what comes off a few well-engineered gas wells?
La Brea isn't human released fossil fuels, nor any where the levels we are ADDING carbon to what the planet used to have in the biosphere, of which BTW La Brea was part of.
Keep diverting from the simple fact AGW is caused by humans, and is warming the planet faster than almost any time in the planets history.
Funny you seem to ignore the rest of the planet in your post rockdoc123.
Ah, babyrock's back, and still up to his cherry-picking tricks, i see!
Whatever fits your agenda, rock. You have interests to protect, after all!
... To get a global look at methane concentrations before, during, and after the plateau, the team amassed atmospheric methane concentration data from measuring stations from Canada to China to Australia, spanning a period from 1984 through 2015. They also examined previously published methane data from Antarctic ice cores extending back 2000 years to the near present.
From there, they began to construct a model, using the yearly concentration changes to calculate changing emissions. The data also include carbon isotope values for the methane concentrations. Carbon isotopes, atoms of carbon that have different masses, are particularly helpful for identifying methane sources: Different sources have different relative amounts of carbon’s two nonradiogenic isotopes, carbon-13 and carbon-12. Processes like photosynthesis or microbial oxidation serve to “fractionate” the isotopes, increasing the proportion of carbon-12, which then gets translated to the emitted gas. As a result, methane emissions have distinct isotopic values: Methane emitted from any microbially driven source such as wetlands or agriculture have values of about -60‰ (signifying a relatively low ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12); oil, gas, and coal emissions have an average carbon isotopic value of -37‰; and tree and crop burning averages about -22‰.
Once they had their data, the scientists looked at what might have been behind the plateau. They found a sharp dip in methane concentrations after 1992; that dip corresponded with a decrease in a source with a carbon isotopic value of about -40‰. “That squarely fits the fossil fuel signature,” Schaefer says. The data don’t themselves prove what led to such a dramatic decrease in emissions, but Schaefer’s team had a guess: the collapse of fossil fuel production in the Soviet Union following its 1991 breakup.
So why did methane emissions start to climb again around 2006? Once again, the team ran models to test various inputs and see how they matched global station measurements. This time, the dominant carbon isotopic values in the new inputs were about -60‰, pointing to a microbially driven source rather than fossil fuel inputs. Given the size of the source, the likely culprit was either an increase in wetland emissions or in agricultural production. To figure out which one was ultimately responsible, Schaefer and his team turned to satellite data, which revealed that the largest post-2006 increases in atmospheric methane were occurring in China, India, and Southeast Asia.
That helped narrow down the sources, Schaefer says, because different types of wetlands have different isotopic signatures. While permafrost thawing or boreal wetlands in high latitudes have values of about -60‰, tropical wetlands—such as would be found in those regions—have slightly less negative values, about -52‰. But most tropical wetlands are in the southern hemisphere—not the region identified by the satellite images. That strongly implicated agriculture as the driver for the latest methane increases, the team reports online today in Science.
Sorry, not interested in going down the idiotic rabbit holes you take such pleasure in building.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Congress to Curtail Methane Monitoring
By Peter Fairley
Posted 13 Feb 2017 | 17:00 GMT
Photo: John Davidson Photography
Pilot testing Quanta3's continuous methane monitoring system at a Texas drill pad
Innovation in methane detection is booming amid tightened state and federal standards for oil and gas drillers and targeted research funding. Technology developers, however, may see their market diminished by a regulation-averse Republican Congress and president. Senate Republicans are expected to attempt to complete a first strike against federal methane detection and emissions rules as soon as this week.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas responsible for an estimated one-fifth to one-one quarter of the global warming caused by humans since the Industrial Revolution, and oil and gas production puts more methane in the atmosphere than any other activity in the United States. Global warming, however, is not a moving issue for Republican leaders or President Donald Trump, who reject the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.
What moves them are complaints from industries that “burdensome" regulations unnecessarily hinder job growth and—in the case of methane rules—domestic oil and gas output. The House of Representatives got the methane deregulation ball rolling on 3 February, voting along party lines to quash U.S. Bureau of Land Management rules designed to prevent more than a third of methane releases from nearly 100,000 oil and gas wells and associated equipment operating on federal and tribal lands.
The House vote is one of the first applications of the hitherto obscure Congressional Review Act of 1996, which gives Congress 60 legislative days to overturn new regulations. If the Senate concurs and President Trump signs, the resulting act will scrap the bureau's ban on methane venting and flaring and its leak-monitoring requirements. It will also restrict the bureau from ever revisiting those mandates.
.... -snip-
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
What moves them are complaints from industries that “burdensome" regulations unnecessarily hinder job growth and—in the case of methane rules—domestic oil and gas output.
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