Source; sent from a friend on the internet.
Several atmospheric gases, including CO2, methane, and water vapor, absorb light in the infrared region. These are collectively known as the “greenhouse gases” because absorbing infrared energy warms up the air.
CO2, on a per-molecule basis, is 6 times as effective an absorber as water is. However, that’s offset by the fact that CO2 is only about 0.04% of the atmosphere. This means that, overall, it’s much less important than water vapor in terms of its ability to warm the atmosphere.
Then there’s methane. Pound-for-pound methane can trap 25 times more heat than CO2. However, scientists say it will never significantly contribute to global warming. Primarily, it is by far the rarest of the greenhouse gases. Methane’s narrow absorption bands, at 3.3 microns and 7.5 microns, perfectly match---water’s! The ratio of the percentages of water to methane is such that the effects of methane are completely masked by water(1). When it comes to methane, termites are responsible for 11% of the world’s production, 76% comes from wetlands. A ‘significant change’ in tropical weather ascribed to human-caused climate change has led wetlands to get bigger and more plants to grow there, thus leading to more decomposition — a process that produces methane. Wasn’t that long ago when environmentalists were ardent supporters of wetlands.
NOTE, left-wing climate extremists blame human-caused climate change for increasing flora and fauna causing methane while this same “human-caused” climate change is also claimed to be making the earth an arid wasteland too.
Meanwhile, ignoring the predominance of naturally occurring methane, left-wing climate fanatics wants to eliminate traditional farming and ranching because they are sources of methane, primarily from ruminant livestock and paddy rice. Rice growing produces methane gas by feeding microbes that live under the rice paddies. Cattle produce methane during their digestive process.
Consider that it was estimated that the digestive tracts of termites produce about 50 billion tons of CO2 and methane annually. That was more than the world’s production from burning fossil fuel. The journal Science's article Termites: A Potentially Large Source of Atmospheric Methane, Carbon Dioxide, and Molecular Hydrogen stated: “The estimate gross amount of carbon dioxide produced is more than twice the net global input from fossil fuel production.” Even the left-wing ny times ran an article titled: “Termite gas exceeds smokestack pollution.”
None of this information stops the biden regime though. It wants regulations on methane emissions by the U.S. oil and gas industry, at a direct cost of more than $1 billion annually, to deal with a nonexistent problem.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the left-wing policy-makers behind so-called “climate science” actually followed the science. But then, it’s all about political not environmental science. And that's the real existential threat!
Every prosperous country has developed using fossil fuels. No poor country has been able to develop to the point of prosperity without massive fossil fuel use. The reason is that development requires energy, and fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective, including scalable, source of energy In recent decades China and India have used large amounts of low-cost, reliable energy from fossil fuels to rapidly develop. Since 1980, India's fossil fuel use has increased by >700% and China's by >600%. India's life expectancy increased by 17 years and China's by 14!
Even prosperous countries can't replace fossil fuels with solar and wind. Over the last 2 decades, the prosperous world has been trying to use more and more solar and wind energy. The ominous results of this experiment so far: higher prices and reliability declines even at relatively low levels of solar and wind use. Despite claims that solar and wind are rapidly replacing fossil fuels, they provide less than 5% of world energy—only electricity, ⅕ of energy—and, crucially, even that small percentage depends on huge subsidies and reliable (mostly fossil-fueled) power plants. Solar and wind’s basic problem is unreliability, to the point they can go near zero at any time. Thus they don’t replace reliable power, they parasitize it. This is why they need huge subsidies and why no grid is near 50% solar and wind without parasitism on reliable neighbors. The left-wing idea that we can use mostly or only solar and wind with sufficient battery backup is not being tried anywhere because it’s absurd. Batteries are so expensive that just 3 days of global backup using Musk’s Megapacks would cost $570 trillion, about 6X global GDP
Fossil-fueled development isn't causing a climate crisis, it's making humanity much safer from climate, giving it the incredible ability fossil fuels give us to master all forms of climate dangers.
The world lives on oil. China lives on it. The U.S. lives on it. Whether the petulant Bolshevik children of “The squad” like it or not, the world wants oil. It all begins and ends with oil.
Wasn’t it only yesterday that the US under President Trump was an energy independent nation? Yes. But then biden was elected and immediately open the Southern border of the U.S. and killed the Keystone Pipeline and declared an end to energy independence. He joined with the hard Bolshevik left of BSanders to wage war on fossil fuels, especially oil and gas. But Russia didn’t stop drilling. Russia didn’t stop producing. And the additional billions they picked up selling oil to China funded Russia’s War on Ukraine, that biden himself tacitly approved.
As the left-wing politico reported: “Crude oil exports from iran have risen on biden’s watch despite U.S. sanctions aimed at punishing Tehran for its nuclear ambitions, military aggression and support for terrorism [between $60-80 Billion] Now, violence by the iranian-allied palestinian group is fueling new calls for the U.S. to choke off that revenue stream, which Republican lawmakers have lambasted as an ill-fated attempt at appeasement.”
biden promised to provide billions of dollars more to iran, and iran uses oil revenues to fund terrorism, including the iran proxy terrorist groups hamas and hezbollah. iran funds hamas and hezbollah. iran trains and feeds world terrorism and the rockets and the death.
We were energy independent. But biden demanded Americans to buy electric vehicles, which Americans don’t want. And he went to war on American oil. And by doing so, he aided Russia in Ukraine–Russia had the money to fund its wars–and he helped iran and hamas slice at Israel.
These are biden’s war fronts. Remember that it was biden who brought rob malley into the White House as his U.S. envoy to iran. malley was 1 of the architects of the notorious BObama-biden nuclear deal with iran. He has now been stripped of his security clearance for suspected misuse of American secrets pertaining to intelligence involving Iran.
This has been an exercise in cynicism and media manipulation and the Washington-liberal-democrat Media Complex had been so hypnotized by the BObama-biden operatives that they were helpless. BObama’s deputy national security adviser, ben rhodes, bragged about media manipulation to The ny times, saying the media was full of inexperienced know-nothings who were helpless before him and were eager to be mesmerized, saying: “We created an echo chamber...They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say...The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old…They literally know nothing.”
And now biden, avoiding the realities on the ground, avoiding the realities that are understood by all: It begins and ends with oil.
1. A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience suggests methane traps and offsets heat, the latter through its effects on clouds. This research indicates climate models are inaccurate because they treat methane only as a heat source. The research confirms methane does act like a blanket in the atmosphere, however, as Robert Allen, of the University of California, Riverside, said of the study by scientists from universities and research institutes in the United States, France, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Austria, methane also: “encourages changes in clouds that have a slight cooling effect...This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system, Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all." The research indicates methane’s impact on cloud cover offsets approximately 30% of the surface warming methane contributes. That means climate models assume methane contributes about 30% more surface warming than it in fact does. Methane also tends to boost precipitation through its impact on long-wave radiation, which climate models typically treat as contributing to warming. However, methane “suppresses that increase by 60%” by absorbing shortwave energy, the study found.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/15/the-wheels-are-coming-off-new-yorks-insane-alternate-energy-plans/
