Quote of the Week – the climbdown on methane and climate change

DirkH says
Ow. Mister Expert System Analyst is here again.
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Senior Checkout Chick actually. Its amazing what you pick up from talking to the customers. But thanks for the compliment.

“The permafrost of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (an area of about 2 million kilometers squared)…”
I think you mean 2 million square kilometers. As written, that’s several thousand times all the surface of the earth, oceans and all.

it looks like LT is really very lazy. The fact is that there is no single answer regarding the formation of diamonds.
A quick Google search brought up some interesting information. One paper from Adelaide University challenges what I was taught a very long time ago about the formation of diamonds. The claims in that particular paper seem to be a bit thin.
However, let’s look at the fact that diamonds are made of carbon. This is a truth.
The common element for coal, diamonds oil and even natural gas is carbon!!
As for the point about viability of extracting the natural gas, when you have an oilfield strike like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, or even Westernport Bay for that matter, or the NorthWest Shelf off the coast of West Australia, the extraction of the methane in the form of natural gas should be a no brainer.

Here, for those of you interested in a more global view:
http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/products/summary/sum35/15_plate2_ch4.pdf
from http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/
So, yes, while we had the warmest decade EVAH!, the concentration was actually decreasing.

Theo Goodwin says:
December 27, 2011 at 4:52 pm
“The reply from Semiletov and Shakhova is enlightening and is the QOTW:
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I nominate this “Quote of the Week” as best ever “Quote of the Week.
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I agree it’s beyond the level of your standard run of the mill QOTW and even beyond “Quote of the Month”(QOTM).
Therefore, I recommend Anthony add this to the contenders for Quote of the Year (QOTY).

Mike the convict says:
December 27, 2011 at 4:54 pm
Also has anyone done any research on the amount of methane consumed by lighting?
Are you thinking of Catatumbo here, the cloud to cloud lightening? http://matthew-miller.suite101.com/the-worlds-largest-lightning-storm-a148124
There’s been very little research done on this phenomenon at all, but certainly a good place to investigate methane feeding lightening. What I find fascinating is the regularity of it, it disappears for a few months at the beginning of the year and then comes back. If you do any searches on it be aware there’s someone called Quiroga an over-excited environmentalist who’s been playing on the theme the ‘lightening has ‘disappeared’, shock horror, but it always does around jan-march and others are pissed off that reporters ignored that bit –

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/world_of_wonders/2011/02/an_everlasting_lightning_storm.single.html
“Muñoz believes methane may increase the conductivity of the air over Catatumbo, allowing lightning to recharge faster and fire more frequently. But he cautions that the mystery of Catatumbo hasn’t necessarily been solved, and he implored me to convey his reservations in anything I wrote. He was disappointed by the way the press trumped up the Catatumbo storm’s supposed “disappearance” last year. The lightning always dies down during the dry months of January and February, he said. There was no reason to be concerned—a sentiment he says he communicated to journalists. “We were interviewed, and we showed them we have no scientific evidence that the Catatumbo lightning is disappearing,” says Muñoz.” [“Ángel Muñoz, who leads a team that studies the lightning at the University of Zulia’s Center for Scientific Modeling”]

@Mooloo December 27, 2011 at 4:01 pm:

Babsy says:

Two million kilometers squared is one incredibly GINORMOUS area!

Yes it made me chuckle too. Scientific illiterates writing science reports: what could go wrong?
I presume mean 2,000,000 square kilometres is meant. About 0.4% of the earth’s surface.

Ah, but 2,000,000 x 2,000,000 km sq is SO much cooler – like almost EIGHT THOUSAND times the surface area of Earth. Ginormous, indeed! Hey, but what is a misplaced decimal or such, among friends? (hahah – good thing I checked on my calculator – I almost missed a decimal place myself!)

“Myrrh says:
December 28, 2011 at 10:32 am
Muñoz believes methane may increase the conductivity of the air over Catatumbo”
This statement definitely requires an explanation. The electronegativity of H is 2.1 and for C it is 2.5. What this basically means is that the attraction for shared electrons is very close so there is only a very slight polarity. However perhaps of greater importance is that the CH4 molecule is tetrahedral so there is an angle of 109 degrees between all H’s and the C. This complete symmetry means the molecule as a whole has no charged ends.

[snip. Use only one screen name, per site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]

Tshane3000 says:
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Those are all great points that should be taken into account.

Has anyone published the yearly loss of natural gas from local and high pressure long distance ( 200+ psi) pipelines? There are gas leaks being repaired all the time around these parts (Boston) but I suspect that there are many many more leaks are going by undetected.
There was one leak near where I work along an abandoned RR track that leaked for a half year. Everyone in the neighborhood could smell it, many people reported it to the local gas company and they would come and check the local lines which were fine. It turned out to be a high pressure line and it didn’t get any service until someone called the local fire department, (a city north of Boston) to point out the bubbles coming up through the standing water and ice in early spring. At least six months of leaking before any action … and that was in the middle of a CITY! So there have to be a lot leaking out in rural areas that will never be detected until the pipes completely split or the leak catches on fire.
http://www.naturalgas.org/images/pipeline_map.jpg

Tshane3000: Since global warming denialism is based on mere belief, trust in discredited and/or nonscientific sources, oddly distorted ideas, and cherry-picked facts, it is religion by definition.

I didn’t know people like you still existed! Have you actually pondered the implications of this ‘cherry picked fact’ with respect to your delusion?: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997
You have it 180 degrees backwards. There is no credible empirical data to support the theory that CO2 from humans causes ANY measurable increase in global temperature… NONE! There are mountains of empirical evidence that CO2 has little or no affect on global temperature at all, (such as that Hadley CRU data above showing no significant warming for over a decade). You are the one in denial.