Thursday Night Quick Shots
Lots of stuff going on, and it ain’t all Alito…let’s sample a few stories we’ve missed so far…
The Kyoto Protocol was always a bad idea, regardless of your stance on global warming; it didn’t include India and China, and after ratification, many of the signatories have seen their greenhouse emissions rise, while the U.S. has actually experienced a decline. Now, it seems, even Mother Nature is conspiring against the treaty! My, but that Karl Rove has long tentacles!…
More on the death of Kyoto from Tim Blair and ScrappleFace…
Our good friend AJ brings to my attention yet another poll showing the public is perfectly fine with the NSA’s eavesdropping program, even with the magic ‘warrantless’ word inserted (for those keeping score, that’s 2 out of 3 that included ‘warrantless’ but still showed majority approval)…
That Virginia guy that was supposedly going to bring down the death penalty because DNA would exonerate him? Um, that silence you hear is the Left avoiding the result – G-U-I-L-T-Y as charged (hat tip to Viking Pundit)…
And whaddyaknow, we’ve still got time for one from the left – check out the latest edition of Ken Rudin’s Political Junkie at NPR (that’s right, you heard me – I said NPR)…
Yeesh! More bad science reporting from NPR.
1) Yes, methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
2) Yes, it’s produced by plants and by microorganisms in the soil.
(full disclosure: my college roomate was one of the pioneers measuring production of methane and other trace gases in tropical rainforests and in lands clearcut for agricultural production. This is something we’ve known about for decades.)
3) But it’s produced in much tinier quantities than CO2.
4) And, unlike CO2, it has a very short half-life in the atmosphere.
Generally, I don’t bother with Tim Blair, as as Tim Lambert enjoys debunking him much more than I ever could.
Well, Jacques, I would be a fool to argue science with a professional physicist (but please, tell me – can you recommend a website, book, article, etc, on global warming that is free from either right- or leftwing bromides? It’s sometimes difficult for us laymen to cut through the partisan crap), but as for Tim Blair, his style is, of course, intentional exaggeration for humorous effect – and he’s scored his share on Lambert, as well…personally, even if I didn’t mostly agree with him politically, I’d still love his stuff – he’s like Spy magazine when it was funny…
realclimate.org is written by some serious climatologists, but accessible to the layman. And they try to steer clear of the politics.
A slightly more “scholarly” climate blog is Climate Science.
Both discuss the recent CH4 paper.
Since I get 3 links before the spam filters kick in, I’ll recommend the Wikipedia article and references therein.
Many thanks, sir! I look forward to some interesting reading…
Frankly, I found the comment section under Blair’s posting to be one of the most consistently witty I’ve come across in a while. Many chuckles there – thanx.
Yeah, Blair has some really funny regulars…have a great one!…
Jacques, interestingly, the folks at your first link think there may be something new in the study…
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that this new work isn’t interesting (at least, to those working in the field). But the interest is completely different from what you might have gathered from the NPR report, or the sites you linked-to commenting on it.
See, we know how much CH4 there is in the atmosphere. That’s relatively easy to measure. We also know that it has a fairly short half-life in the atmosphere. So, to the extent that we find any at all, it must be continuously replenished.
So the question is: where is it coming from? This study suggests a new source that others had previously neglected. If it holds up, that’s pretty interesting (to people like my ex-roommate, who study these things) because we know how much CH4 there is and we know (or thought we knew) how much was being produced by other sources. If this new mechanism is actually an important source of CH4, then they must have mis-attributed the origin of a lot of the CH4, that we see, to other sources.
Still, in the “big picture,” (what we, outsiders, care about) it may not matter what fraction of the CH4 produced by an acre of rainforest is produced in the soil (by bacteria), and what fraction is produced by the trees.
It’s all methane to us …
Perhaps the idea of trading emissions credits is the way to go in the future: the new ad – hoc arrangements currently being employed will include the developing world as well, and that seems to be one of the keys to solving the overall emissions problem.
Been reading Blair for over two years now, and he’s hilarious – as are his commenters. Lambert, on the other hand, has been hoisted on his own petard too many times for me to take him seriously anymore.
kyoto had nothing to do with the environment.
it’s desired effect is being shown.
reduce the current industrialized nations economies to dust while allowing china/india to produce unchecked.
wal-mart is doing just as much damage to the US economy as kyoto could.
china has begun producing enmass their own automobile. the engine they are using is based on a pre-WWII army jeep. let’s talk emmissions control with this in the hands of 200 million chinese. if that many will be allowed to buy one. or could afford it.
the world-o-crats lost this one.