure is starting to bring to light the ugly truth that a series of equipment failures, lack of oversight and regulation, and bad decisions all combined to cause this catastrophe:

Details of a likely blowout scenario emerged this week for the first time from congressional and administrative hearings. They suggest there were both crew mistakes and equipment breakdowns at key points the day of the explosion.
In the hours leading up to the explosion, workers finished pumping cement into the exploratory well to bolster and seal it against leaks until a later production phase. After the tests that indicated leakage, workers debated the next step and eventually decided to resume work, for reasons that remain unclear.
At the same time, heavy drilling fluid — or mud — was being pumped out of a pipe rising to the surface from the wellhead, further whittling the well's defenses. It was replaced with lighter seawater in preparation for dropping a final blob of cement into the well as a temporary plug for the pipe.
When underground gas surged up uncontrollably through the well, desperate rig workers tried to cap it with a set of supersized emergency cutoff valves known as a blowout preventer. However, the device was leaking hydraulic fluid and missing at least one battery, and one of its valves had been swapped with a useless testing part.

Who in his right mind would think that swapping a security device’s part for a useless piece of junk would be a smart idea?
One of the morons who helped cause this disaster apparently.  It’s on your conscience now.
I hope they make them pay through their teeth for all the damage they are and will be causing and punitive damages on top of that.

The 2010 spill – update

Oil has been confirmed to have made land impact on Louisiana’s easternmost border.
From Raw Story:

Oil sheen from a massive crude spill in the Gulf of Mexico has started washing ashore on an island off Louisiana, officials said Thursday, confirming a land impact for the first time.
BP spokesman John Curry said three emergency response teams had been sent to the island, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) offshore, and were deploying inflatable booms to try to protect the prime marsh and wildlife area.
The Chandeleur Islands form the easternmost point of Louisiana and are part of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge -- the second oldest refuge in the United States and home to countless endangered shorebirds.

The NYTimes.com reports on the dangers to the entire food chain from both the oil spill and the incredible amount of chemicals being used to limit its impact on the environment:

But biologists are increasingly alarmed for wildlife offshore, where the damage from a spill can be invisible but still deadly. And they caution that because of the fluidity between onshore and offshore marine communities, the harm taking place deep at sea will come back to haunt the shallows, whether or not they are directly hit by the slick.
The gulf’s deeper water harbors 10 species of threatened sharks, 6 species of endangered turtles, manatees, whales and innumerable fish.
It is also a temporary home for the eggs of dozens of species of fish and shellfish, whose offspring spend their earliest days floating along currents at the surface of the water — the very layer where most of the oil settles.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of experience in how oil affects marine life, ecosystems, coastal communities, and fisheries,” said Christopher Mann, with the marine program of the nonprofit Pew Environment Group. “The iconic images of oiled seabirds are just the tip of the iceberg, because oil spills affect life up and down the food chain.”
Spring is mating and spawning season for almost everything in the gulf: Fill a jar with plankton from the local waters in the spring and it will typically contain the larvae of 80 species. All the eggs and hatchlings are surface dwellers, with almost no ability to swim away from the slick.
The fumes are particularly dangerous when the crude is fresh, because some strong toxins evaporate early. With a onetime spill, the slick gets less dangerous over time, but in the gulf, where the well has not been capped, there is a constant supply of new vapors.
Dr. Solangi said he was worried for dolphins. “They have to be awake to breathe,” he said. “If they become anesthetized, they will die. If they become intoxicated by fumes, they won’t survive.”
Even normal feeding might expose sea creatures to harm from the spill: sea grass and other vegetation covered in oil are ingested by fish that are then eaten by bigger fish and finally by manatees or other marine species. It is this food-chain effect that worries Larry Schweiger of the National Wildlife Federation.
“It is not a question of whether all these species will be affected now. It is when,” he said.

Finally, CNN.com reports that the first containment dome is ready and BP has already started work on lowering it in position over the largest leak:

A massive dome began its descent into the Gulf of Mexico to cap a gushing oil leak about 5,000 feet below the surface, a BP official said Friday.

The arduous process of lowering the four-story containment dome and getting it in place is expected to continue into the weekend. The technique has never been attempted at the depth of the leak spewing from the sunken oil rig, officials said.
Oil washed ashore on Louisiana's barrier islands and drifted west past the mouth of the Mississippi River on Thursday. An ominous pinkish-orange foam mixture of seawater and crude oil streaked across large stretches of water in the northern Gulf and turned up on the shores of the Chandeleur Islands, off southeastern Louisiana.
The hope is that the container will collect the leaking oil, which would be sucked up to a drill ship on the surface. If the operation is successful, BP plans to deploy a second, smaller dome to deal with a second leak in the ruptured pipe.

Let’s hope this “band-aid” works and the biggest leak is patched.  That would potentially decrease the amount of oil being dumped daily into the ocean.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill

More bad news.  Actually, news so bad the term catastrophic doesn’t begin to describe it:

In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow.
Federal officials have raised the possibility of a leak of more than 100,000 barrels a day if the well were to flow unchecked, but the chances of that situation occurring were unclear.
Also on Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, told Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, that the spill would clearly cause more than $75 million in economic damage, the current cap on liability for drilling accidents.
Mr. Nelson and the two Democratic senators from New Jersey, Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, have introduced legislation to raise that cap to $10 billion, and to make sure that the new limit applies to this spill.
While BP continues to acknowledge its responsibility to shut off and clean up the oil, it is being barraged by government officials and civil lawyers who are redoubling efforts to ensure that the company’s legal obligations are clearly defined and strictly enforced.
Attorneys general from the five Gulf Coast states have been drafting a letter to BP that will lay out demands. In the letter, they are expected to urge BP specifically to define what is meant by its repeated statement that it intends to pay “legitimate” claims, a term Attorney General Troy King of Alabama said was unacceptably nebulous.
For now, weather patterns seem to be holding the giant oil slick offshore, and are expected to do so for several more days, temporarily sparing the coast — and sparing BP the renewed criticism that would surely come with oil landfall. A containment dome is being readied to drop over the worst of the leaks.

So we could be looking at a disaster that is 10 times bigger than the worst estimates we’ve been given so far.  This could mean that the entire northern part of the Gulf of Mexico could be turned into a dead zone for decades to come, with countless animals dying and no businesses related to fishing or tourism being able to thrive.
And let’s not forget that there are many other drilling platforms out there that could have an accident like this at any point, compounding the catastrophe.
Link.

Another man-made disaster

When I first heard that an oil drilling platform, the Deepwater Horizon, had caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico, I figured it would only be a problem for the oil company that owned it, and given their enormous profits, I wasn’t feeling too bad for them.
Unfortunately, that’s changed now.  After the rig’s explosion and subsequent sinking, the connection between it and the oil reserve below sea level ruptured in multiple points and BP, the oil company that owns the oil field, hasn’t been able to stop the flow of oil into the water.
As a consequence, an environmental disaster far worse than the one caused by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 is inevitable, especially because of the fragility of the wetlands and the richness of wildlife in the area.
Excerpts from various sources.  BBC News:

Rear Admiral Mary Landry said 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) a day were now thought to be gushing into the sea 50 miles (80km) off Louisiana's coast.
One fire-fighting expert told the BBC the disaster might become the "biggest oil spill in the world".
"Probably the only thing comparable to this is the Kuwait fires [following the Gulf War in 1991]," Mike Miller, head of Canadian oil well fire-fighting company Safety Boss, told BBC World Service.
"The Exxon Valdez [tanker disaster off Alaska in 1989] is going to pale [into insignificance] in comparison to this as it goes on."
If US Coast Guard estimates are correct, the slick could match the 11m gallons spilt from the Exxon Valdez within less than two months.
On Tuesday Adm Landry, who is in charge of the clean-up effort, warned that work on sealing the leaking well using robotic submersibles might take months, and that the coast guard would attempt to set light to much of the oil.
With the spill moving towards Louisiana's coast, which contains some 40% of the nation's wetlands and spawning grounds for countless fish and birds, she said a "controlled burn" of oil contained by special booms could limit the impact.
Environmental experts say animals nearby might be affected by toxic fumes, but perhaps not as much as if they were coated in oil.
BP says it has not been able to activate a device known as a blow-out preventer, designed to stop oil flow in an emergency.
The idea of placing a dome directly over the leaks has only been done in shallow water before and is still two to four weeks from being operational.
BP will also begin drilling a "relief well" intersecting the original well, but it is also experimental and could take two to three months to stop the flow.

NYTimes.com:

About 210,000 feet of boom had been laid down to protect the shoreline in several places along the Gulf Coast, though experts said that marshlands presented a far more daunting cleaning challenge than sandy beaches.
Underscoring how acute the situation has become, BP is soliciting ideas and techniques from four other major oil companies — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and Anadarko. BP officials have also requested help from the Defense Department in efforts to activate the blowout preventer, a stack of hydraulically activated valves at the top of the well that is designed to seal it off in the event of a sudden pressure release.
Other efforts to contain the spill included a tactic that Admiral Landry called “absolutely novel”: crews awaited approval on Thursday night to begin deploying chemical dispersants underwater near the source of the leaks. Aircraft have dropped nearly 100,000 gallons of the dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil, a more conventional strategy.
BP is also designing and building large boxlike structures that could be lowered over the leaks in the riser, the 5,000-foot-long pipe that connected the well to the rig and has since become detached and is snaking along the sea floor. The structures would contain the leaking oil and route it to the surface to be collected. This temporary solution could take several weeks to execute.
“All that movement is going to continue to stress and fatigue the pipe and create more leaks,” said Jeffrey Short, Pacific science director for Oceana and former chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who helped clean the spill from the Exxon Valdez in 1989.
“This is not on a good trajectory,” he added.
The next solution is drilling relief wells that would allow crews to plug the gushing cavity with mud, concrete or other heavy liquid. The drilling of one such well is expected to begin in the next 48 hours, Mr. Suttles said, but it could be three months before the leak is plugged by this method.
The legal and political dimensions of the oil spill spread as well on Thursday, with lawyers filing suits on behalf of commercial fishermen, shrimpers and injured workers against BP; Transocean; Cameron, the company that manufactured the blowout preventer; and other companies involved in the drilling process, including Halliburton.

Raw Story:

An oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control and drifted inexorably toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday as fishermen rushed to scoop up shrimp and crews spread floating barriers around marshes.
"It is of grave concern," David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. "I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling."
The oil slick could become the nation's worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.
Government officials said the blown-out well 40 miles offshore is spewing five times as much oil into the water as originally estimated — about 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, a day.
At that rate, the spill could easily eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history — the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 — in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor.
Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells typically hold many times more oil than a single tanker.
"You're pumping out a massive amount of oil. There is no way to stop it," he said.
An emergency shrimping season was opened to allow shrimpers to scoop up their catch before it is fouled by oil. Cannons were to be used to scare off birds. And shrimpers were being lined up to use their boats as makeshift skimmers in the shallows.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency Thursday so officials could begin preparing for the oil's impact. He said at least 10 wildlife management areas and refuges in his state and neighboring Mississippi are in the oil plume's path.

CNN.com:

A huge oil spill oozing toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday threatens hundreds of species of wildlife, some in their prime breeding season, environmental organizations said.
"The terrible loss of 11 workers (unaccounted for after the rig explosion) may be just the beginning of this tragedy as the oil slick spreads toward sensitive coastal areas vital to birds and marine life and to all the communities that depend on them," said Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for the Louisiana Coastal Initiative, in a statement.
Coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida could be at risk, the organization said.
"For birds, the timing could not be worse; they are breeding, nesting and especially vulnerable in many of the places where the oil could come ashore," she said. "The efforts to stop the oil before it reaches shore are heroic, but may not be enough. We have to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, including a true catastrophe for birds."
It's not just birds that could be affected, although they are usually the first to feel the effects, said Gregory Bossart, chief veterinary officer for the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. The birds are right at the surface, get covered in the oil and swallow it, causing liver and kidney problems.
"They need to be rescued and cleaned," he said.
But the coastline of Louisiana, with its barrier islands and estuaries, "is a very unique ecosystem. It's very complex," Bossart said.
Plankton found in the estuaries nourish organisms all the way up the food chain. Crabs, mussels, oysters and shrimp feed on the plankton, he said. Oil smothers the plankton, meaning they cannot eat.
Also, "the estuaries here are a nursery ground, literally a nursery ground, for the entire fish population in this area," Bossart said.
River otters in the region eat mussels and other animals. And "we know, in this area right now, that there are sperm whales. There are dolphins right in the oil slick," he said.
If an oil spill is small enough, animals can leave the area.
"Some of them can get away," Bossart said. "It's totally dependent on the size of the slick, and this is huge."
Exposure to the oil for a prolonged period of time can result in a toxic effect on the skin, and mammals can suffer lung damage or death after breathing it in, Bossart said.
"When the oil starts to settle, it'll smother the oyster beds. It'll kill the oysters," he said.
The spill also threatens the Louisiana and Mississippi fishing industry, as crab, oysters and shrimp along the coast could be affected, along with numerous species of fish. Gulf shrimp are in their spawning season.
More than 400 species are threatened by the spill, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported Thursday, citing the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
Species of beach-nesting terns and gulls, beach-nesting shorebirds, large wading birds, marsh birds and ocean-dwelling birds are also at risk, along with migratory shorebirds and songbirds, the Initiative said.
The migratory songbirds move across the Gulf during a two-week period from late April to early May, for instance.
"The journey across 500 miles of open water strains their endurance to its limits," the Initiative said. "They depend on clear skies and healthy habitats on both sides of the Gulf in order to survive the journey."
According to a 1998 study by Louisiana State University, more than 500 million birds fly over the Gulf and enter the United States along coastal areas in Louisiana and Texas each spring.

CNN.com:

Louisiana is the No. 1 producer of shrimp and oysters in the United States, while fishing remains a major industry on the Mississippi coast even after casino gambling has come to dominate the local economy.
The Gulf Coast hasn't seen a major oil spill in about 40 years, Crozier said. Most of the toxic components in the crude spill are likely to evaporate in the sun, but a "physical mess" is likely to remain in the marshes.
"The occasional drum has fallen overboard, but we've never had anything of this magnitude," he said.
Wilma Subra, a chemist who advises the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, said hundreds of spotters are watching for signs of the slick along the shoreline. But until the damaged well is capped, the coast could be hit over and over again when weather patterns shift.
"This is just going to be unbelievable," Subra said. "It's not going to be just a one-time event."

Yahoo! News:

Crews continued to lay boom in what increasingly feels like a futile effort to slow down the spill, with all ideas to contain the flow failing so far.
"I've been in Pensacola and I am very, very concerned about this filth in the Gulf of Mexico," Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said at a fundraiser for his U.S. Senate campaign Sunday night. "It's not a spill, it's a flow. Envision sort of an underground volcano of oil and it keeps spewing over 200,000 gallons every single day, if not more."
Fishermen from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle got the news that more than 6,800 square miles of federal fishing areas were closed, fracturing their livelihood for at least 10 days and likely more just as the prime spring season was kicking in. The slick also was precariously close to a key shipping lane that feeds goods and materials to the interior of the U.S. by the Mississippi River.
Even if the well is shut off in a week, fishermen and wildlife officials wonder how long it will take for the Gulf to recover. Some compare it to Hurricane Katrina, which Louisiana is still recovering from after nearly five years.

"It's probably easier to fly in space than do some of this," Charlie Holt, BP's drilling and completion operations manager in the Gulf of Mexico, said Sunday.
Everything engineers have tried so far has failed. After the April 20 oil rig explosion, which killed 11 people, the flow of oil should have been stopped by a blowout preventer, but the mechanism failed. Efforts to remotely activate it continue to prove fruitless. On the surface, windy weather and waves have hampered plans to burn the oil and made booms all along the coast ineffective.
The oil probably could keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to relieve pressure from the first.
Besides the immediate impact on Gulf industries, shipping along the Mississippi River could soon be limited. Ships carrying food, oil, rubber and much more come through the Southwest Pass to enter the vital waterway.
Shipment delays — either because oil-splattered ships need to be cleaned off at sea before docking or because water lanes are shut down for a time — would raise the cost of transporting those goods.
Even if the oil stays mostly offshore, the consequences could be dire for sea turtles, dolphins and other deepwater marine life — and microscopic plankton and tiny creatures that are a staple of larger animals' diets.
Moby Solangi, director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss., said at least 20 dead sea turtles were found on the state's beaches. He said it's too soon to say whether oil contamination killed them but that it is unusual to have them turning up across such a wide stretch of coast, nearly 30 miles.
None of the turtles have oil on them, but Solangi said they could have ingested oily fish or breathed in oil on the surface.
The situation could become even more grave if the oil gets into the Gulf Stream and flows to the beaches of Florida — and potentially whips around the state's southern tip and up the Eastern Seaboard. Tourist-magnet beaches and countless wildlife could be ruined.
BP has not said how much oil is beneath the seabed the Deepwater Horizon rig was tapping when it exploded. A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that it was tens of millions of barrels. Fryar said any numbers being thrown out are just estimates at best.

Scary.  Maddening.  Sad.  Heartbreaking.
When we told the kids what was happening, their eyes opened wide.  They couldn’t understand how something like this could happen.  I can’t either.
In our daily lives, in this modern society, we need energy to operate anything and everything.  That energy comes primarily from oil, which can be collected on land or sea.  Naturally, it’s much harder to control in the water, so I would think that the safeguards there should be paramount, more important than even the ability to drill for oil in the first place.
Obviously, oil barons don’t agree with that reasoning.  As a result, we’re now witnessing the latest oil related environmental disaster unfolding right before our eyes.
My heart goes out to all those whose livelihood will be affected, but above all to all the poor animals who will lose their lives because of our shortcomings.