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By Jo Nova
Nobody checked the carbon-13 ratios!
Wouldn’t you know it — 150 nations signed the Global Methane Pledge without even bothering to check if the methane was man-made.
Methane — the second most hated Greenhouse gas — spiked to record historic levels in the last few years, over 1,900 parts per billion. In 2019, even the WEF scientists admitted they couldn’t explain the baffling rise, and then in 2020, the world of methane went into the twilight zone. We shut down the modern world due to the pandemic, and methane levels rose even faster.
It seems many have been blaming fossil fuels for the global surge in emissions, but forgot to check the C13 isotopes. Somehow we spend millions on breathalysing cows, measuring their burps, and feeding them seaweed, but didn’t think to do the basic chemistry. How could that be, you might wonder… 158 nations agreed to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030, but none of them audited the science even though very strange things were happening. (The point was obviously the “pledge”, the junkets, the captive industries and subsidies, anything but the science).
Methane from fossil fuels has a higher carbon-13 ratio, but even though […]
By Jo Nova
They didn’t tell us, the term “fossil fuels” might be wrong too
Dr Willie Soon unleashes on the failures of climate change and modern science for 40 minutes with Tucker Carlson (see below). As an opening he explained how one of Saturn’s moons has more liquid fuel than than all the oil and gas deposits of Earth, which rather pokes a hole in the idea that fossil fuels are only ever made from fossils.
Essentially a frozen, lifeless moon with no dinosaurs, forests or peat bogs, somehow has lakes of methane. Not only does Titan have liquid seas of hydrocarbon fuel — but we’ve known this for years. In fact even in 2005 a NASA scientist quietly admitted that Titan had methane that wasn’t made from fossils. But where was NASA in the 18 years since?
Soon explains that Titan proves that abiotic oil and gas formation is true. In 2009 an experiment showed that when methane is put under great pressure like the kind we find 50-100 miles underground, it can form more complex hydrocarbons. (Kolesnikov). Several papers in the last dozen years find more exotic kinds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons all over the place, […]
Bison in Montana. USFWS Flickr
By Jo Nova
Someone just realized that humans emit methane (like cows, camels, mammals, and ancient herds of bison).
The new study shows that humans are generating methane, just like the awful Planet Wrecking Cows. But the truth is that all mammals have probably always produced some methane, and that includes the massive herds of herbivores that used to roam the Earth, when the climate was “perfect”.
The new paper in PLOS One assessed 104 people and found 31% were methane producers like the cows. They calculated the 67 million homo sapiens in the United Kingdom increase the national methane and N2O emissions by as much as… golly, 0.05 – 0.1%. (Despite this trivial and predictable outcome, somehow, they had no trouble getting grants or getting published for studying methane-angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin).
The main thing we learn from this paper is how easy it is to get money to study climate inanities compared to how hard it is to get grants to audit the IPCC or investigate the sun’s role in climate change.
If belches of methane can cause a climate crisis, how, we marvel, did the planet not boil away when 30 million bison roamed […]
Steak-lovers — look at the volatility in the graph of methane levels. That is not the cows…
Methane emissions are a bit of a sleeper. They are ignored (even by me) yet and cows, sheep, pigs and lamas produce a whopping 11% of the Australian national greenhouse emissions (mostly as methane and nitrous oxide). Livestock emissions are 70% of our entire agricultural sector emissions. They are so important, at one stage Australia was considering a camel genocide — hoping to stop storms and reduce droughts by knocking off some camels. So if we like ham, steak and hamburgers, we need to pay attention. The carbon-politisi are coming.
The UN thinks we need to worry about methane which has 34 times the impact of CO2 (which is 34 times something immeasurably insignificant, so who cares?). Somehow global methane levels are often blamed on fossil fuels and farting cows, but this latest analysis suggests humans are pretty much irrelevant.
Tom Quirk tracks the annual changes in methane and finds that it bumps up by both big and small amounts, and the volatile pattern doesn’t match human agriculture or mining but rises and falls in time with El Ninos. This is not […]
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Look out, another knot of tortured researchers just went past. All this time we’ve been pouring money into planting trees and stealing land from farmers because we were sure that trees would cool the world. (Just like solar panels do, yeah?) But life is so complicated — for years now some researchers have been quietly wondering if more trees were actually going to warm the planet instead, but they didn’t want to say much. It turns out that while trees absorb the sacred CO2 (that’s cooling!) they also emit methane (that’s warming!), and terpenes (cooling) and isoprene (warming and cooling!) If that’s not complicated enough, then there is the albedo effect. Trees are dark, they absorb more sunlight than bare ground and snow. So depending on where they are planted, that makes for “warming”. Then some VOCs or volatile organic compounds also seed clouds.
So what’s the net effect? Who knows, it’s not like there are whole industries dependent on it…
Now they ask?
How much can forests fight climate change? Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours. Gabrielle Popkin, Nature
As usual, the debate is based […]
CSIRO wants to stop methane emissions: but can they get a grant to stop El Nino’s and cap volcanoes?
This type of trans-Siberian cow used to emit a lot of methane.
Tom Quirk sent me a short note to point out that the big rise in global methane almost certainly was man-made — at least up to the mid 1980’s, but in the last 20 years, the culprit for rising methane appears to be volcanoes and El Ninos. (Note the timing of the spikes in the graph below, as methane pours into the atmosphere some years, but barely changes in most other recent years).
Apparently, the man-made emissions in the 70s and 80s were largely due to leaky pipes in the Soviet Union. Natural gas was dirt cheap up til the mid 1970’s. It was so cheap the Russians didn’t bother to plug those flawed pipes. But as prices rose (and after a big nasty explosion in 1982*) they got serious, fixed the pipes and stopped a lot of the out-gassing.
Meanwhile, the Australian government is spending millions and killing camels in the hope of reducing global methane and changing the weather.
There are many graphs of atmospheric methane […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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