Non-government scientists are expressing skepticism about reports that BP’s huge mixed plumes of oil and oil-dispersant chemicals have vanished from the Gulf, the ProPublica‘s Marian Wang reported Tuesday.
Wang’s compilation of quotes from media reports:
“These are just what we call WAGs — wild-a– guesses,” Rick Steiner a retired University of Alaska professor, told the Times.
“I’m suspect if that’s accurate or not,” Ronald Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, told McClatchy Newspapers.
“There is a lot of uncertainty in these figures,” Lousiana State University professor James H. Cowan Jr. told McClatchy.
“If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces,” Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, a leading scientist on this spill, told The New York Times.
“This is a shaky report. The more I read it, the less satisfied I am with the thoroughness of the presentation. … There’s some science here, but mostly, it’s spin,” Florida State University professor Ian MacDonald told The Associated Press.
Some in the scientific community did find the report plausible. Louisiana State University emeritus professor Ed Overton peer-reviewed the report and told the AP he thought it was mostly good work, though he was uncomfortable with the precise percentages about the amount of oil left in the Gulf.
