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Damage Report: LA Methane Leak Is One of the Worst Disasters In US History (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino writes: A week after the ruptured natural gas well in Aliso Canyon was finally declared sealed, we have a full account of the damage — and it doesn't look good. In total, 97,100 metric tons of methane were released into the atmosphere over the course of 112 days — the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.
It used to happen all the time but we are worrying more about uncapped wells now. So while a bit of a disaster, avoidable and not a good thing to happen at all I don't think it deserves the hype.
From reading TFA, they say its the equivalent of a half million cars for a whole year.
There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.
Is half a million cars a lot in a nation that has over 230 million cars on the road? LA County alone has over 7 million cars and trucks registered.
Having more cars than licensed drivers in the USA sounds like more of an environmental disaster... and worse yet, China already has more drivers than the entire population of the USA, and the numbers are still climbing.
Worst disasters in US history? Bull Shit.
How many died? How much property damage?
This doesn't even rank in the top thousand by any objective measure.
Every last bit of that methane was due to be burned. It was at the last step before retail use. You only get to count the extra from being unburned and if this was really such a fucking disaster it could have been flared.
Welll, that sucks for sure, but it's a rounding error in annual methane emission calculations.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
When I first heard about it last Nov/Dec, my first few thoughts where "wow, that's a lot of gas". "They don't plan to cap it for 6 months? wtf?". "Dang, must be costing them a lot of money to relocate all those households", and "dang, the company just doesn't seem to care".
Then the media picked up on it, and suddenly the company decided "uh oh, this is really bad PR for us we better fix it".
Kinda eye-opening how they didn't really give a shit until the media picked it up. That's a lot of lost gas, and a lot of affected people, and a ton of bad PR.
Coal Oil Point off of Santa Barbara, a NATURAL methane/oil seep, leaks 40 tons per day. Been doing it for hundreds of years. And will continue doing so. And that's just one natural seep in California - there are hundreds of them off-shore.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Right. And if you follow through the links, you'll find a statement that the leak was the equivalent of "burning 300 million gallons of gasoline." That's a nice round number, and I'd bet they rounded up.
/13476 = 445236 cars. So that was dishonestly rounded up.
Even so, that's 600 gallons for each of those 500,000 cars. New cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average when including older ones. That's 12,000 miles per car. US DOT says the average miles driven per year is 13476, so they're overstating the equivalence. 300,000,000 * 20 = 6,000,000,000 miles,
Looking at it another way, the EIA says the US consumed, "In 2014, about 136.78 billion gallons..." So, that leak was equivalent to less than 0.22% of US gasoline consumption. That seems to be a more honest indication of the scale.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This is not only not the worst disaster in US history, it's not ever in the top 25.
But things are always bigger in Texas. The L.A. leak gets more attention for its location
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
But if you say "half a million cars" without providing context, it seems like more than it is, which I believe was the intention.
"People hit by falling pianos up 100% this year."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Having more cars than licensed drivers sounds good for the environment - it means some aren't being driven...
That's only "good" if no resources are needed to build a car. Depending on how far down the chain you track resources, building a car has a higher carbon footprint than driving it:
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
Anyhow, that "fact" isn't true, at least as of the given dates.
Try "licensed drivers".
I eat a brand of breakfast cereal that claims "Since 2006" their factory used enough wind energy to account for "taking nearly 6,200 cars of the road!" Note the exclamation point in what I am quoting, you cannot advocate for a cause or advertise a commercial product or write a fake ransom note ("Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals representing a small foreign faction" ) without one.
The alternative is eating a competing brand that requires me to exercise by serious swimming, bike riding, or tennis playing -- sweating in the summer heat sending tennis balls careening off the edge of the racket and over the chain-link fence and then trudging over to retrieve them, I did that in college P.E., but who needs that?
You mean to tell me that by taking only 6200 cars off the road I might as well be eating Lucky Charms?
That "enviro-left" you speak of has been gradually vindicated every year on the mattee of climare change, so i'm not seeing much credibility loss. But leave it to a shill to claim that seeking responsibility as to what we put into the atmosphere just makes you a "tripping hippie"
Seriously, this is not anywhere near close to one of the worst disasters in the country's history. Anyone who would make such a claim is either a complete idiot or just looking to be a sensationalist. We've had dozens of hurricanes or earthquakes that have been far worse and if you want to count man-made disasters both the September 11 attacks the the BP Gulf Oil spill are just two within recent memory that are far, far worse in terms of damages and something like the underground coal mine fire (that's still going) in Pennsylvania has probably dumped (or will dump) several orders of magnitudes more greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the atmosphere than this incident.
That math seems reasonable but, it doesn't change the fact that a company released an enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere for no other reason than incompetence. It's a small percentage of the overall pollution produced by the US but, generally, that pollution at least has some purpose other than, "Ooops". Ignoring or dismissing this as a minor incident just tips the risk/reward scale for corporations further towards "Fuck it. Who cares if it leaks".
I'd suspect there is more methane released by the cattle on the ranches of the US West in a month than was released by this background noise blip of a "disaster".
graph
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close. If they practised science at this point you would trash your hypothesis and come up with a new one. Since they are anti-science and reality doesn't matter, only their agenda, they ignore this reality and tell you the models are what matters and reality is only an inconvenient truth to them.
That calculation could be misleading because the time period is not taken into account.
The equivalent of 500000 car emissions for a year, when adjusted for the number of days of the leak, would be 1.63 million cars over the 112 day period for which the leak had not been sealed. Under the assumption that there are 253 million cars on the road in the US, the correct percentage would be 0.64%. Now, this doesn't seem like much, and I grant you that. 0.64% represents the proportion of pollution caused by the leak as a percentage of the number of cars on the road in the US over the same time period.
Had the well not been capped, this percentage would reflect the percent contribution to greenhouse gas emissions compared to automobiles on an ongoing basis. As the well was capped, the study chose to express the equivalent cumulative amount of pollution in units of car-years. Both are legitimate. Even your calculation is legitimate as long as it is made clear what it represents: 0.2% is the percentage contribution of the leak compared to the total annual greenhouse gas output of US cars.
As for whether this is a significant amount, I say it still is, because the loss is twofold: not only was there atmospheric pollution, there were economic losses as a result of a failure to burn the lost fuel. In other words, it could have heated homes and fueled industrial processes, instead of going to waste and causing a lot of inconvenience to the public as well as costs to cap the well. If you were very rich and had a billion dollars, and a hacker or thief somehow stole 0.2% of that wealth, most people would still be upset by losing 2 million of that billion, because it's money they could have used to buy something they wanted, even if in the big picture it only represents a small fraction of your total wealth.
... link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close.
The Guardian addresses several of your errors interpreting this graph in this article. Perhaps the biggest error is the implication that the models predict specific temperature rises over time. In reality, the projections all included error bounds which, if included, would have show a very different picture.
I will note that those error bounds were pretty broad back in 1990. And that newer models are narrowing those bounds.
Last, a quotation from the article: "The 1990–2012 data have been shown to be consistent with the [1990 IPCC report] projections, and not consistent with zero trend from 1990"
I care about the environment. I just think hysterical headlines like this one tend to do more harm than good by damaging credibility.
A serious issue, and one that needs investigation? Yes, absolutely. One of the worst disasters - even environmental disasters - in US history? Please. Not even close. Notice how this topic was completely derailed by reactions to the ridiculous hyperbole? In this case, yes, I absolutely am blaming the messenger.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
We won't know for a while. We'll have to wait for the final death count that can be attributed to climate change and then do some regression analysis. That's assuming of course that humanity survives.
"One of the worst disasters in US history"? Cows and other livestock release 238 million metric tons of methane per year [source]. The estimated 97,100 metric tons from this leak amounts to a whopping 0.04% of that amount.
This is slashdot, it's ok to change your mind based on new evidence
Roy Spencer is indeed a "climate scientist" and a specialist in creating misleading graphs and statements about that particular set of sattelite data (UAH lower troposhpere temps). He is well known as a religiously motivated climate denier and is quite likely the author of the red-herring you just posted. I have used scare quotes on the phrase "climate scientist" because IMO someone who signs the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming just doesn't have the skill set that Science requires.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is slashdot, it's ok to change your mind based on new evidence
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There is nothing funny about man boobs.
Just because there are glaciers in the world remaining does not mean that many glaciers in the world have already been lost.
Sure, but when you tell politicians that you predict that a particular glacier is very likely to melt, and then it doesn't do what you said... this failed prediction is a data point that goes into the column keeping track of the veracity of your predictions, and within this column the distribution of errors better turn out to be normally distributed
If all the science is rigorously peer reviewed then of course the prediction errors will be normally distributed, but peer reviewed science isnt what backed the prediction that the IPCC told policy makers (based on an editorial from the world wildlife foundation, really?), and guess what... the error falls towards alarmism. Are we likely to see more alarmism play a role in the prediction errors coming out of the IPCC?
"His name was James Damore."
I'm actually a huge defender of climate science and the argument that global warming has it's origins in mankind.
With that said, this argument is indefensible and doing harm to my cause. There is no scientific way to tie a 0.5 degree increase in temperature to a single weather anomaly.
I realize you were responding to a moron, but please don't drop to that level.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If the guy really is a mino(taur), then I can understand his increased methane output.