The only “blow to the Keystone pipeline” is in the exaggerated reporting of the science…
The “report” (Kurek et al., 2013) did find slight elevations (relative to 1950) of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in five lakes in the vicinity of the Fort McMurray, near oil sand mining and upgrading operations in NE Alberta. The PAH flux trends in four of the lakes were unremarkable compared to the control (Namur Lake). One lake (NE20) exhibited PAH levels similar to urban and agricultural areas. The other four lakes were very similar to remote lakes in the Canadian Rockies and boreal forests.
This is Figure 1 from Kurek et al., 2013…
The lakes around Fort McMurray clearly do exhibit some increase in PAH flux since 1950. The winds in the area are generally southerly. So, it makes sense that SW22 and SE22 exhibit the least increase in PAH flux; while NE13 and NE20 exhibit the greatest increase. However, apart from NE20, the PAH fluxes aren’t remarkable when compared to Lake Namur. There does seem to be some evidence of minor wind-driven pollution in the lakes to the north of site AR6.
The supplemental information included a comparison table of PAH levels in the study area and in distant urban and remote settings. I transcribed those data to Excel in order to put the oil sands pollution into perspective.
Three of the four oil sands sites had lower PAH concentrations than Namur Lake. Only one of the sites (NE20) was comparable to lakes in urban and agriculturally developed areas.
I noticed that two of the remote, boreal forest sites (PAD 18) had maximum PAH fluxes in 1758 and 1810. So I plotted the PAH concentrations and fluxes against the year in which the maximum flux occurred.
This clearly demonstrates that the PAH “pollution” associated with oil sands development is insignificant. The PAH concentrations in most of lakes in the study area are unremarkable when compared to remote lakes in the boreal forest in the 18th and 19th century and are more similar to modern remote lakes than they are to urban and agriculturally developed areas.
Reference
Joshua Kurek, Jane L. Kirk, Derek C. G. Muir, Xiaowa Wang, Marlene S. Evans, and John P. Smol. Legacy of a half century of Athabasca oil sands development recorded by lake ecosystems. PNAS 2013 ; published ahead of print January 7, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1217675110
I believe this is the first time I’ve seen a greenie/warmist employ a quadruple ad hominem argument.
Mike what hobby or profession are you engaged in which enlightens this audience?
I lived in Fort McMurray for 20 years. Every year during the height of summer, on the hottest days you could drive on the bridge over the Athabasca river and see the oil dripping out of the sides of the hills. This has nothing to do with the oil sands plants.
It happened before Syncrude, when Suncor was still G.C.O.S.
In other words, finding Oil Sands in the waters is completely natural for the area.
I may just be used to looking a log plots. It never occurred to me to use a broken bar… And I’m not sure I know how to do that in Excel. However, that probably would have worked better.
This is just a “hobby” after all.
As others point out, the tar sands are natures biggest oil spill.
Oil or Tar the name does not matter, your emotional reaction is your problem, old timers called them tar sands and for greeny propaganda, common sense is moot.
Canada has a huge surface oil deposit mixed into sand. A major river runs through this sand.
The spring melts used to tear great chunks of the river bank down and spread the oil therein all the way to the arctic ocean.
Using eco-speak, I can argue we Canadians are doing Gods(good) work here, cleaning the oil out of the sands, and disposing of that contamination in an environmentally way.(Selling the oil)
To the opponents, “What You don’t want this ghastly environmental disaster cleaned up?”
“You want to prevent us cleaning up an oil spill, measured in square miles?”
Must save Mother Earth.
Same twisty logic applies to the dams and irrigation systems on the Peace and Athabasca Rivers, by limiting the flood surges we are saving the watershed, from Fort McMurray to the Beaufort Sea.
The comedy of environmental monitoring this area continues, seems the same activist standards of science are applied, history disappeared and massive illogic expressed.
Where the river flows over an asphalt outcrop the water contamination is high, including up-stream of the projects.Govt monitors have reported up-stream levels higher than down-stream for years.But by eco-logic rivers must flow uphill.
@David Middleton; Great debunking! The linear chart is far more revealing. It seems to say, stay out of the cities and move to remote N.E. Alberta if you want to avoid PAH’s.
David:
I notice you use Pb as a ‘parts per billion’ in Figure 3; (or did the research authors use Pb?) I was stuck on the graph for a few minutes trying to figure out where the metal lead came into the paper. Perhap using ‘ppb’ would be suffice and be clearer?
I wasn’t able to link to the paper; but the first thing that crosses my mind when folks are comparing trace chemicals/elements from two different time periods, “What quantitative chemistry process are they using and is there any attempt to establish a common base for analysis?”
Organic chemistry has literally exploded in both knowledge and process since the 1950s when chemists were just beginning to seriously explore organics. This ‘report’ sounds very much like “We can measure it better, so now we can declare it a problem.” Yeah, they had a ‘control’ lake; say what?. Why didn’t they test lakes across a wide region and establish a map of ‘claimed’ traces of organics described in chemical terms so everyone knows it’s bad.
Amusing drive by troll fecal post Mike. You smacked yourself right in the kisser with it. You used absolutely no science, just potty mouth ad hominem. I am curious about why your pitiful attempt to degrade David as it smacks of petty jealousy and envy. Perhaps your vitriolic is because you yourself are impotent and unable to converse when topics such as physics, math, chemistry, analysis, tree rings… are brought up? Give it up Mike and return to the PAH slimed rock bottom you wriggled out from.
Polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) has a specific meaning. Gail Coombs is correct in nominating naphthalene as one, although the term is usually reserved for higher Molecular Weight types with multiple fused rings, e.g. anthracene, tetracene, chrysene etc. Only some are carcinogenic, but the term is used to try and scare people.
The higher MW means that they are not very volatile and they aren’t very water soluble either.
Note also the use of nanograms. In that area the analyst has to be very careful about contaminants. I recall an early environmental scare with coal fired power stations supposedly emitting large quantities of cadmium and selenium. So large that it was pointed out that humans wouldn’t be alive within 30 kilometres of them. The faulty results came from the use of coloured plastic stoppers containing a low level of a normally insoluble pigment.
A third consideration in all of this is it might be interesting to set up a national park, to preseve the vegetation in-tact in a part of the oil sands area, especially where there are natural oil seeps. It would be good to do further scientific studies to see how nature has adapted or been affected by areas where there are natural releases of petroleum hydrocarbons. This has implications on seeing how environments where there are not normally hydrocarbon seeps or releases, may be affected by the release of hydrocarbons (i.e. contaminated soil, oil spills, etc). This may lead to isolating vegetation or microorganisms that are tolerant of, or even consume, petroleum hydrocarbons, and they could be used to help treat oil spill areas elsewhere.
Seriously, logarithm charts are taught in high school, at least they were when I went. Breaking is not advised as you lose scientific data or information that is a crucial component of what you are trying to convey. One of my professional specialties was a draftsman and breaking a long item is common, but no loss of information takes place in these scenarios as visual representation of data is not the objective, just information so a component can be constructed to the desired specification.
Maybe a series of background lines separating in spacing in a logarithmic fashion just like good old fashioned log paper does.
Or maybe I’m over thinking all this.
Still, seriously logarithm charts are Childs play. Or maybe my recent 2,000 hours of pure calculus studies have made me think it is.
The “Pb” refers to lead. The cores were dated using lead isotopes. The PAH max. flux year is estimated from 210-Pb.
@David Middleton: Would you have also found this to be visually deceptive? Linear Scale
The linear scale it better with bar charts. The bars are a visual integration. Relative sizes should mean something and on a log scale they don’t. On a linear scale, it is much easier to see “big”, “small”, and “tiny”
Since you bring it up, I do question putting “Flux (mass / area-year)” side by side with Concentration (ppb) in side by side bars. Side by side bars should be in the same units.
Comparing Flux with Concentration is better done in a scatter x,y chart. While I use log scales on scatter points all the time, this example does make we wonder if the visual correlation on a log-log chart is meaningful. Is the implied relationship
a) Concentration = f(Flux) ? or
b) Ln(Concentration) = g(Ln(Flux))?
If the latter, it should be plotted of as log-log. End of story.
If the former, then while a log-log scatter might be visually pretty, spreading out the tiny values, does it show the right relationship? A Cartesian plot will be visually poor with one point at the upper left, another point at the upper center, and 19 points clumped in the 5% lower left —- but that is the data, isn’t it?
One more thing…. plotting Max flux against Max concentration? Plotting outlier vs. outlier? WUWT? Is that how the original data was delivered, max without mean and range? If your point is that the even the maximums are too small to be of concern, well I can’t disagree there.
The third plot, Flux & Concentration vs time, gives the visceral feeling that the oil sand lakes are 1/3 to 1/2 the value of the Urban/Ag lakes. You have the consciously look at the axis and mentally do the arithmetic — oil sand lakes are really 1/10 to 1/50 of Urban lakes. Plotting flux and concentration on the same graph further muddles this message.
Exactly where is the evidence this isn’t naturally occurring?
I think they did find some evidence that the oil sand upgrading has led to a slight increase in PAH flux in the lakes down-wind of the AR6 site.
But… Yeah… The oil sands are exposed by fluvial erosion. The Tar River got its name long before GCOS started mining.
They are produced by the incomplete combustion of compounds containing C and H, and diagenesis.
http://www.mendeley.com/catalog/polycyclic-aromatic-hydrocarbons-pahs-soil-review-5/
Diagenesis definition:
When animal or plant matter is buried during sedimentation, the constituent organic molecules (lipids, proteins, carbohydrates and lignin-humic compounds) break down due to the increase in temperature and pressure. This transformation occurs in the first few hundred meters of burial and results in the creation of two primary products: kerogens and bitumens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagenesis
Erosion of overburden allows translocation of PAHs.
I can only plot what they published. Table S3 only listed the catchment description, region, lake name, collection year, number of PAH analytes, maximum concentration, maximum flux and the year of the maximum flux (210-Pb).
The concentrations (ng•g−1) and fluxes (μg•m−2•y−1) “fit” well on the same graph. So I plotted them together.
Interesting that the (I think) PHD student working under the author of the report disagreed with the conclusions drawn.
Aah! I skimmed to fast and missed that. It should’ve dawned on me. Though I wonder about the value of lead isotopes for dating cores…
Thanks for correcting me!
Now I need to go find a reference on thermal fluid migration of lead compunds to understand how it’s used for dating cores.
CodeTech: I believe one term could be “progressus-phobic”. Self-evident I’m sure.
All you guys whining about Log Bar charts, don’t know what you are talking about. One uses bar charts for PH and dB. The same thing applies here. If you are to slow to understand why this is, then you are too slow to have a valid opinion on any subject.
“Mike says Dave, your hobby is debunking junk science. ”
Tr: Wah wah wah.
Come up with some substantive argument in rebuttal because all you’re doing is making a bigger fool of yourself than you already are.
Oh wait. THERE ARE NONE. Go ahead and cry, then, Crybaby Mike.
But speaking of “visually deceptive”: has no-one else commented on this, or did I miss it, the ghastly headline about oil in the lakes, and the picture below of a paper drinking cup full of oil? Although the picture is explained, I cannot the juxtaposition with the headline is anything but intentionally deceptive.
Someone just scanning headlines would see “Canadian oil sands pollute nearby lakes. Report is blow to Keystone pipeline” and a coffee cup filled with heavy crude oil. I’m sure this was unintentional (/SARC).
@DesertYote 10:13 am
pH (as in acid/base) and dB (as in loudness) are “linear in log” common measurements. I don’t have a problem with those. But that doesn’t mean you should plot city populations on log bar chart.
@David: I can only plot what they published. Table S3 only listed the …., maximum concentration, maximum flux….
A red flag in the source right there. “Why cherry pick when lemon pick tells a bigger story?”