lamont
Contributor
RICoder:I think the debate, and the two very polarized sides, serve their own purpose; which is to come to a reasonable and proper result. If you just left the oil industry to itself, it would undoubtedly drill dirty and cheap...economics and business being what it is (that's reality not a judgement). If you left the environmentalists to itself, we'd all be walking around with hairy armpits and no cars.
Fortunately 2 things have resulted to date, at least in the US, that give me hope. First, the oil and gas industries have managed to shrink the footprint of drilling platforms, ans second they have managed to make them "clean", as much as such a thing is possible.
The drilling in Alaska that was supposed to DESTROY the environment and kill us all, ended up boosting the Caribu population, as they started breeding next to the warm pipelines. The platforms in the Gulf became marine environments unto themselves. Seems to me that this is a good precident.
I'm still all in favor of any renewable resource, but at least we can do the interim solution cleanly.
I don't see how this discussion can possibly not get political. I'm just going to wind up dragging it back again to the real footprint of the drilling operations being the CO2 which is produced. Breeding grounds for caribu and marine sanctuaries around oil rigs isn't going to make up for that. Then we're back to yelling at each other about global warming...
Neglecting to mention global warming and focusing on the scuba-diving marine sanctuaries around oil rigs is also not "not political" and does not conform to the TOS of this board. It will be political through omission.
I can try to introduce some basic science into the global warming discussion, though...
O2 and N2 are diatomic molecules which means that they have a limited set of quantized rotational and vibrational modes compared with molecules like CO2, H2O and H2SO4. O2 and N2 are more transparent in the infrared and visible range, which means that they tend to pass through the suns radiation. In gaseous form, CO2 and H2O and H2SO4 have broad absorption bands in the I-R spectra, but tend to pass through visibile light. The broad absorption bands correspond to the different and more complex vibrational and rotational modes that a three-body or n>3-body molecule can undergo. In liquid form as water vapor molecules H2O and H2SO4 act much differently since now you tend to be scattering wavelenghts of light which are much smaller than the diameter of the particles themselves (whereas in gas form the wavelenghts of light are much larger than the size of the atoms). An approximation to the green's function solution of a gaussian wavepacket hitting a potential in the approximation where the potential is much larger than the wavepacket will show that scattering is inversely proportional to the wavelength to the fourth power. This is called Rayleigh scattering and is why the sky is blue and why sunsets are red. Shorter wavelength, higher frequency, bluer light is scattered by H2O droplets, H2SO4 droplets, and particulates, including smog. So the blue sky that I'm seeing out my window in the sky right now (in seattle, go figure) is the blue light which someone else is not seeing in their red sunset someplace else. And when you look at a sunset, all the blue that you're missing is creating a blue sky for someone else on the planet.
These two processes have different effects on the temperature of the planet. The gaseous CO2, H2O and H2SO4 will allow light to fall from the sun primarily in the visible part of the spectrum (since the sun acts as a 5800K blackbody) and will block heat being radiated from the earth in the IR (as roughly a 300K blackbody). This is exactly the effect that glass has, and is why you build greenhouses out of glass. The light passing through the glass carries energy which is aborbed by everything in the greenhouse, which heats up and then re-radiates in the I-R which is then reflected by the glass back into the greenhouse.
Here's a reference on how solar greenhouses (to grow plants) work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_greenhouse_(technical)
Since CO2 is a gas in the atmosphere that's really all that it does. H2O and H2SO4 are more complicated since they can exist either in gas form or water form. With large droplets they're dominated by Rayleigh scattering, which scatters primarily bluer light, which means they will scatter more in the visible than they do in the infrared. The IR photons have wavelengths which essentially "travel around" the water vapor particles, while the visible photons have wavelengths which are so short that they're more like bb's hitting a hard target and they bounce off.
So, water vapor, H2SO4 vapor and smog will act to cool the earth by decreasing the incident radiation on the surface of the earth, while gaseous molecules like CO2 will have a greenhouse effect.
That's all entirely science. Al Gore didn't invent it, most of it was invented by german physicists nearly 100 years ago now. CO2 is a greenhouse gas based on the basic physics of its spectra in the IR and visible light. You can, of course, have a political discussion about it, but it'll be as useful as trying to pass legislation that pi is exactly three.
Now the balance between warming and cooling is a little more political. Although theories of global cooling fell completely out of favor in the scientific community in the late 1970s they can still politically be ressurected. Planetary science does, however, have an answer for how the increase in the sun's output, the increase in water vapor and particulate matter and the increase in greenhouse gases all interact, which is a theory called "global dimming":
http://www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XXXVI/Issue_8/Opinions/opinions1.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
This explains why as the suns output has been increasing, we've seen a measurable decrease in the suns radiation on the surface of the earth and the sun (as we see it) has actually been "dimming" (this is *really* solidly scientific data and not political). The theory is that the particulate matter has been dimming and cooling the earth, and that this trend has now reversed now that we have cleaned up a lot of the industrial pollutants. The theory got some major experimental confirmation on 9/11 when for a few days all airplane contrails were eliminated over the united states. The implications are a little worrying because as China and India begin to struggle to clean up their environment they will also be reducing their particulate and aeresol emissions and that will dramatically reverse the effects of global dimming and should accelerate the greenhouse effects of CO2.
This is ultimately what those oil rigs are doing to the environment. The implications to scubadiving, of course, are entirely new dive sites like most of what currently is dry land in florida and lower manhattan...
And moderators, will you stop wasting everyone's time and just remove this thread if you don't want political discussion?
