In How much oil is gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon rig? And what does that mean? I was looking for a more intuitive way to think about quantities of oil and rates of emission. The conclusion was that, in many contexts, area is a better way to think about oil than volume. Nevertheless, I wanted a better feel for the rate at which BP is polluting the Gulf (a good estimate of the rate, that is) so I made this animation for Carbon Visuals:
The volume that would accrue over a day at the rate in the video
The motivation for making such an animation is to understand the numbers better - to get a handle on what's happening. The animation is ingenuous - not polemical. In an ideal world, BP itself would have made a movie like this as a way of presenting the facts of the disaster in an intuitive way.
I'm not in the business of bashing BP, though I think that any corporation should be challenged when its public relations efforts are disingenuous and BP's certainly have been. They have systematically understated the rate of emission and Tony Hayward, the Chief Executive Officer of BP used a remarkably inappropriate comparison when he pointed out:
"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean... The volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."
Cubic metre for cubic metre he's right, but it's an odd point to make about a hydrophobic substance like oil. Oil affects areas, not volumes (as I discussed before).
Now there is even more spin from BP. In a 'technical update' on 24 May 2010, Kent Wells (Senior Vice President of Exploration and Production at BP) used the following graph (4' 13" into the video) showing the oil BP has managed to remove from the sea:
It looks good, doesn't it? It looks like an improving situation. As Wells himself says:
"...and here you can see how we've continued to ramp up" (4' 45")
I would guess that a majority of people seeing the graph in the context of the presentation would come to the conclusion that each day BP are collecting more oil than the day before. In fact the graph shows that the rate of collection has been going down - but you have to be pretty good at looking at graphs to see that even though the graph states clearly that it is a 'cumulative' graph. (Some oil is collected every day, so the cumulative total always goes up even if the daily amount goes down.) I expect a PR person at BP was delighted with this cunning ruse. It's not a lie. All you have to do to make the majority of your audience believe a bad story is a good one is use an apparently straightforward graph that is actually quite a subtle graph. For the numerate portion of the audience though it just makes BP look like a bunch of shysters - it's a PR disaster.
For more on this graph see The Maddow Blog, Stephen Few, the excellent Flowing Data blog.
It's a shame really. The graphics in that technical update are rather nice. BP have clearly got a good team working on presenting the 'facts'. Nevertheless, we will never be able to trust corporate communications implicitly. Facts will always be framed by a corporation's agenda so there's always going to be a role for outsiders to challenge and re-present the facts.
I'm rather pleased with the animation. OK - Industrial Light and Magic or Double Negative might have made it prettier and there are a few rough edges I haven't had time to fix, but it does the job. It is also the very first thing I've made with Blender. I'm very impressed with Blender's ability to simulate liquids and look forward to seeing what else I can make. The animation is greatly enhanced by a soundtrack by GoveEd's Ben Lavington Martin. (30 May 2010: Actually - there are big problems with the animation. It looks as if there is a 'drain' i.e. it looks as if not all the liquid entering the imaginary box is staying there. It think this is an artefact of the perpective, but I'm not sure yet that it's not a Blender problem. Also, 30 seconds is too short to give a good sense of the rate, but it's all I could manage with my wee compter.)