Mapping the spill

I appreciate James Fallows' efforts to provide real scale to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It is truly horrifying. But, in fact, he actually does a disservice to his readers. The oil is not merely floating on the surface. It has depth, and comparing it to the Eastern Seaboard or the Bay Area or whatever surface scale doesn't convey just how tremendous this thing is going to be. I've yet to see an estimate of just how many million cubic gallons are going to have gushed out of this hole in the earth's crust.

UPDATE: Alert reader "Tom" tells me that a gallon is a unit of volume so "cubic gallon" is redundant, once again illustrating that my readers is smarter than me.

"What difference could it possibly make?"

That's Somerby's name for the decade that just ended.

Irrelevance watch

No, not George W. Bush. The "new kind of political reporting" site, Politico.

Then again, it could be worse. Politico, for instance, should be lucky enough to hire reporters who actually know how to use Google. If Erika Lovley had even bothered to looked at the wiki entry for her major piece of "evidence" of growing scientific doubt about global climate change, she'd have discovered that the "31,000 scientists" on the laughable Oregon Petition included "Perry Mason," "Geri Halliwell," and someone by the name of "Redwine, Ph.D." For the sheer fun of it, I just might sign the petition and stuff it in the late afternoon mail, thus blending my skeptical voice with fellow Alaskans "Edward M. Dokoozian" (a "Certified Safety Professional"), "Monte D. Mabry" (a staff geologist for ConocoPhillips), and dozens of other folks whose existence on the internet consists, so far as I'm able to tell, entirely of having "signed" the petition....