U.S.: Should we trust the numbers we’ve been hearing from the oil spill?
- The government has a responsibility to get good numbers. If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them.
- Florida State University oceanographer Ian R. MacDonald • Regarding the numbers the government has been using to explain the growth of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. MacDonald and others claim that the spill has spewed forth far more than 5,000 barrels a day (still very high), and suggest that the method that they used to measure the spill was not designed for spills the size of the uncontrollably-spewing Gulf spill. For its part, oil company BP suggested that the leak could spew as much as 60,000 barrels a day – in other words, an Exxon Valdez worth of oil every four days. Scared yet? source