It’s going to be bright, bright, bright sunshiny day on the Gulf coast if federal officials charged with responding to the months-long BP oil spill are to be believed.

After months of dim news from the Gulf, officials last week were able to deliver twin beacons of hope. First, BP finally managed to stanch the tide of oil that had hemorrhaged from its deepwater well since April. And on the heels of that delayed success, a wondrous claim that nearly 75 percent of the spilled oil was either going or already gone. Hogwash, say scientists and residents alike.

“It’s not gone,” the New York Times quotes George Barisich of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Alliance as saying. “Mother Nature didn’t suck it up and spit it out.”

However, that's what federal officials are in effect claiming happened to some of the oil. According to the government’s tally, 24 percent of the oil was either chemically or naturally dispersed into tiny droplets that are “biodegrading quickly.” Another 25 percent is said to have evaporated, and 25 percent was either burned or collected at the wellhead or from the surface—leaving a mere 26 percent, or 1.3 million of the estimated 5 million-barrel total, to muck up the Gulf.

“There's a lot of ... smoke and mirrors in this report,” Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald told the Washington Post. "It seems very reassuring, but the data aren't there to actually bear out the assurances that were made."

MacDonald is far from alone in questioning how the Pollyannaish report was derived. Many others have voiced similar concerns, including University of Georgia marine scientist Samantha Joye.

“A lot of this is based on modeling and extrapolation and very generous assumptions,” Joye told the New York Times in a separate article. “If an academic scientist put something like this out there, it would get torpedoed into a billion pieces.”

Environmental chemist Jeffery Short, a former NOAA scientist who assessed the impacts of the Exxon Valdez spill, echoed that sentiment.

"There's not enough information in there to make anybody with any kind of quantitative or ecological background believe it," he told Nature in an article published Wednesday.

The greatest room for error lies in the estimation of how much oil has dissolved, dispersed, or evaporated, which could be off by factors of two to three, Short told Nature. According to the article, the numbers in the federal report were based on a calculator used by the Coast Guard since June. Lead author of the report, NOAA’s Bill Lehr, told Nature that while scientists used conservative estimates, they were trying to create a simpler interpretation to answer the public’s questions.

"The decision was made—and people can argue whether that was right or not—to present the average values [without the uncertainties]," he’s quoted as saying.

None of this means a hill of oil droplets to Gulf Coast residents who have lost their livelihoods and stand to lose even more once the media spotlight turns away and cleanup efforts dissipate. Although the report’s rosy spin might help restore the decaying reputation of Gulf Coast seafood and tourism, the withdrawal of clean up efforts that accompany it leave fishermen like Acy Cooper between a rock and a hard place.

In a Monday Washington Post article about what the end of the spill will mean to residents, Cooper opined the loss of BP jobs, which are ending long before the seafood industry is ready to bounce back.

“If we get these shrimp and they get one person sick, you know how long it will take us to come back?" Cooper, who recently lost his place on a clean up crew, is quoted as saying. “We ain't through the cleanup. We can't go into recovery. It is not recovery. Somebody's lying.”