Monthly Archives: August 2013

Gulf Woes Persist – BP Denies

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Shirking Responsibility in the Gulf

By STEPHEN TEAGUE
Published: July 30, 2013

BILOXI, Miss. — IF you don’t live near the Gulf Coast, you may have the impression that the area has fully recovered from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the largest environmental disaster in American history. Sadly, that’s not the case for tens of thousands of gulf residents still trying to put their lives back together.

That is, however, what BP wants the public to believe — which is why it is now engaged in an aggressive legal and public-relations campaign to limit how much it pays individuals and businesses for the losses its reckless behavior caused. After having a hand in this huge disaster, the company wants to leave these communities to rebuild on their own, even as it takes in record profits.

The spill resulted in the release of more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and the deaths of 11 people. In September 2011 a federal investigation found BP responsible for the leak, and in November 2012 the Department of Justice reached a court settlement with the company that included a $4.5 billion fine.

In 2010 the company set up a $20 billion fund to settle claims arising from the disaster, and since then it has made payments to hundreds of thousands of individuals and businesses affected by the spill. In 2012 a federal court took over supervision of the fund.

But tens of thousands of gulf residents still haven’t been fully compensated for their losses, and many are struggling to make ends meet. Many low-wage workers in the fishing and service industries, for example, have been seeking compensation for lost wages and jobs for three years. In many cases, their claims aren’t successful because they can’t afford the legal help required to navigate the complex claims process.

Their troubles stem in part from BP’s increasingly brazen attempts to stonewall payouts. Most recently, the company made a motion in court to freeze payments on tens of thousands of legitimate claims, arguing that a staff attorney from the Deepwater Horizon Court-Supervised Settlement Program, the program responsible for evaluating compensation claims, had improperly profited from claims filed by a New Orleans law firm. The attorney is said to have received portions of settlement claims for clients he referred to the firm.

But the alleged bad behavior of one attorney does not justify freezing the payment of all claims, as BP has demanded, especially when the firm handled a small fraction of the claims that have been submitted for compensation. In any case, the attorney has resigned, and Carl J. Barbier, the federal judge who is overseeing the settlement, ordered an investigation, which is continuing. So far the judge has refused to freeze payments while the investigation is under way, a ruling that the company is appealing.

Of course, this isn’t really about the possible extent of the damage done by the attorney. BP is using the case to cast doubt, both in public and in the courts, on the entire process. And it’s working: its talking points have been echoed in mainstream media coverage, which has so far featured few voices of actual oil-spill victims.

Such guilt by association ignores the robust measures built into the settlement program to ensure a fair compensation system. The fraud-detection mechanisms are so extensive that the processing of claims is slowed down to accommodate them.

Meanwhile, the company has fought aggressively to undermine individual claims. In some instances, BP has tried to deny payment of claims that its own settlement program had already deemed legitimate.

The company’s efforts know no bounds and have pushed the claimants and their legal representatives to the limit. My organization, the Mississippi Center for Justice, is one of several groups providing pro bono legal assistance. Since 2011, we have helped approximately 10,000 people navigate the difficult claims process and obtain money they are owed by BP.

We have seen firsthand the extent to which BP will go to avoid paying even patently legitimate claims. One claimant with whom we worked, whose employer closed its doors in the wake of the spill, finally received an offer for compensation after two years. Then BP appealed the award, seeking to have it revoked. After he received assistance in countering BP’s appeal, the company finally admitted that he was, in fact, owed money and withdrew its appeal of his claim.

But while we can carry on the battle through lawsuits and in the affected communities, we are outgunned in the court of public opinion. In countless high-priced TV spots and full-page newspaper ads, the company is selling the story that it is committed to helping victims of the oil spill and rebuilding the gulf.

We know different. The company has turned its back on the people whose lives it derailed. BP must end its stall tactics and keep its promises to the people of the gulf.

Stephen Teague is a staff attorney at the Mississippi Center for Justice.

from:    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/opinion/shirking-responsibility-in-the-gulf.html?_r=1&emc=0&

August Hurricane Potential

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A massive dust storm that formed over the Sahara Desert early this week has now pushed out over the tropical Atlantic, and will sharply reduce the odds of tropical storm formation during the first week of August. The dust is accompanied by a large amount of dry air, which is making the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) much drier than usual this week. June and July are the peak months for dust storms in the Southwest Sahara, and this week’s dust storm is a typical one for this time of year. Due in large part to all the dry and dusty air predicted to dominate the tropical Atlantic over the next seven days, none of the reliable computer models is predicting Atlantic tropical cyclone formation during the first week of August.


Figure 1. A massive dust storm moves off the coast of Africa in this MODIS image taken at 1:40 UTC July 30, 2013. Image credit: NASA.

Video 1. The predicted movement through August 3 of this week’s Africam dust storm, using the NOAA NGAC aerosol model. Image credit: NOAA Visualization Laboratory.

How dust affects hurricanes
Saharan dust can affect hurricane activity in several ways:

1) Dust acts as a shield which keeps sunlight from reaching the surface. Thus, large amounts of dust can keep the sea surface temperatures up to 1°C cooler than average in the hurricane Main Development Region (MDR) from the coast of Africa to the Caribbean, providing hurricanes with less energy to form and grow. Ocean temperatures in the MDR are currently 0.7°F above average, and this anomaly should cool this week as the dust blocks sunlight.

2) The Saharan Air Layer (SAL) is a layer of dry, dusty Saharan air that rides up over the low-level moist air over the tropical Atlantic. At the boundary between the SAL and low-level moist air where the trade winds blow is the trade wind inversion–a region of the atmosphere where the temperature increases with height. Since atmospheric temperature normally decreases with height, this “inversion” acts to but the brakes on any thunderstorms that try to punch through it. This happens because the air in a thunderstorm’s updraft suddenly encounters a region where the updraft air is cooler and less buoyant than the surrounding air, and thus will not be able to keep moving upward. The dust in the SAL absorbs solar radiation, which heats the air in the trade wind inversion. This makes the inversion stronger, which inhibits the thunderstorms that power a hurricane.

3) Dust may also act to produce more clouds, but this effect needs much more study. If the dust particles are of the right size to serve as “condensation nuclei”–centers around which raindrops can form and grow–the dust can act to make more clouds. Thus, dust could potentially aid in the formation and intensification of hurricanes. However, if the dust acts to make more low-level clouds over the tropical Atlantic, this will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ocean, cooling the sea surface temperatures and discouraging hurricane formation (Kaufman et al., 2005.)


Figure 2. Map of the mean summer dust optical thickness derived from satellite measurements between 1979 and 2000. Maximum dust amounts originate in the northern Sahel (15° to 18° N) and the Sahara (18° to 22° N). The Bodele depression in Chad is also an active dust source. Image credit: Evidence of the control of summer atmospheric transport of African dust over the Atlantic by Sahel sources from TOMS satellites (1979-2000), by C. Moulin and I. Chiapello, published in January 2004 in Geophysical Research Letters.

Dust in Africa’s Sahel region and Atlantic hurricane activity
The summertime dust that affects Atlantic tropical storms originates over the southwestern Sahara (18° – 22° N) and the northwestern Sahel (15° – 18° N) (Figure 3.) The dust from the Southwest Sahara stays relatively constant from year to year, but the dust from the Northwest Sahel varies significantly, so understanding this variation may be a key factor in improving our forecasts of seasonal hurricane activity in the Atlantic. The amount of dust that gets transported over the Atlantic depends on a mix of three main factors: the large scale and local scale weather patterns (windy weather transports more dust), how wet the current rainy season is (wet weather will wash out dust before it gets transported over the Atlantic), and how dry and drought-damaged the soil is. The level of drought experienced in the northwestern Sahel during the previous year is the key factor of the three in determining how much dust gets transported over the Atlantic during hurricane season, according to a January 2004 study published in Geophysical Research Letters published by C. Moulin and I. Chiapello. In 2012 (Figure 3), precipitation across the northwestern Sahel was much above average, which should result in less dust than usual over the Atlantic this fall, increasing the odds of a busy 2013 hurricane season.


Figure 3. Rainfall over the Northwest Sahel region of Africa was about 200% of average during the 2012 rainy season. The heavy rains promoted vigorous vegetation growth in 2013, resulting in less bare ground capable of generating dust. Image credit: NOAA/Climate Prediction Center.

Links
Saharan Air Layer Analysis from the University of Wisconsin

Atlantic dust forecast from the Tel-Aviv University Weather Research Center

Dr. Amato Evan published a study in Science magazine March 2009 showing that 69% of the increase in Atlantic sea surface temperatures over the past 26 years could be attributed to decreases in the amount of dust in the atmosphere.

Kaufman, Y. J., I. Koren, L. A. Remer, D. Rosenfeld, and Y. Rudich, 2005a: The effect of smoke, dust, and pollution aerosol on shallow cloud development over the Atlantic Ocean. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 102, 11 207–11 212.

Wang, Chunzai, Shenfu Dong, Amato T. Evan, Gregory R. Foltz, Sang-Ki Lee, 2012, Multidecadal Covariability of North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature, African Dust, Sahel Rainfall, and Atlantic Hurricanes, J. Climate, 25, 5404–5415.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00413.1

from:    http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Perseid Meteors Arriving Now

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FIRST PERSEIDS OF 2013: Earth is entering a broad stream of debris from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Although the shower won’t peak until August 12-13, when Earth hits the densest part of the stream, the first Perseids are already arriving. “Despite poor weather over our network of meteor cameras, we detected three Perseid fireballs on July 30-31,” reports Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. He made this plot showing the orbits of the meteoroids:

In the diagram, the green lines trace the orbits of Perseid meteoroids. All three intersect Earth (the blue dot). The orbit of the parent comet is color-coded purple. An inset shows one of the fireballs shining almost as brightly as the Moon: video.

The shower is just getting started. Rates should remain low for the next week as Earth penetrates the sparse outskirts of the debris stream, then skyrocket to ~100 meteors per hour as the calendar turns to the second week of August.

fr/spaceweather.com

Your Color Vibe for 08/01

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Thursday, August 1:    Cloudy Red

Yes, indeed, the old stuff is coming back and making you wonder just what is going on.  You can find yourself really out of touch with things that are going on.  Along with that may come some self-doubt and questioning.  You might be feeling as though your basis is shifting and moving and not really solid enough.  Because of this, today is not a good day for making decisions or setting up allegiances.  You can find that a lot of those decisions you will want to change tomorrow.  Moreover you can be wondering, even as you ally yourself with a person, place or cause just why you are doing that.  The best way to be today is to be the observer.  Watch what is going on.  Again, more pieces are falling into place.  As that happens, the pattern is shifting and your piece gets moved around.  It is best to see how everything else is moving before taking any action.