Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Katrina deja vu

In other words, I'm right.
TB — (archived)

His own furniture restoration business had suffered while his furniture repair businesses boomed as people anticipated economic distress, although as soon as the media reported the well plug, the situation reversed as people suddenly convinced themselves the threat was over.

I submitted that the environmental damage was going to be much less than the damage done by hysterical predictions from a ratings-hungry media and issue-hungry politicians. So far, the evidence is supporting me. All the examples I'm being given here of people in trouble are people who are mostly suffering from the effects of the hysteria and government responses, not the oil.

I didn't come up with this thinking just in the past day or so.

I did some research a while back on spills in Alaska, Mexico, South America, the Persian Gulf, and other places. I found that the environment in warm-climate spills recovers with amazing speed. I also studied the natural seeps in the Gulf of Mexico, which have evolved a wide range of oil-eating microbes that can step up when the oil increases. Add to this the deep water of the leak, and the dispersal policy that chewed the oil up into bite-size chunks for the microbes and sun.

Then I went to the NOAA and other monitoring sites, and watched to see what happened. Lo and behold, the Gulf has been assimilating the spill as fast as I thought it would.

I wish I could reassure your friend. Fortunately, his business seems to be recovering rapidly. I don't think tourist-related businesses are going to be as fortunate, since they probably rely a great deal on people who make long-range plans, and their business pickup may be a ways into the future.

Do you remember a similar a month or so ago when I was trying to reassure Eri that this was not going to be a planetary disaster?

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