«
»

‘perspective’

in the running for most ludicrous LRC post ever (guest or regular), as lew continues his oil propaganda overcompensation shtick:

Some Perspective on the Oil

Posted by Lew Rockwell on June 11, 2010 09:25 AM

Writes Daniel Mahaffey:

Just for fun, I looked at how fast the Gulf of Mexico is filling with oil.

  • The Gulf’s volume is approximately 2.5 quadrillion cubic meters, 660 quadrillion gallons (660,000,000,000,000,000 gallons) or 600,000 cubic miles.
  • Estimates of the oil released vary from 40 million to 100 million gallons. Let’s use 66 million gallons to make the arithmetic easy.
  • The amount of oil released is 1/10,000,000,000 of the volume of the Gulf (one ten billionth).
  • If it has taken 53 days to release 66 million gallons, it will take 530,000,000,000 days to fill the Gulf of Mexico. That’s 1.8 trillion years.
  • If the earth is 4.54 billion years old, it would take 400,000 earth ages to fill the Gulf.
  • If the universe is 13.75 billion years old, it would take 130,000 ages of the universe to fill the Gulf.

Stop! This is not possible. Here’s another view:

  • Tiber field (on which the platform was drilling) contains 250,000,000 barrels of oil (at 42 gallons per barrel).
  • At 66 million gallons per 53 day period, it would take 8,400 days to drain Tiber field (23 years).
  • If emptied, Tiber field would cover the 615,000 square miles of the Gulf surface with 0.00098 (about 1/1000) inch of oil after 23 years.

The point of all this is perspective. We are very small so everything looks big to us. When journalists report massive oil plumes underwater, or foot deep oil collections on shore, we should be aware that things are still very, very small relative to the enormity of the Gulf of Mexico. The plumes may not actually be massive, and the oil may not be 1 foot deep everywhere. None of this is intended to excuse BP—it’s just perspective.

Tags: ,

Posted 20100611 13:13 under deficient press, douche patrol. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “‘perspective’”

  1. galacticmonk Says:
    June 12th, 2010 at 11:36

    what a moron. that blog has its moments. o-strows post on the blown ump call and mass hysteria…i get a kick out of these logicians & theorists with their libertarian skewed math.

Reply form

comments are enabled solely to discourage off-topic blather when i'm writing elsewhere. my wish is that no one comment here.

off topic? say it here or it'll be deleted. no spam. full censorship policy here.

update 20100729: generally, dunce comments from anonymous pussies no longer replied to. comments routed to spam queue may take weeks to publish, and sometimes be deleted accidentally from overlooking during review.

You must be logged in to post a comment.