Posted on 03/22/2003 10:32:37 AM PST by kattracks
Fears that Iraqi oil wells set alight by Saddam Hussein's thugs will create an ecological cataclysm are overstated if the record of the Kuwaiti oil well fires at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 is any indication.
Observing the carnage created when Saddam's retreating army set fire to 732 Kuwaiti oil wells, the late Carl Sagan and other top scientists predicted that the blazing wells would create enormous clouds of black soot which would rise up to the stratosphere, encircle the planet and block out the Sun's rays and bring on a form of nuclear winter, the Wall Street Journal recalls.
The scenario envisioned by the doomsday scientists had summer daytime temperatures in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent downwind plunging 18 degrees to 36 degrees Fahrenheit and setting off Indian monsoons that would devastate agriculture and entire ecosystems.
By the time the fires had been extinguished in November, 1991, it became clear that the alarmist predictions had been way off the mark.
According to the Journal, there were good reasons - and they still apply to the current Iraqi oil well blazes.
In May 1991, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Nuclear Agency -- driven by the nuclear-winter warnings -- dispatched a team of researchers to Kuwait.
"Sometimes the smoke was so thick the instruments couldn't even penetrate," atmospheric scientist Lawrence Radke, co-leader of the project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado told the Journal. "Less than 1% of the sun's visible light penetrated plumes. As we flew through, it got black as night, as if the sun had gone out."
Added NCAR's Bruce Morley: "There was raw, uncombusted oil in the plumes because the burning was so inefficient," says . "The first time I flew through one, the plane returned black with oil."
Fears of a Sagan-type ecological holocaust quickly receded however. "We expected a sooty, pitch-black smoke," Mr. Radke told the Journal, "so on the first mission, when I saw white plumes rising from pools of burning oil, you could have knocked me over with a feather." The reason, according to the Journal: Kuwaiti oil had a high content of salt water. About 25% of the plumes were white or dove gray, due to the high concentrations of sodium chloride and calcium chloride crystals in the smoke.
For this and other reasons, the soot clouds never reached the stratosphere.
With some oilwells in Iraq now burning, much of the same circumstances diminish the ecological threat.
Notes the Journal: "Oil contains sulfur ... 'Sour' crude contains more sulfur than 'sweet.' The Kuwaiti wells produce crude with a sulfur content of 2.5% or more, according to the Energy Information Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Iraq's northern Kirkuk field yields oil with just over 2% sulfur, the EIA says, while crudes from the southern Rumaila field vary from just under 2% to 3.4%. So, some Iraqi oil is more likely than Kuwait's to precipitate out harmlessly, while some poses a greater climatic threat if ignited.
Latest reports indicate that most of Iraqi oil fields are either in U.S. hands or, where not, mostly free of well fires. As a result, crude oil prices are plunging and are now below $30 a barrel.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Saddam didn't know that it wouldn't happen, demonstrating all the more the necessity of eliminating such a maniac now.
and where would that be?
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