Saturday, June 28, 2008

Anthropogenic methane bubble bursts again

As we saw previously the arbitrary assumptions of the IPCC "accountants" and their bottom up brick build of the ratio of natural/anthropogenic production of CH4 take a swan dive with Keppler et al and the Heavy Brigade from Max Planck,another conundrum arises.

Most methane in Earth’s atmosphere is made by primitive microbes called archaea that reside in anaerobic locations like rice paddies and the guts of ruminants like cows. However, methane is also produced non-biogenically, by reactions between water and hot, carbon-bearing rocks, or by the natural decay of coal and petroleum.

Methane, composed of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms, attracts a lot of attention from astrobiologists “because it is a key biomarker,” says Bebout. “But methane can be produced by non-biological means, so when you see it in the atmosphere of a planet, biology was not necessarily involved, and that’s why we want to know about isotopes.”

Isotopes are key to understanding the origin of methane because organisms tend to use more of the lighter isotopes. Biogenic methane usually – but not always – contains a higher percentage of the lighter carbon-12 than non-biogenic methane, which contains relatively more of the heavier carbon-13. The two types of carbon atoms both have the same number of protons, but carbon-13 has one more neutron than carbon-12



First the brickbuild is bad methodology and there are well defined reasons in mathmatical physics as Poincare portrayed.Poincare followed rather the ideas of Francis Bacon (who claimed that to start scientific investigations from general axioms and principles is a dangerous and damned method, leading to unavoidable mistakes), than the Cartesian theory (saying that the conformity to any reality is unrelated to the science, which is the art of the deductions of the corollaries of arbitrary axioms).

Secondly extrapolation of generalized axiomx(isotopic biogenuc modulation) across taxa is pseudoscience,There are no constants end of story.Even within taxa the modulation rate varies with both competition and geographic location.

Bottom line we do not know the partition ratio for natural/anthropogenic ch4 production.

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