UPDATE: December 2, 2013 …

National Academies of Science Study: Fracking Captures 99 Percent of Methane

Containment measures employed by energy production companies capture 99 percent of the methane released by natural gas fracking operations, scientists report in a peer-reviewed study published by the National Academy of Sciences. The study contradicts environmental activist assertions that methane releases during fracking operations negate the substantial reductions in pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions resulting from natural gas-fired electricity.  <Source>

Original Post …

They have demonized carbon dioxide using junk science. They have demonized coal as a gross pollutant. They have demonized nuclear energy. And, since the progressive socialist democrats and communists behind global warming want industrialized nations to scale back their industrial capabilities, economies, and standard of living – with the difference being paid as climate reparations to third-world nations as compensation for “climate damage,” they now move on (pun intended) to demonize methane hydrate crystals in another apocalyptic scenario.

The 'Ticking Time Bomb' That Could Cause Such Rapid Global Warming We'd Be Unable to Prevent Extinction

If, 250 million years ago, you were standing thousands of miles away from what is now Siberia in the first years of the Permian Mass Extension (sic), probably the most you would notice is an odd change in the weather and a reddish hue in the northern sky. What you wouldn’t know, and probably your children wouldn’t even realize –although their grandchildren probably would – is that a tipping point had already been passed, and an extinction – an unstoppable one – was already underway.

Extinction? 

What could get America’s leading experts on climate change to agree on something that the average American has probably never even heard of?

Methane.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and there are trillions of tons of it embedded in a sort of ice slurry called methane hydrate or methane clathrate crystals in the Arctic and in the seas around continental shelves from North America to Antarctica. 

If enough of this methane is released quickly enough, it won’t just produce “Global warming.” It could produce an extinction of species on a wide scale – an extinction that could even include the human race.

If there is a “ticking time bomb” in our biosphere that could lead to a global warming so rapid and sudden that we would have no way of dealing with it, it’s methane.

“Could” is not a scientific term … and the author does not express a range of probabilities because they would be so low as to be laughable. Do we really think man can curb the global warming that is based on the Sun’s energy output, the Earth’s position relative to the Sun, the Earth’s rotational and precessional dynamics, the Earth’s vulcanology and plate tectonics, the deep sea currents, and the greatest greenhouse gas of all, water vapor? Man has such a small footprint on global climate change over geologic spans as to be a signal lost amid the noise of climate’s natural variability. As for a “ticking time bomb,” I would be more concerned with a major Earthquake or volcanic eruption in the continental United States. Something that even our government can control or even prepare for. They botched Katrina, they botched Sandy Hook – so what do you think they can do about a major regional or planetary catastrophic event? Curse the heavens while waving their arms to and fro?

Perhaps, maybe, possibly, and other weasel words indicating scientists don’t know what caused the mass extinction and there are many theories that are plausible …

Somehow, most of the life on Earth perished in a brief moment of geologic time roughly 250 million years ago. Scientists call it the Permian-Triassic extinction or "the Great Dying" -- not to be confused with the better-known Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that signaled the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Whatever happened during the Permian-Triassic period was much worse: No class of life was spared from the devastation. Trees, plants, lizards, proto-mammals, insects, fish, mollusks, and microbes -- all were nearly wiped out. Roughly 9 in 10 marine species and 7 in 10 land species vanished. Life on our planet almost came to an end.

Scientists have suggested many possible causes for the Great Dying: severe volcanism, a nearby supernova, environmental changes wrought by the formation of a super-continent, the devastating impact of a large asteroid -- or some combination of these. Proving which theory is correct has been difficult. The trail has grown cold over the last quarter billion years; much of the evidence has been destroyed. <Source: NASA>

Did anybody note that all of the hypothetical sources for this catastrophic event are well beyond man’s capability to alter the future by controlling these events?

Another consensus “opinion” by climate activists? 

Our planet has experienced five major extinctions over the past billion or so years, times when more than half of all life has died in a geologically brief period of time, and the common denominator of each one has been a sudden pulse of global warming. Increasingly, it appears that a rapid release of methane played a primary role in each one.

Back in 2002, the BBC documented  how, just in the previous decade, geologists had by-and-large come to the conclusion that a sudden release of methane led to the death of over 95% of everything on Earth during the Permian Mass Extinction. That methane is back, probably in even larger quantities, as life has been so active since the last mass extinction.

I was unaware that the BBC was a peer-reviewed scientific journal of record. “By-and-large” is not science as is a “consensus opinion.”

We laid out the scenario and its possible doomsday implications in a short video titled “Last Hours” a few months ago. Since the world has been recently sensitized about methane, we’re now discovering more and more of it leaking from oil wells, fracking operations, melting permafrost, and even stirred up by Arctic storms.

I wonder if the filmmakers used the Al Gore methodology of distortion and using computer-generated-imaging stock footage from another movie to make their point. Enough with the scenarios based on little more than flawed models. They cannot be supported by observation, experimentation, or any other rational scientific methodology. They remain speculative hypotheses.

Just this week, the EPAreported they may have been underestimating by half the amount of methane being produced by human activity.  Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation just released a report that methane releases from the Arctic have also been underestimated . The caption accompanying their graphic says it all too clearly: “Methane is leaking from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf into the atmosphere at an alarming rate.”

First, the EPA is a demonstrably corrupt agency that has been infiltrated by hard-core socialists and communists. They are doing more damage to our planet and productivity with their unconstitutional rules and regulations than any other government body. Second, what is an alarming rate; and measured against nature’s normal variability, who is becoming alarmed?

Back to carbon dioxide …

While methane does eventually degrade into carbon dioxide, when large amounts are released over a short time period, their effect on global warming can be dramatic, since methane is such a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. 

Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has passed 400 ppm, a number never before seen in human history, but we’ve also never seen methane releases on this order in human history. And, to a large extent, the naturally occurring methane releases are the result of that 400 ppm of carbon dioxide.

Amazing, the majority of the climate model scenarios couldn’t even acknowledge the last 12-15 years of global cooling and generally use a carbon dioxide forcing of two-times the normal atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, whatever “normal” means in a chaotic variable system.

While many of the methane releases are the result of fossil fuel extraction processes, the most dangerous ones – the ones that could lead to trillions of tons of methane escaping into the atmosphere and driving an extinction event – are from the melting of frozen methane clathrate crystals along the seabeds. And the process that drives that is global warming, principally driven by carbon dioxide.

If we want to avoid an extinction that could approach or even rival some of the five past extinctions that have wiped out so much of life on earth, we must get control, quickly, of our man-made carbon dioxide and methane releases. <Source:The 'Ticking Time Bomb' That Could Cause Such Rapid Global Warming We'd Be Unable to Prevent Extinction>

Socialism and Communism is all about creating and managing scarcity to support political power …

Why is it these “activists” never think technology is the solution to providing more clean energy? Perhaps because that would spur industrialization and further prove that socialism is not a sustainable political philosophy unless you want to control your fellow man? 

You know how NASA scientist James Hansen has characterized continuing to tap Alberta's tar sands as being game over for the climate, thanks to the massive amount of carbon that'd be released in burning them? Well, if that's the case, then therecent news from Japan that a team has successfully extracted gas from methane hydrates from the seafloor isn't good. In fact, if Japan is able to commercially exploit the reserves in six years, as is planned, then it's game over for the climate.

According to the Washington Post, which cites US Geological Survey stats, all the gas hydrates around the world contain "between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas." <Source>

Hansen is the proximate cause of all the global cooling-global warming nonsense and has morphed from a researcher to a climate activist supported by Al Gore and other progressive socialist democrats. We can’t have anything that would mean more energy for industrialized nations because that defeats socialism and communism as people respond to abundance instead of suffering under the scarcity of socialism.

Bottom line …

Amazing how these progressive socialist democrats and climate activists acting on their behalf have solved the 250-million year mystery with such certainty as to warrant draconian public policies that enlarge the size and scope of government, raise taxes, fees, and prices, reduce everyone’s standard of living, curtail everyone’s standard of living, and provide for wealth redistribution, based on a speculative hypothesis that has about as much proof as the activist claim that carbon dioxide is responsible for global warming as opposed to nature’s inherent and chaotic variability. And, given the size and scope of the natural phenomena to be controlled or mitigated – can we trust a government that can’t even roll-out a healthcare plan designed and implemented by these same progressive socialist democrats and their communist friends?

Time to throw the progressive socialist democrats out of office in 2014 and return to social, financial, and scientific sanity – where scientists are free to express their opinion without fear of being demonized or losing funding for their jobs and projects.

If methane is such a problem, perhaps we should consider moving to MARS where there is apparently no methane according to NASA.

-- steve 

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