Methane phantom menace

By
Dr. Luis Contreras
-
499

Methane is an invisible, odorless, flammable fuel, a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide

Atmospheric methane is increasing. Frackers say methane is a natural gas which makes it sound harmless. The fracking debacle left behind abandoned wells, sterile land, and toxic sites. Taxpayers get to pay for the environmental mess, plugging wells with cement, and capping the wells.

There are several sources of methane emissions. Anthropogenic (man-made) emissions include production, storage, leaks, fires, and use of fossil fuels, agriculture, landfills and melting permafrost. Wetlands, oceans, geological events, and termites are natural methane emissions.

The global methane budget is 1,250 parts per billion in the atmosphere by volume. Higher concentrations create global warming. The current concentration is 1830 ppb and growing.

The Arctic is one of the main drivers of the climate, the Earth’s cooling system. The Arctic region has seasonally varying snow and ice cover, with predominantly treeless permafrost – permanently frozen underground ice.

Unlike the Antarctic ice resting over Antarctica, there is no land beneath the North Pole. The floating Arctic ice sheet expands during colder months and shrinks to half its size in the summer. Today, most of the ice is fractured. Is this the end of the Arctic?

Global warming is melting the Arctic snow and ice, reducing the whiteness of the Arctic and the amount of heat reflected back to space. This is the albedo feedback.

At the same time, warmer temperatures are thawing the permafrost, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, warming the planet. This is the permafrost feedback.

All clues point to the Arctic. Canada has a ban on drilling in the Arctic. During the government shutdown, the review by the Bureau of Land Management to allow drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge continued at a frantic pace. While other national parks were unattended, BLM found the money to keep going.

Soil, not oil

Native wisdom, biology, organic chemistry, soil science, and microbiology, hold many natural secrets for survival. Our ancestors know what we have replaced with oil. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, and algae are the best ways to capture and sequester carbon.

Ted Turner’s Flying D Ranch, 100,000 acres of pristine land in Montana, is bringing back the American bison, far superior to flatulent cows kept in pens, like the pig factory by the Arkansas Buffalo River.

U.S. cows are corn-fed using oil and antibiotics, with more than $50 billion subsidized to the corn industry in the last ten years. Turner’s mantra is to keep the grass growing and let the bison roam. Naturally raised grass-fed bison are healthy, lean, and resilient.

Mycelium carbon vaults

The Hive Mind Company began as an adjunct to the Chicago Green Roofs program for community centers, installing green roofs inoculated with mycelium to increase the garden’s resilience, based on the groundbreaking work of mycologist Paul Stamets. Here is their story:

“Though the focus was on mitigating the urban heat island effect we also measured for CO2 and N2O in the soil. Over the next five years, we discovered three game-changing results. The mycelium not only helped the plants sequester more CO2, but 40% of the plant’s carbon stayed in mycelium matrix in the soil even after the plant died. The mycelium out-performed nitrous oxide-producing microbes. The process also worked on sites other than green roofs including community gardens, meadows, and vacant urban lots.”

Please check Paul Stamets website, fungi.com, to learn about mycelium and fungi climate solutions and join The Tribe.

The real climate hoax

In 2016, the Trump International Golf Links in Ireland requested a permit to build two seawalls to prevent erosion at Trump’s golf resort due to rising sea levels. The zoning application mentions global warming and extreme weather as the main reason for building the walls. The controversial project was approved without an environmental review. Please see the 2019 YouTube video “A walk on the beach,” and hear what the locals say about the seawalls.

The anthropogenic climate disruption is real, Trump is a hoax.

Would U.S. Senator John Boozman (R-AR), promoter of fossil fuels, explain Trump’s bizarre behavior, denying climate change in public while protecting his property in private?

Dr. Luis Contreras

6 COMMENTS

  1. Floods are not only on the coast, and the toxic water contaminated with CAFO pigs and other animals is eroding the soil – many farmers will be out of business. When the soil and drinking water are gone …

    ================== here is an update on the current crisis ==================

    It would takes weeks or more for scientists to determine if the Plains flooding, or any weather disaster, was caused or worsened by climate change, which is occurring as emissions from coal, oil and gas alter the atmosphere. But federal agencies and scientists around the world agree that climate change already is making natural disasters more frequent, stronger and longer.

    The military has warned in a series of reports under past administrations that climate change is a security threat on many fronts. That includes “through direct impacts on U.S. military infrastructure and by affecting factors, including food and water availability, that can exacerbate conflict outside U.S. borders,” the federal government’s grim climate report said last year.

    But Trump has belittled his own government’s warnings. During a January cold spell, he tweeted his wish for “a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming!” In response to security warnings on climate change, the Trump administration has allowed a physicist who rejects scientific consensus on manmade climate change to start organizing a White House panel to make its own determination.

    https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/midwest/ct-flooding-climate-change-20190322-story.html

  2. This is what fracking on fire looks like.

    Overproduction creates the need for storage farms … and creates risks of mega-fires

    The Houston tragedy started Sunday … the fire was put out Wednesday … benzene has been detected on Thursday …

    March 21, 2019 – National Guard called into Houston after chemical fire, residents told to stay inside. The fire started Sunday, sending a huge, dark plume into the air for several days before crews extinguished the blaze on Wednesday. National Guard troops have been called in and residents were told to stay inside after elevated levels of benzene were detected early Thursday near a Houston-area petrochemicals storage facility that caught fire this week.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/national-guard-called-houston-after-chemical-fire-residents-told-stay-n985776

  3. Breaking news!

    From the Washington post article referenced below, “a Federal Judge ruled that the Interior Department violated federal law by failing to take into account the climate impact of its oil and gas leasing in the West.”

    The decision by U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Rudolph Contreras marks the first time the Trump administration has been held to account for the climate impact of its energy-dominance agenda, and it could have sweeping implications for the president’s plan to boost fossil fuel production across the country.

    Contreras concluded that Interior’s Bureau of Land Management “did not sufficiently consider climate change” when making decisions to auction off federal land in Wyoming to oil and gas drilling.

    The judge temporarily blocked drilling on roughly 300,000 acres of land in the state.

    The initial ruling in the case brought by two advocacy groups, WildEarth Guardians and Physicians for Social Responsibility, has implications for oil and gas drilling on federal land throughout the West.

    In the decision, Contreras—a Barack Obama appointee — faulted the agency’s environmental assessments as inadequate because it did not detail how individual drilling projects contributed to the nation’s overall carbon output. Since greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change, the judge wrote, these analyses did not provide policymakers and the public with a sufficient understanding of drilling’s impact, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/03/20/federal-judge-casts-doubt-trumps-drilling-plans-across-us-because-they-ignore-climate-change/

  6. Increased methane emissions is part of today’s oil based economy. The details are not known, they are hidden from people buying meat in supermarkets without clue of how the animals were treated

    The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations – CAFO

    https://youtu.be/AOVn7_drjkE

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