It's not that bad... yet

The largest oil spill in the Gulf's history happened in 1979. Ixtoc-1, the largest accidental oil spill in history, dropped 3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Between 10,000 and 30,000 barrels spewed every day from the well, which took 10 months to cap.

The Deepwater Horizon incident has lasted 38 days, and the best estimates are between 17,000 and 23,000 barrels of oil (with about 3x that volume in natural gas) every day. It looks as if the top kill procedure has worked, although we won't know for sure for a few more weeks at best.

The comparison is enlightening, but so is the media attention: there's damned little on Ixtoc-1 available on-line, but gigabytes about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. What is available lets us know that the world will survive this disaster, although other experiences, such as the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf War spill of 1990 tell us that cleanup is going to be an economic disaster, and an ecological disaster, but it's not going to be the end of the world.

Stop that right now!

Neil Gaiman was the last straw. This morning Gaiman tweeted: "Vaguely disappointed to learn that BP’s 'top kill procedure' will leave its entire executive strata alive."

In the past few days, as the procedure for top kill has been publicized, I've heard Bill O'Reilly suggest the entire staff of MSNBC be shoved down there to block up the hole, and Stephanie Miller suggested O'Reilly and Limbaugh together might be enough, and there have been other attempts at "comedy" with suggestions of, basically, murdering groups of people and using their bodies as raw materials.

I understand that emotions are high, but can we please stop wishing, even as a joke, for the painful deaths of people who, whatever their failings and responsibilities, don't deserve that level of hatred?