Everybody has a stake in those questions. What's more, everybody with enough knowledge to answer any of them well has a bigger stake.
It's like you had a medical condition and you asked for a competent diagnosis from somebody with tho stake in health care.
Unlike your 100 words, your link has no obvious errors. Your claim that we are still coming out of the ice age is incorrect insofar as global temperature is concerned. Global mean surface temperature probably peaked 5000 to 8000 years ago and was gradually declining until the abrupt 20th century rise. It is now a close call whether we have caught up to the 5ka peak, but we will likely surpass it soon enough.
(Of course, I am assuming that you DO write code and that your organization ISN'T criminal. Otherwise disregard this.)
Of course you are right about that. Oil refined and used is far less damaging than oil spilled. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. What I mean is that slow gradual problems can be bigger than huge obvious ones.
Anyway there was a similar event in 1979 and the world didn't end. Tens of thousands of barrels a day spilled for months into the Gulf.
Also, I've lived most of my adult life in Chicago. Don't get me wrong, I love Chicago, but one of its drawbacks is that it *always* smells like oil fumes. I don't believe you are smelling the Gulf.
Geez, calm down. I'm just trying to get some perspective.
Yes, that much oil is enough to cause the extinction of humanity, if it finds its way into our bloodstreams.
Ocean currents are, fortunately, not that selective.
This botched well is shaping up to be a terrible mess but it will, if anything, destroy America's best beaches, and its most valuable wetlands. It won't destroy the ocean. I am just advocating for directing your concerns in the right direction, not for shrugging them off.
The Gulf of Mexico is huge compared to a sailboat, but tiny compared to the whole ocean. The volume of the ocean is 1.5 x 10^18 tons. Even if a ton of oil contaminates a million tons of water, 50,000 barrels a day would take over half a million years to do the job by my calculations.
It may be a decent sized oil reservoir (it is far from "one of the largest ever" per the article) but it isn't THAT big. Sometime in the next half million years it will stop gushing on its own. Probably before that.
This is a very serious event on the scale of the Gulf, but it is nowhere near as serious as ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2, which affects the entire ocean.
Relevant quote:
My own interference with this great question, while sanctioned by many eminent names, has been also an object of varied and ingenious attack. On this point I will only say that when angry feeling escapes from behind the intellect, where it may be useful as an urging force, and places itself athwart the intellect, it is liable to produce all manner of delusions. Thus my censors, for the most part, have levelled their remarks against positions which were never assumed, and against claims which were never made.
- John Tyndall, 1881
http://transcribingtyndall.wordpress.com/2008/08/
Phil is talking like climate scientists talk. There is nothing remotely unusual in any of it. Your problem is you don't know how to spin it when you have actual scientist talk in front of you. Sorry to confuse you so badly.
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~brianpm/charneyreport.html from 1979 seems pretty close to what is being said now.
Do you have any idea what you are talking about?
Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss the one you are least interested, and say nothing about the other.