Response to Marine Oil Pollution - Review and Assessment is the essential source book, now updated, for all involved in marine oil pollution consequences and response. It covers policy, planning and operations, and provides technical assessment of the true nature of the problem, of the means to maximise the performance of current techniques and equipment, and of the bases for future improvements. This book provides a fundamental understanding of the oil properties and processes which determine the persistence and impacts of oils in the marine environment. It establishes parameters against which to evaluate performance of all current techniques and equipment, and the environmental impacts of their use. It identifies design parameters, and makes proposals for the creation and development of more effective equipment and techniques. The book also shows how a fresh approach to cargo transfer, and the scaling of spillage response provision to oil releases on immediate impact, will be more effective overall, and will ensure that approved waste handling and disposal facilities are not overwhelmed. The recent Sea Empress incident is reviewed to illustrate the points made and conclusions reached, and to emphasise the need for thorough salvage planning for all future incidents.

Response to Marine Oil Pollution - Review and Assessment is the essential source book, now updated, for all involved in marine oil pollution consequences and response. It covers policy, planning and operations, and provides technical assessment of the true nature of the problem, of the means to maximise the performance of current techniques and equipment, and of the bases for future improvements. This book provides a fundamental understanding of the oil properties and processes which determine the persistence and impacts of oils in the marine environment. It establishes parameters against which to evaluate performance of all current techniques and equipment, and the environmental impacts of their use. It identifies design parameters, and makes proposals for the creation and development of more effective equipment and techniques. The book also shows how a fresh approach to cargo transfer, and the scaling of spillage response provision to oil releases on immediate impact, will be more effective overall, and will ensure that approved waste handling and disposal facilities are not overwhelmed. The recent Sea Empress incident is reviewed to illustrate the points made and conclusions reached, and to emphasise the need for thorough salvage planning for all future incidents.

This book shows that our Rational Trinity evolved through our precursors to constancy in our species Homo sapiens, and that everything we have done is a consequence of being the group-species we are. Thus, we have an awareness of the unknown and the unknowable which stimulates our imagination to produce beliefs which we validate to knowledge consistent with reality or which otherwise remain beliefs because we cannot yet reality-evaluate them or because they are beyond reality-evaluation in principle. Thus, this book shows that our craftsmanship and self-knowledge have accrued since time immemorial by reality-evaluation of our imaginative beliefs as to the usability of reality and the maintenance of our survival dependent social cohesion, and that this self-knowledge was progressively reflected in the deities of our imaginative belief to the reinforcement of adherence to our behaviour codes in reality. Again, this book shows that the methods of craftsmanship led to the experimentation which defines scientific method which from the seventeenth century onwards enabled beliefs concerning the underlying nature of our reality to be validated to the knowledge which inter alia transformed craftsmanship to technology. However, this book also shows that while differences in belief have been the source of conflict from time immemorial, knowledge has been accepted by religious believers regardless of such differences; that in contrast, secular belief now opposes aspects of our self-knowledge and technology; that scientific knowledge and method are now being corrupted to pseudo-science in support of a secular belief supremacy reminiscent of the religious belief supremacy which destroyed the Roman Empire; and that it is imperative to replace our current belief-based democracy with a knowledge-based alternative before democracy itself is lost to the reality rejection of postmodernist relative belief.